AIBU to quit my job and retrain as a solicitor?

[Moobieboobie]

Should I not? I hate my job (civil service) although fairly well paid and have always hankered after joining the legal profession. But, I am almost 40 and have three children would I even have a chance at getting a training contract? I can self fund the GDL and LPC, but would need to have a training contract in place once the qualifications are completed. Am I totally unrealistic as I will be competing with lots of young'uns!?

I work as a solicitor in local government. love the work, work life balance fab. pay is not good and certainly not getting better.

Hugh number of applications for any job.

OP, nex. week at work, try an experiment. Set up a spreadsheet and every time you read an email, draft an email, read a document, prepare a report, make a phone call, discuss an issue with a colleague or do anything productive whatsoever, enter the exact task duration into the spreadshet. Make sure that every task has at least 3 different identifying codes, and ensure that you write a full explanation of what you were doing- not just "letter to John Smith" but "letter to John Smith about X, Y and Z. Imagine doing this for every single task you perform at work all day every day until you retire. Still want to be a solicitor?

OP I agree with the suggestion of looking into the GLS as you're already within the public sector.

As for me, I'm at one of the big firms in the City and enjoy it. I find the work interesting, like the clients and the people I work with. I barely recognise the description of the profession on this thread.

I got a training contract the first year I applied and had all my law school fees paid, maintenance grants etc. This was post 2008. I think people really exaggerate when they say it's imposible to get training contracts, that they are like gold dust and you'll have to paralegal for years. If you're good enough then that is just not true. Yes it's competitive to get a decent one but plenty of normal people do get them.

Trainees at our place start on just under £40k and qualify on about £65k two year later. This goes up at decent increments and there are bonus etc. Dont understand how people are saying you'll never earn more than a shelf stacker

Hours are unpredictable sometimes but it very much depends on your department. Employment is not really a long hours area. Plenty of lawyers at my firm have kids and manage. Admittedly I don't have them yet.

Jessie - then have someone pick over it. That complex letter which you think you did very well to draft in 48 minutes. Well the client does not see why it took more than 18....

I do NOT miss measuring my life in 6 minute increments.

Jessie - so true.

Then be prepared to explain justify each unit spent in 3 months' time when the bill is queried.

Jessie, oh come on. Time recording is not that arduous. Just click a timer on and off, type a brief note, hardly rocket science. It becomes second nature.

How arduous time recording is depends a lot on your area of practice, I found amongst my colleagues.

That is your opinion Diane Lockhart. I am a partner in a law firm, I have been doing it for 17 years, I fucking hate it and so do most of my associates.

I also think it's a share there are so many unhappy lawyers on the thread. If you don't like it do something else. Plenty of us do like it. I haven 't given time recording a thought for ages and I've never worked in a firm with a billing target either by the way.

However I certainly agree most people applying find it hard to get in. I think that's brilliant. None of us would want anyone who applied to get to be a doctor so why should it be any different with lawyers. We only want the best in the profession for the good for public. That inevitably means competition. Competition is a good, not a wrong.

I'm a lawyer and I bloody love my job. I work in a large commercial firm outside of London. I do interesting work for less money than my London counterparts but more than enough for the local area. The hours aren't as bad as the City but are still long. If you go into it op, you need your eyes open. You will be working much harder than you do now. Wave goodbye to that public sector holiday entitlement, time in lieu and overtime mentality.

I personally havent come across any older trainees but they do exist - a woman from my LPC class was in her late 40s and she had a training contract lined up. do you have young children because that will make things difficult. As a trainee you need to be able to give it your all. Also as others have said you need to be ok with the idea of taking orders from people a lot younger than you. I qualified quite young and now supervise trainees and NQs who are slightly older than me which can be difficult - are you prepared for a 28 year old to rip your drafting apart?

Just to clarify my earlier post to DianeLockhart when I say I hate it I don't mean that I hate being a lawyer, I mean that I hate the timesheets side of it. Penguins is correct and I will give Diane the benefit of the doubt about her very rude response: it's not such a big deal if you do large corporate transactions or big chunks of advisory work where you work on one project at a time. However I am in litigation and my clients are mostly very cost-conscious insurers; all our bills are audited by a third party company who are paid according to how much they can reduce our fees.

