If you have a 2.2 or lower, you should be aiming at high street firms.

If your academics are good and your background excellent there is no reason why you will not be successful applying for training contracts with the commercial and city firms.

It is important to understand the distinction between high street and commercial. Salaries on the high street will rarely get above £40k for the majority of your career in most firms. Salaries in commercial firms go up into 6 figures. If at all possible you should be aiming to get work experience in commercial firms and give yourself a chance to go for a training contract in this sphere.

Work experience on the high street demonstrates a commitment to law, but commercial law firm experience indicates to HR and recruiters that you are aiming for a training contract in this area.

The best source of info for applying for work experience is the Legal 500 (www.legal500.com). You can identify the smaller sized commercial firms and also individual solicitors. Contact individual solicitors rather than HR – HR is basically there to fob you off!

Bear in mind that most firms have vacation schemes in place, but smaller sized practices tend to be more flexible at being able to offer you a few weeks work experience.

For further careers support including a free guide on how to find legal work experience and training contracts, please visit www.ten-percent.co.uk/careersshop

The CV is the main part of your application and very often if I am looking at 20 applications for a vacancy I dont bother reading the covering emails if they dont contain any information I actually need to see in order to progress an application.

The things that stand out in a covering letter are:

1. Salary levels
2. Notice period
3. Confirmation that you fit the job description – ie a commercial solicitor
4. Number of years experience – again to fit the job description
5. Anything outstanding in your career to date – ie exceptional billing levels, a particular case you have worked on, or any links you may have to the recruitment consultant’s client.

The danger of putting anything else is:

1. You dilute the information above.
2. You state something that rules you out if the recruiter has not included the full spec – ie you mention that you have spent your career dealing with transactions up to £5 million when in fact they want someone able to handle £100 million transactions etc..
3. The recruiter does not bother reading it and just looks at the CV, missing a vital point about how much salary you require or your notice period.

Whilst the resulting covering email (example below) probably looks as if someone scrawled it out on the back of a beer mat in about 30 seconds, it is in fact exactly what I as a recruiter would want to see if I got your CV in.

Remember as well that most recruitment consultants are not professionals in the field they recruit for and do not understand a lot of terminology.

Jonathan Fagan

Sample Covering Email/Letter

Dear Sirs,

I am a qualified Solicitor in England & Wales with 2 years PQE. I should like to apply for the residential conveyancing solicitor post, reference x. My extensive experience in development work may be an asset to your client.

I have been working in London for Linckletters Solicitors, a specialist property firm, since 2010 and qualified with a Legal 500 practice in St Albans.

My salary level is currently £32,000 and I am available to start work with 1 months notice.

My interview availability over the next 2 weeks is as follows:

Thank you for considering my application and I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards

George Formby

Jonathan Fagan is a specialist legal career coach and professional legal CV writer for Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. He regularly coaches lawyers looking to join, change tack or leave the legal profession and personally prepares all CVs for clients using our CV writing services. Full details of the Ten-Percent Legal Careers Service can be found at www.ten-percent.co.uk/careersshop

• Experienced advocate with over 100 completed summary trials to date.
• Public speaker used to speaking to audiences of 10-200 people.
• Regularly participating in over 400 weekly management meetings and training sessions 2001-2012.

Since I have been working in recruitment over the last 10 years, just occasionally I have come across a CV of someone who has gained Police Station Accreditation and I have scratched my head as to how they have got in to do that in the first place because their CV shows no legal work experience, no academic background or anything that would possibly make them stand out from a pile of hundreds of CVs when applying for a Police Station Accredited role.

The other day though I discovered that there is a company in the UK who actually charge people to do the Police Station Accreditation Course in full. The difficulty with the Police Station Accreditation Course is that you can complete the academic section yourself but you cannot complete the whole process because you need to be in a firm actually working in the Police Stations to do this.

It has been a catch 22 for a number of years and I am sure that the various legal education providers across the UK have made considerable amounts of cash out of people taking the academic stages and simply not being able to get through the practical stages.

The whole Police Station Accreditation thing has been a bit of a wheeze and a cash generator for all the people involved for many years.

A firm have started to offer to cover the whole process including the practical side for £4,500.

This gets you Police Station Accredited and in theory means that you can get a job fairly easily as a Police Station Accredited Rep.

In fact, the website of the firm in question advertises the price of the course, and also states that some Police Station Accredited Reps earn over £1,000 a week doing the work.

I would strongly advise anyone who is thinking about going down this route or into crime to read The Law Society Gazette for the past 12 months before deciding to hand over £4,500 to anybody or to start the Police Station Accredited course.

It used to be the case that there were considerable amounts of money to be made and when I went to the Police Station many years ago you got paid according to the time you spent at the police station, which to me seems very reasonable and fair because sometimes you could be there for literally hours waiting for either police officers to sort themselves out or have their tea or alternatively for them to conduct further investigation and to call you back again and again for further interviews.

