Vicky Clark – director of BCL Legal & BCL Graduates
BCL Graduates launched 12 months ago so how has the first year been for the team?
It’s been fantastic. The biggest challenge has been getting the message out there but the whole BCL Legal team has bought into the scheme which has been great to see.
What’s the reaction been like from law schools, firms and graduates?
In the last three months we’ve been to see Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham BPP as well as the University of Law in Bloomsbury. We’ve got plans to visit the law school at UCLAN, Northampton, York, Chester as well as Nottingham in the near future. Every year law schools report on how many of their graduates secure employment in the first 18 months after graduation and being associated with bclgraduates means they can increase their students’ chances of finding employment soon.
Is there a good geographical spread of candidates and firms using BCL Graduates?
We have high street firms as well as some of the top 50 law firms across the country and we are currently in talks with two from the Magic Circle. We are also quite excited as we have a household name business interested as it seeks to appoint paralegals in its in-house legal team.
How many graduates are now registered?
I’m proud to say that we now have over 2,500 graduates signed up which is a real achievement in such a short space of time!
What are the benefits for those who use the service?
There are many; for example, they can upload their CV and regularly update it and they can then be viewed by all the hiring managers who are downloading CVs from the site daily for their internal vacancies. Also, we don’t charge law firms for this service like other providers of CV databases do.
What’s next?
We want to focus on driving employer engagement and for it to be a resource for law firms. Seeing that CVs are being downloaded and graduates are securing that all important step on the ladder through our hard work is inspiring and makes it all worthwhile.
Where do you see BCL Graduates being in five years time?
We hope that it will be the biggest resource of legal graduates around and that law schools, graduates and law firms alike are using it daily. I’d like to see over 50% of law firms signed up to the site and potentially law firms using it as a way to recruit the partners of the future. Hopefully they will remember that in part it was the BCL Legal business that made it happen and that one day we can recruit graduates and fee earners for their departments too.
