Silver lining in the Brexit clouds for lawyers Down Under

If you’ve got even a passing interest in news out of the UK, you’ll be aware that in six months’ time the UK is going to “commit a monumental act of self-harm” and leave the European Union. If you need to catch up on this, the BBC does a late but useful summary here.

From the way they’re behaving, it doesn’t look like the UK government has the foggiest idea of what’s going to happen when the clocks tick over into 30 March. I certainly don’t. But the increasingly dark clouds of Brexit may have a silver lining for Kiwi and Aussie lawyers.

Cards on the table, I think Brexit is a TERRIBLE idea. I’ve bored friends, upset ex-friends, filled social media with anti-Brexit news and views, marched against it and will march again. But somewhat ironically, although leaving the EU, and the government’s shambolic, fractured and fractious approach to negotiating the exit agreement may be terrible news for the country as a whole, it may enable New Zealand and Australian lawyers to come and work in London more easily and for longer than since the UK joined the EU in 1973.

Let me explain.

Why (some) people voted "Leave".

Amongst the reasons commonly touted for the eventual “leave” vote was to cut down on immigration. One of the European Union’s “four freedoms” to which all members must accede is freedom of movement. There are pockets of voters all over the UK who have become uncomfortable with a rapidly changing and diversifying population, and who wanted to “take back control” of the country’s borders. The shadow of terrorism, fuelled by a lamentably right wing press, created an undercurrent of xenophobia which was cynically harnessed by the Leave campaign.

There is evidence that plenty of Leave voters didn’t realise that the immigrants they’d been told they should fear weren’t coming from the EU, and unfortunately it turns out that immigrants from the EU were often doing work native Brits didn’t want to do and fulfilling essential roles in teaching, agriculture and the NHS. Post Brexit, many EU citizens are leaving a country in which they now feel unwelcome.

So the upshot is that when the UK shuts its doors to EU citizens on 30 March 2019, workers will have to come from somewhere. With surely at least one eye on this, the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) has recently published an “immigration post-Brexit” report, in which it recommends scrapping the cap on Tier 2 (ie. sponsored) visas, and the Resident Market Labour Test (the flawed test under which employers had to advertise to prove that they couldn’t find the employees they needed from the EU). If the MAC’s recommendations are enacted, it will mean that employers will find it a lot easier to sponsor workers from all over the world.

In a display of breath-taking blindness to the need for unskilled workers to replace those who can’t (and probably no longer want to) come to the UK from the EU, under the MAC’s recommendations, the new system will retain a salary threshold of ￡30,000. This is bad news for nurses, teachers, lab technicians and fruit pickers which the UK desperately needs absent the EU labour pool, but great news for Kiwi and Aussie lawyers who want to come to London, because London law firms are having an “absurd pay war for talent” which flows down to an extent to the rest of the legal market.

In addition to the recommendations of the MAC’s report, UK diplomats have spent the last couple of years cosying up to the New Zealand, Australian, and Canadian governments in particular (ie. Commonwealth countries where English is the first language), discussing new opportunities post-Brexit. Inevitably, immigration and free trade will form a part of these discussions.

Brexit sounds awful. Should I still come to London?

So, it may soon be easier for Kiwi and Aussie lawyers to work in the UK. But Brexit sounds like it’s going to be an economic calamity, why would I want to take my career there? Again, one of the unintended consequences of Brexit seems to be that there is still plenty of work for bankers and lawyers. One thing those darn capitalists are good at is making money, and although uncertainty is seldom a good thing in business (or for lawyers), law firms are busy recruiting like the Brexit vote never happened.

It seems the City knows something we don’t, or is at least better positioned to prepare for it. I asked the Head of Corporate at a major international firm recently if he was nervous about the impact of Brexit on his firm’s clients and thus his team’s utilisation. Should the new senior associates he was keen to hire have any concerns about their career progression in a post-Brexit Britain? He said that 95% of his corporate group’s work has an international element anyway, and confirmed that the large businesses which big law services have already taken the hit from Brexit and their strategy has pivoted to ameliorate risks.

Brexit is "priced in", and although Brexit has slowed growth, we are where we are and things are still going pretty well for large, internationally looking businesses and their advisors. The laws of England & Wales are still the lingua franca of business, and business chiefs (and lawyers) still want to live in London. The City is still open for business, and although Brexit has (and will continue to) almost certainly have a negative effect on the UK economy, there will still be work for lawyers.

Market update – come on over.

So the London market is buoyant, with the caveat that London’s international firms are still picky and demanding. There are still opportunities for lawyers from top tier New Zealand (ok, and Australia, too) firms with 4-8 PQE in banking & finance, privacy, TMT, funds, projects, capital markets, securitization and construction (contentious and non-contentious). Although the newspapers are full of news of businesses fleeing the UK, law firms and companies of all sizes will still have opportunities for high quality New Zealand and Australian lawyers of all types, on both an interim and permanent basis. Get in touch to hear more: [email protected].

And post-Brexit, worrying about how to extend a two year working holiday visa may become a thing of the past.

Addendum 25/10/2018:

The clouds are hanging lower and possibly for longer.

Due to a combination of a mismatch between what Brexiteers promised and what is possible, and our great government’s ineptitude, it looks increasingly likely that the UK will not leave the European Union properly for some time. While not leaving the EU would be good news, this purgatorial “transitional arrangement” is bad news because it might conceivably last forever. If Brexit is bad, arguably this prolonged (“are we in or out?”) uncertainty is worse, because most investors and employers like uncertainty about as much as they like Brexit.

During such a “transitional arrangement”, the EU’s pillar of freedom of movement will continue to apply, so the clouds of Brexit will still lour upon us without the silver lining of increased access for commonwealth citizens.

All I have to say to that is ? which I appreciate isn’t helpful. Fortunately, most large law firms and businesses in London still seem to be recruiting like Brexit isn’t happening.

David von Dadelszen is a Director at Jameson Legal.

Prior to moving into recruitment in 2006 he qualified as a lawyer in New Zealand and worked in private practice in New Zealand and in-house in the UK.