That has all changed in recent times and you will now find that the maximum you can ever get paid for any length of police station is about £75.

This means that in order to earn £1,000 in a week you need to be doing over 10 separate police station attendances each week.

This may seem a fairly easy thing to do, but the reality for most people working for most firms is that they are unlikely to do ten police stations in a month let alone a week.  The government have taken one of the stages out of the whole process and set up a call centre to which all the police station calls from various police stations are sent in the first instance, with the sole aim of trying to deflect people away from getting legal advice which the government then had to pay for, and instead to having a quick chat on the phone and making the decision they go ahead in interview without a legal representative present.

Most Police Station reps are currently unemployable, there are hardly any vacancies out there for anyone to do that kind of work and the crime market itself is shrinking rapidly.  Even if you go on and qualify as a solicitor and get Duty Solicitor Status you are not likely to ever earn more than about £35,000 for the rest of your career and this is likely to drop further as further cuts come in.

Some people of course do crime for a vocation and if that is the case then the best of luck, but if you are doing it for a vocation I would probably recommend not spending £4,500 to get through what is essentially an exercise in jumping in burning hoops in order to get to the end prize of qualifying as a solicitor.

Firstly we ask our clients to send us over a completed form on the internet with lots of detail in.  Alternatively our clients can send over their existing CV and we will work from that.

Very often clients fall into two categories.

Either they are having problems putting a CV together because they do not have very much to put on it or they have a CV that they feel is too long or has the wrong detail in it.

Our specialism is providing the relevant content to a CV ensuring that all the elements that recruiters look for are contained on the CV in the right places. This means that potential employers do not need to be looking around the CV to hunt out all the relevant bits.

We focus on getting the right content and information into the work experience section which very often is the key part of any recruitment procedure.

Candidates at all levels, whether looking for a training contract or a legal job, need to have the appropriate work experience to be considered for positions.

Employers are very often impressed by academic qualifications but interested in actual work undertaken in a practical work environment.

We also spend time ensuring that the layout is accurate and all the different elements are in the right places.

This can mean making sure that the appropriate personal details are at the top of the CV and not at the bottom as some people put them, that the relevant computer and language skills are present, that the right address even has been used and factors such as date of birth have been carefully considered.

The whole process is not lengthy or convoluted in most cases, although we have worked on CVs that have required between about 6 and 9 pages of information.

For further details please visit our Legal Careers Shop. Ten Percent Legal Recruitment offers a DIY legal CV writing pack as well as full CV preparation and full CV review services.

The usual or fairly common response is someone who has been told by a careers adviser when they were 14 that a CV should never be longer than 2 pages, or someone else who’s been told by a friend who is a lawyer and got a job with a good firm that their CV shouldn’t be longer than 1 page.

The correct answer is that for everyone not applying for a training contract or paralegal work and straight out of university is that a CV is as long as it needs to be. In some cases this can be 12 pages, in other cases this can be 1 page.

We normally recommend having a CV that is between about 2 pages and 7 pages long.

If you are applying for training contracts your CV should never be longer than 2 pages unless you have come from a previous career that is directly relevant to a legal career.

If you are a solicitor your CV should not fit onto 2 pages because you should have lots to say and therefore it should fit onto between about 3 and 6 pages. The more senior you are the lengthier the CV.

I have worked with a client a few days ago who had a CV that was 19 pages long. This was because they had included case examples at the end of the CV and so the actual CV was 9 pages long plus examples of cases they had worked on.

This is important because it means that someone can read the comfortably but then if they want further information about actual cases they can go on and explore these further without needing to contact the candidate again.

The most important part of a CV is the first third of the first page because this is the part that pops up onto your computer screen or comes out of an envelope and is checked.

There are specific techniques for making sure that your CV is quickly readable and catches the eye, and although you can read all about this on our various websites, blogs, article pages, you could also just cut to the chase and use our own CV preparation service or purchase our legal CV writing pack which contains hundreds of examples and templates. And yes – this is a shameless plug!

Jonathan Fagan, Managing Director of Ten Percent Legal Recruitment. Jonathan personally prepares and writes all the CVs for lawyers and law students who use our CV writing services. He has over 10 years’ experience and has worked with clients as diverse as District Judges through to law students. For details please visit our Legal Careers Shop.

It is that time of year when people start to look at their career prospects and how they can improve them.  We often get asked this question and people are often expecting an easy answer. It depends on the stage of your career to date, but there are very simple, albeit extremely difficult to achieve, ways of increasing your career prospects.

1.    Students who have not yet completed all their academic studies

This advice is very easy. To dramatically increase your chances of getting a pupillage or training contract, or progress meaningfully with your legal career, you need to get a first class degree.

When I suggest this to people they look at me as if I am completely mad and stare off into space. As if they could possibly get a first class degree.

