everyonesfavouriteposter
Senior Member
  
Offline

The one and only.
Posts: 241
Gender:
|
This year has been very testing, especially for students in the diploma who have been told that there was no longer a place for them at the firm they were expecting to join this September. As hiring for firms is done two years in advance, and the 2010 places have already been filled, this means that they would now have to start in 2011. If they had previously taken a year out before starting their traineeship, this meant that the diploma would then be out of date, and this is why the Law Society have had to say that they will extend the validity of the diploma because of the unique situation we find ourselves in. Prospective trainees must however, keep up their knowledge of the current law.
The issue of firms walking away from offers already made to final year students led the Society to publish a statement with their views on the subject. They basically said that offering a student a traineeship was akin to a contract and that firms could not just withdraw this. so what firms have been doing is asking the future trainees to defer starting for a year. If they agree, then some firms are offering them £5-6k for their troubles. Some firms are making all of the future trainees apply again for the job in order to ascertain who is to be deferred. I know of one girl who started a traineeship in September 2008, and was told in December that she was being made redundant.
Just this morning, a girl at uni got a phonecall from one of the Edinburgh firms asking her to voluntarily defer. If nobody wanted to voluntarily defer, the company were going to put names into a hat, and whoever was picked out would have to defer for a year.
For the foreseeable future, things do look bleak from a lawyers prospective, apart from things like bankruptcy and repossessions where business is booming! However, things will most definately pick up again in a few years......we hope.
|