Burges Salmon sets up job site for Halliwells trainees
Students whose Halliwells training contracts were cancelled after the firm went into administration have been offered a potential lifeline by Burges Salmon.
Stephen McNulty
The Bristol firm hopes that every law firm in the country will sign up to a project that will attempt to match trainees with firms located in a region where they are able to work.
The firm has launched a portal on its website for trainees to submit their CVs and offer letters, which will then be sent on to other firms taking part in the scheme.
Burges Salmon senior partner Stephen McNulty has already contacted at least five top 50 firms to drum up support for the scheme, which went live today (2 August). He said it would be “a litmus test for the decency of the profession”.
McNulty pledged that his firm would take on at least one of the 51 students left without training contracts after Halliwells went into administration last month.
“Halliwells won’t have offered contracts to people they didn’t think were good enough,” added McNulty. “It’s a question of matching them to the right firm.”
One trainee who had been set to join Halliwells said: “What Burges Salmon’s proposing for us would really be a lifeline to all the trainees who’ve forked out thousands of pounds to train and have been left jobless.”
The first wave of CVs sent to firms signing up to the scheme will be from those offered contracts beginning this September. There will be further waves for the prospective January and June 2011 intakes.
To access the portal click here.
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Readers' comments (38)
Anonymous | 2-Aug-2010 5:52 pm
Ms Lee is unfortunatey the product of the environment in which she works: a bureaucracy that tries to represent too many divergent interests. I presume to her own mind, her idea meets the minimum required response on paper to justify her role at the Law Society to the stakeholders/electorate that put her there. Again, this proves that government/regulatory/trade union type organisations are not adept at dealing with these kinds of issue (especially those requiring a quick and effective response) and to believe that they should be able to respond effectively is a mistaken presumption.
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St McNulty | 2-Aug-2010 7:13 pm
Thank goodness somebody is trying to do something. Hats off to Mr McNulty. I also like the way he is trying to emotionally blackmail fellow firms with the line "a litmus test for the decency of the profession".
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Salary Sacrifice rah rah rah | 2-Aug-2010 10:20 pm
Surely Ian Austin should accept a salary sacrifice so that his new firm Heatons can take on at least 3 ex Halliwells trainees.
Come on Ian, if you work your socks off, give your life to the practice, swallow the bitter pill and show some commitment then you could undo some of the damage which your mismanagement of Halliwells has caused to those poor unfortunates who secured training contracts before you expertly steered the firm into administration.
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Axel Foley | 2-Aug-2010 11:50 pm
Fair enough! But what I want to know is who is going to do something about the hundreds of people out there who have being trying for years (have all the right grades etc) to get a Training Contract to no avail?
Surely it would make sense that when you finish the LPC you can be a lawyer. Stop all this recruitment rubbish. Training Contracts tend to be a postcode lottery anyway - how rich was you family, could they buy you a good school, which buys you a good university etc. Give any person in Hackney and Peckham the life some of those Magic Circle lawyers have had and they would be working there as well.
If the current batch of lawyers are so good how come not a single one saw the finantial crisis coming (for the sake of their own business at least)? Not a single City lawyer has any right to judge whether I am commercially aware or clever because when it came to the crunch (credit) they failed so miserably. Should they not have been advising that some of the deals the banks were doing were detrimental under Basel and FSMA? And then reported this to the FSA? If this was medicine most of the City lawyers would have been struck of for killing their patients.
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Rolf Harris | 3-Aug-2010 0:17 am
Ha, I wonder if Heatons and Mr Austin will be signing up to take trainees on?
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Anonymous | 3-Aug-2010 9:18 am
Linda - I am a Halliwells future trainee and have had absolutely no contact from the JLD at all. Please elaborate on when this 'direct contact' took place.
Shame on the Law Society for not doing anything to try to aid the situation we find ourselves in.
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1+ PQE who has now changed careers | 3-Aug-2010 11:03 am
Ms Lee mentions the JLD!
Hahaha - this token sub-division almost makes the Law Soc look useful. The JLD did absolutely JACK ALL bar a couple of "webinars" and articles when the storm was at its most intense for those approaching qualification, the NQs and the juniors in the months following the Lehmans bankruptcy.
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sebastiannook | 3-Aug-2010 11:17 am
i only hope this offer doesnt become something of a poisoned chalice - sceptic - yes - but realist too
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Anonymous | 3-Aug-2010 12:02 pm
Alex Foley.......Allowing everyone to become a qualified lawyer once they have finished the LPC will NOT solve any problem. All that will result is hundreds of qualified lawyers with no jobs to go to.
It will also worsen the inequality, as those from rich backgrounds will qualify as lawyers automatically once they have paid the LPC fees.
LPC providers currently enrol ANYONE that has a degree. Your idea would make a joke of the law and allow anyone and everyone to become lawyers. Law is a tough and demanding profession, it should be a challenge to secure a training contract.
A better solution would be for LPC providers to act more stringently on their entry criteria and for students to take more responsibility for the risk that they take on when deciding to do the LPC.
Also, the JLD and the Law Society SHOULD be helping the Halliwells trainees. They place heavy restrictions on students but offer little support.
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Anonymous | 3-Aug-2010 12:12 pm
The unfortunate demise of Halliwells is unlikely to be an isolated incident in months/years to come. Our profession, like a number of others, is not immune to consolidation and mergers and the economic climate of the last 18 months and years to come will see many more consolidations and mergers as firm strive to "survive". I only hope that the commendable initiative taken by Stephen McNulty on behalf of Burges Salmon is taken up by as many firms as possible so that these talented individuals (and those who may be affected in the future) know that they are supported at least by private practice, if not the bodies that regulate them.
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