To give you an example: email comes in from client. You consider the question raised and then draft a reply. Our Service Level agreement requires three separate time entries for that and each one must have a full explanation of what you were doing. If it does not satisfy the auditors then all the work done is disallowed. It is tedious beyond belief and really sucks the joy out of the job for me.

JillyR2015

I haven't given time recording a thought for ages and I've never worked in a firm with a billing target either by the way

Do you mean you don't have to record time or you are so good at it you don't think about it? As for billing targets, it depends if you mean chargeable hours targets or billing targets. For the OP's benefit, billing targets are usually for partners only and not something an associate has to worry about. But partner will definitely have targets, it would be impossible to run a firm without them.

Chargeable hours targets are a target number of hours recorded by each associate and Jilly you are very lucky if you have never had one of these. From a management perspective we need to set these targets for associates because we have to be sure that they are profitable i.e. bringing in more money than we are paying them. Otherwise the management board will put pressure on us to reduce headcount.

This is a reflection of the fact that until law firms move away from a charge-by-the-hour model of billing the only way we can earn money is by recording time and billing it. It's a paradigm shift away from results-based assessment of value that you will be used to in the civil service OP.

That's just a bit of insight to give you a sense of (a) the daily admin obligations and (b) how performance will be monitored and measured. More generally, I echo what a lot of previous posters have said but the different parts of the profession vary wildly and I'd suggest that you try to find a practising employment lawyer wiling to sit down with you and talk you through it, or see if you can get some work experience at a firm. Very much endorse what Chunderella says above.

I recruit trainees for training contracts. I would not consider age to be a factor on paper (and not just because it is unlawful to discriminate), but I would have to think carefully about how the candidate would fit into the firm, its values, its hierarchy. When you train you rotate betwen departments so you have to be a good general fit, not just get on with the partner whoo interviews you. I know quite a few partners who would feel pathetically threatened by having a "grown-up" trainee over whom they wouldn't be able to lord it over like they do with the fresh grads.

Former solicitor here. Sorry to be so negative but I have to agree with the others - don't do it.
Since I left my job as a solicitor (10 years ago) many, many firms, including my former firm, have gone under. Yes, we did crime and family, pretty much all legal aid stuff but the fact is that the cuts have been savage and there have been lots of redundancies. The legal job market is saturated with young, child-free people willing to move wherever necessary, work in crap conditions for very little pay. My heart sinks when friends tell me their kids are doing the LPC and want to do law.

I really dont think that your age, per se, is a negative factor, especially with your background, but the reality is that you are at a different stage of your life to twenty somethings and not able to give what they can. And why should you?!

I'm sorry but I'd stick with your job.

Jessie, spot on about the time recording. God, yes, how could I have forgotten about that?

I met a nurse a few weeks ago who'd done a law degree and LPC. She managed to get a training contract but absolutely hated it. She went back to the NHS but I think achieved a promotion so her time away wasn't entirely wasted.

I second the idea of taking holiday/unpaid leave for work experience.

op - on a more positive note, when I was a partner in my mid-30s I had a trainee sitting with me who was nearly 10 years older than me. She was one of the best I'd has as she already knew how to deal with clients/ juggle workloads/ write a convincing letter. I didn't actually realise she was older than me (because I didn't ask - why would you?) until the last month she was with me.

And the time sheet thing is a pain but it does vary according to practice area. If you keep on top of it, it is all quite manageable ime.

I also think a lot of the negatives stated in this thread could have been said by people in other professions which have become popular and/or affected by technology. Friends and family in journalism, academia and architecture raise a lot of the same issues. And not all areas of law are in decline.

I have also had some brilliant older trainees, but as a PP said, plenty of other partners would be less amenable to that and want a pretty young thing to take to meetings

Time recording totally varies according to practice area - when working on 100 plus matters and supervising 2 junior lawyers (with costs draftsperson and sometimes judge reviewing entries), it's pretty soul destroying.

In many ways I love my job, but that is because I don't have kids and my husband has easy hours and likes housework Would I enter the profession if I had my life again? Probably not. I am the same age as the OP - hardly geriatric - but I cannot keep up with the hours that new graduates are expected to work any more. It's brutal and just means that what looks like a pretty good salary on paper disintegrates into less than minimum wage per hour.

I also think that clients are becoming ever more demanding. I was discussing a piece of work with a client and she told me it was urgent and I could simply "not go home" until it was complete. (Imagine saying that to your doctor...) I worked till 3am, and she took no action based on it for 6 weeks. Sometimes PP lawyers end up in a semi-abusive relationship with their clients! I have seen it take its toll on many colleagues.