However, as a successful lawyer you need to have a positive and “can do” attitude. If you are already starting out in your career with the thought that you cannot achieve something then what chance is there in future when a client wants you to achieve the impossible for them?

It seems to me that in recent years more and more students are getting first class degrees from universities across the UK. I am not sure what the physical evidence is, but I would hazard a guess that a first class degree is considerably easier to get now than 20 years ago.  It may be that this is because universities have their funding linked directly to their academic results, but similarly it may be that because of the way work is assessed then provided somebody puts the effort in they have a much greater chance of achieving a high mark.

Afterall, if you have coursework to complete for pretty much all of your degree modules, you can to a certain extent dictate your own destiny. If you are totally reliant on marks achieved in an end of year exam, this makes it considerably harder to achieve a higher result.

So if you are in control of your own destiny, make sure you work extremely hard because your efforts now will pay off for the rest of your career in law. People with first class degrees get job interviews from firms who recognise that someone who has worked so hard that they have achieved a first class degree is someone who is to be valued.

2.    Law Graduates

Take a look at your CV. How much work experience do you really have on it and how much of this is legally related and obtained in the last 12 months?

If you have less than 2 weeks legal work experience your CV is lacking.  In order to drastically increase your career prospects go and get legal work experience. This can make all the difference to your future career. So many different obstacles come in the way of people achieving this, it is important to be able to look past this and focus instead on your future. Do not run your career for short term gain. Careers are for the long term and any effort you put in now will pay off in years to come, but probably not in the short term.  Visit our Careers Shop for a downloadable guide on getting legal work experience (no charge).

3.    Qualified Solicitors and Lawyers

Get a following. A following makes all the difference to your legal career. You get a following by making sure that any clients you have know that you are their lawyer, not the firm you work for. The firm you work for is simply a vehicle to drive your talent forward.

Any solicitor with a following gets it either because they have family connections or because they have given such a good personal service that clients have wanted them to deal with their work, not the firm.

If you can achieve this you will find that your career will be recession proof and you will have a good grounding to stand on your own two feet in years to come if you decided to go it alone or into partnership.

Without this you will always be a salaried employee working on other people’s case loads and not your own.  Following is the key and to achieve one takes a lot of work and effort. However again it pays off in the long term.

I suspect that there will be a lot of people who read this article and think this is all very well and good but I just can’t do any of this.  You can and this advice applies to everybody in the legal profession. Perseverance is the key and something a lot of people are not prepared to offer in return for a rewarding career. If you are prepared to offer it you are already at a massive advantage.

Jonathan Fagan, specialist Legal Career Coach and Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment, preferred suppliers of legal recruitment to over 45 law firms in the UK.

Most of the Commonwealth Jurisdiction CVs we have prepared have been completed without query but on a number of occasions US clients have got back to ask lots of questions as to why the CV is in the format it is.

One of the major issues appears to be that a number of US lawyers believe that their CV should only be one page long at the most and cannot understand why we have prepared them a CV that is between 3 and 8 or 9 pages.  The other issue appears to relate to the rather dramatic difference between the way education is used to recruit in the UK compared with the US.

It may be worth explaining these two points further, in case you are a US lawyer thinking of using our legal CV writing services.

In the UK and in most Commonwealth jurisdictions it is very common to see long CVs detailing all the work you have done in a particular role.  The usual length for your work experience and your most recent role is around ¾ to 1 ½ pages. It is also common to see a full breakdown of your academic studies going right back to your high school days.  The reason for the lengthy CV is that employers want to see exactly what you have been doing.

There seems to be a lot more emphasis in the States on the name of the firm, the name of the institute you studied at and the therefore implied quality of that work.  It does not seem to be the case in the UK as much, although obviously employers recruit based on the quality of the firms you have worked for.

In the UK employers want to see exactly what you have done with a law firm throughout your career to date and the only way they are able to do that is for you to describe it for them.  If you do not describe it it could be implied that you have spent your time with the firm doing very mundane tasks and have nothing to offer them.  There is a whole list of things that need to be included on your legal CV and this is why we have to prepare CVs of a considerable length.

Secondly your academic record matters in the UK and you need to provide your full history dating back to high school.  Law firms in the UK and other jurisdictions like to see academic consistency and the quality of your education is not necessarily as important as the actual results.  Afterall it is no good going to Eton for five years if you finish up with Es at A Level.

We still get telephone calls now from law firms wanting to know what A Levels senior solicitors got because they are checking for consistency in both work and academia.

Please bear all of this in mind if you are contacting us to write a legal CV. We have been providing our CV writing services for over 10 years.  If you do not think you will be comfortable with the advice we give you, please think carefully before placing your order. We hold back nothing, and we give each client full advice on their CV and legal careers where applicable.

Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and prepares each CV ordered through our legal careers shop personally.