Articles From the Team

Newly qualified 1st, 2nd or 3rd choice – how selective should/can I be?

The 2011 Newly Qualified market would appear to be the busiest I have seen it for 3 years, especially across the Birmingham area and parts of the South East.  However, there is a catch!  Not all of the Newly Qualified roles we are working on are the first choice area of law for a lot of September 2011 qualifiers currently looking for a position.

It's fine to have a first choice area of law, however, it is clear that as a candidate you need to keep an open mind and not dismiss all options out of hand!  Think about what you enjoy about your preferred area of law and think about how some parts of that job could be attainable in other areas of law.

I'll give you an example; if you're keen to specialise in defendant personal injury and have trained with an insurance litigation firm and have a seat or seats in defendant PI you may naturally be looking for a defendant personal injury Newly Qualified position.  However, these are few and far between.  So why not consider other areas of insurance litigation like credit hire litigation or insurance fraud?  On the face of it you may think one or both of 2 things:

1) I don't have any experience of either area of law
2) I don't know much about either and therefore it's not for me

Both insurance fraud and credit hire positions require litigators or can defend robustly.  So if you enjoy litigation, why not look at areas like these?  The good news is that firm's who look to recruit fraud or credit hire lawyers know that candidates with this experience are hard to find and so as long as you can litigate (preferably within the context of personal injury litigation) and know the CPR, this is often enough to be considered as a candidate.

So don't be too quick to overlook potential options, the Newly Qualified market is good but not that good!