Old I would totally agree with that comment regarding clients. I found that pretty soul destroying - "We have decided to do X project that we could have done at any time and to any sensible timescale. But we want to start it today, and have it done in three days". For absolutely no reason.

I agree that time recording problems will depend on practice area as to how much of a hassle it is. I had one case paid by an insurer where they wanted a lot of detail (like someone described above), but that was once.If you spend 4 hours drafting things it is not too hard to record that. Anyway it is one issue. In fact a partner from a firm where I used to work was on Radio 4's Bottom Line talking about billing a couple of weeks ago saying they still have no target hours for lawyers and will often not charge on a time basis.

Anyway there is lots of variety in law so be careful what you pick.

Unless OP can obtain a training contract, whether it's a good move or not will be academic. Endorse earlier comments about the difficulty almost certainly to be encountered in obtaining a training contract unless OP is outstanding.

I thank my lucky starts I had the extreme good fortune to obtain a training contract in the days when it was relatively easy - indeed, the Law Society even drew up guidelines requiring candidates not to hold more than two offers at a time... My I find it profoundly dispiriting to see how many amazing candidates cannot obtain a training contracts (or even paid work experience at the city firms' summer placement work experience schemes). I wouldn't have stood a chance of obtaining a training contract in the current climate...

yy Aridane - it's particularly depressing to watch the profession become less meritocratic, even in the 15-odd years I have been in it. These days, the types of activity you need to do to make a CV stand out (gap yahs, charity, internships, work experience, etc) are just not available to students who have to work in their spare time to pay their rent (like I did). I read recently that they have abolished the minimum salary for trainees too, and I still remember the bad old days when firms used to offer training contracts to trainee lawyers who were willing to pay for them

IN a way it reflected reality, though. Most people when they start any job are not too much use for a good while so the idea you pay to be trained - the indentured servant and the like which most trades had I think in the UK if you go back far enough and that you paid someone to take on this useless new starter until they were good enough to be any use to you is not a model that is necessarily wrong in a free market (not that people do pay - law is better than most careers in that you have PAID work experience - vacation placements unlikely careers like journalism which seem to be more who you know) and law pays for your GDL and LPC course if you are good enough which again many careers don't.

Over 30 years ago I had to make over 010 applications. It was dire. A whole generation of graduates in a recession then could not get jobs at all. It is difficult now too. In the 1920s my grandfather who left school at 12 had 4 brothers who trained after leaving school at 15 to be solicitors. Only 1 managed to qualify . The rest lived in poverty and then died. I am not sure there has ever been a golden age when it was easy to become a lawyer.

The baffling appeal of the legal profession to those in secure good jobs. Pay attention to what JessieMcJessie writes, because that is the reality for many. The other reality is going into the public sector on a lowish salary because you are a woman with family and can't do the long hours and provide the devotion the more well paid areas of private practice require. Or doing your traineeship and several years later being desperate to return to your former job - I've seen that happen with trainees I worked alongside.

I had a pretty smooth path through my degree and traineeship, but still had to spend a year farting around and making hundreds of applications for it. The average role of a solicitor is filled with form filling, it is not exciting, it is repetitive and if you like the academic challenge of the law it may not be for you. You really have to learn to think in a way which produces fees from clients and not laterally. Prepare to be both impressed and shocked at the total (sometimes lack) of legal knowledge of your fellow solicitors. There are no longer any nice, interesting jobs in rural firms where you could strike a good work/life balance. The best jobs are in London and maybe Birmingham and Manchester and even then its a hectic life. Or in Europe - that's certainly been the better option for me, but not everyone would be in a position to do that. I loathed being a solicitor in a medium sized commercial firm, and it wasn't that bad compared to some, it was just dull as ditchwater.

I agree with most of what has been said already. I have good friends who are lawyers and it is tough.

I planned to retrain at 42 and did a law degree but could neither afford the time or the money for the next stage with 2 young kids and a part-time job. Tried to go down the legal exec route but could not get any sort of job with a legal element. Got on a part time course for the Legal practice but decided I'd be nearly 50 by the time I'd be earning any money.

However - I have used my law in my current job and it has enabled me to take opportunities for some really good work - and I have gone sideways! So my advice would be go for it - but without giving up your job.