To think that no newly qualified lawyer can be worth a salary of £150k?

[Molemole]

I’m a private practise solicitor in the south west. I serve my community and have worked my way up to partner in our small firm. Aged 56 I make £60k a year.

I’ve just read that lawyers at snobby london firms like Freshfields and Linklaters are now paying their trainees more than me. They are paying newly qualified lawyers £150k plus bonus.

How can anyone be worth that with 6 months experience in that area?

It’s competitive. They recruit from the best universities and also demand an enormous amount from their employees. They also attract hugely lucrative clients. You’re a lawyer so you must be aware of the disparities in your own profession.

Bitter much?! Your assessment of Freshfields and Linklaters as snobby rather than charging a premium given their involvement in high value M&A transactions (which on a £60k drawing as a partner you clearly don’t do) reveals much about your horizons and small mindedness. That aside those juniors end up sweating blood

I work for a smallish firm in the SW, my friend works for a magic circle firm. I finish work at 5 and I’m done for day, and work 35 hours a week pretty much on the dot. She easily works 80, sometimes more, most week. She earns way more than me but never has the chance to spend it! Personally it never massively appealed to me but fair play to those who go for it!

Course they aren’t worth it at NQ. What is funny is they are given these salaries but they can do very little without supervision. They need constant help. After a few years they become worth it (if they get good at billing and collecting).

with insight that it's off topic... it makes junior doctors seem pretty cheap!

We did it when young to get on the property ladder then bailed out of London at 5 pqe for West Country lower salaries but better family life. No regrets! Op post is quite odd that a solicitor does not understand how the profession works.

They pay these salaries because they want the very best people who are willing to work stupid hours.

I trained at a Magic Circle firm, but I didn't stay, oddly enough.

I now work for a firm which treats its staff pretty well but pays somewhat less because it doesn't require the hours (though people do still work hard).

It is a bit annoying that someone who qualified yesterday is earning more than a lawyer with over 20 years' experience, (pretty well twice as much in my case!) but it's a lifestyle choice.

Shift systems don’t work as the information in people’s heads is key to doing the job quickly.

The client is paying top dollar to close deals at particular time for the markets etc plus what I did was international so on one deal working with NY Singapore etc so just as you want to leave they pop up I worked round the clock sometimes.

A lovely trustafarian friend of Dh explained how I would never had experienced tiredness like I would with a new born. Err I had actually!

If you’re a partner in the south west and you’re only earning £60k a year then you’re doing something wrong.

I’m in the midlands, qualified 2.5 years on just under £50k in a legally aided practice area and have a fabulous work/life balance.

Work for someone else again and negotiate a decent salary.

Your bitterness aside, it would be interesting to see the demographics they hire, I bet there’s little diversity and they are all from a certain “mould”.

Do you think you get good advice with that attitude towards your service providers?

Most in-house lawyers are a bit more cognisant of the fact that if you want a good job doing, people have to be well rested.

I don't believe for a minute that all these things are that urgent. Thank goodness I don't do client-facing work anymore.

So much for the legal profession taking more care in the wake of the Vanessa Ford case. I thought better of in-house lawyers.

Everyone has already covered most of what I’d say but I will commend OP for the fact that if this is the first time they are hearing of this, they obviously spend less time inanely scrolling the comments section of legalcheek / RoF than I do.

In my experience young people with tons of family money are less keen to squander their youth and life outside of work chasing a very high salary when mummy and daddy will buy them a house anyway. The people in these jobs tend to be from pretty normal backgrounds.

Most of the time it can wait - it's just a macho thing to demand things on a Friday evening and expect it by 9am on a Monday morning even if you can't look at it until say Wednesday.

I always asked when you are going to look at the work, and usually found that I got a deadline pushed back. Funny that. And equally I only ask for something so that I have time to look at it myself before my deadline, I don't set deadlines for the sake of it.

I don't see why other people should compensate for someone else's bad planning. But they do get paid a lot to deal with nasty clients.

Tru dis. Law can be an interesting job but so many of the environments you do it in are toxic. People do start to lose sight of what matters and sometimes behave very badly to each other.
i wouldn’t recommend it to either of my kids.

Yes I'd say they are a lot more diverse than your average firm in Devon.

Here’s an example

https://www.freshfields.com/494c9e/globalassets/about-us/rb/report-pdfs/uk-diversity-statistics-2023.pdf

Me neither, DH and I very strongly recommended that our son did not do law.

My mum was annoyed with me because she thinks it's a good thing to do, but I wouldn't say it's particularly agreed with me, and I think it would agree with my son even less. Fortunately I've found roles that do agree with me but still in the legal sector.

It's not a race to the bottom. We constantly say how people in other lines of work should be better paid for what they do. Let's focus on increasing wages across the board rather than pushing the bar down

I do agree with this part of your post though.

Yes, I have seen in house lawyers regard it as a right to make unreasonable demands of and behave rudely towards external counsel. Like it’s part of what you pay for.
often a sense of inferiority underlying this behaviour.

I agree. It's danger money. Massively stressful and exhausting.

That’s good. I enjoyed working in government. The hours could be long but the work was very interesting and people behaved well to each other on the whole.
PP and inhouse much less pleasant.

I don’t know why we as a society value so highly some professions and not others, it’s said here that the trainees work 24/7, it’s stressful etc., but so are many other a lot less paid professions at a start level (NHS comes to mind and these people save lives, not helping the rich getting richer).

People in London get paid lots shocker. They also work ridiculously long hours and live in shoeboxes. Their lives are not to be envied.