Trainee Solicitors' salaries slipping further behind

35% of all Trainee Solicitors are being paid below Law Society recommended levels according to our research. 12 months ago 31% were being paid under the threshold. 

London trainees fare best with only 25% being paid below the recommended £20,913 salary. On average, 37% of trainees in the regions fall short on salary, trainees in the North of England are worst off with 1 in 2 being paid below the £18,547 recommended by Chancery Lane.

We also discovered that although Trainee Solicitors are in general contracted to a 37.5 hour working week, average actual working weeks were more like 40 and 13% of all trainees are working over 48 hours a week.

More on Trainee salaries and working weeks 

Find your A game this February

We’ve all heard of Blue Monday and at times January can feel like the most depressing month of the year.

However, research we have undertaken for our 2017 Salary and Benefits Benchmarker has revealed that nearly 8 in 10 Solicitors and legal professionals have partnership and business leadership aspirations. If you are one of them you cannot afford to tread water for another month.

Recruitment Consultant Rachel Marshall offers five tips to help ambitious legal professionals finally ditch the winter blues and find their A game this February.

Find that A game

Tech for lawyers: time to ditch the 6?

Apple is expected to post record iPhone sales this week, commentators are predicting 78 million phones were sold in Q4 2016 which is a 3m year on year increase. 

But what's all the fuss about? Sure there's the looks. The feel. The status. But beyond vanity are there any other reasons legal professionals should be ditching the 6 in favour of a mobile phone that can cost up to £1,000 of your hard earned cash. 

Legal IT recruiter David Doherty looks at 10 enhancements that will probably fail to convince your friends and colleagues otherwise.      

Ditch the 6?

Best foot forward for 2017's Happiest Person in Legal

Meet Zara Okereafor, a Senior Paralegal working in the Commercial Litigation department of Stewart's Law and, in the process of crunching through the data for our 2017 Salary and Benefits Benchmarker, the legal professional we have identified as 2017's Happiest Person in Legal. 

Inspired by the memory of her late father Zara studied Law at Keele University and completed her LPC at the University of London, Bloomsbury. An extremely sporty individual Zara is also an ice figure skater and a member of the GB National Ice Skating Association (NISA) programme. 2017 is a big year for her as she will be getting married and moving into a new property with her fiancé which is a very exciting chapter in her life.

Read more about Zara

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