Why we can’t afford to hire freshers and very junior lawyers

There is a raging debate going on right now about how lawyers do not pay even subsistence salary to junior lawyers that they hire. I have written about this quite a bit even earlier. Here is why young lawyers struggle to get a job that pays them enough. 

The debate around this has been rekindled by a comment of Dr. Faizan Mustafa, VC of NALSAR, who said that law students are not opting for litigation because senior lawyers are stingy about paying juniors. 

It is hard to deny what he said. This is absolutely the truth. However, this is not the complete truth. 

Before I jump into that part, let me show the kind of emails I get almost every other day.

Guess what was the response to my rather curt comment? It was a blunt “I am sure.”

Yesterday I asked a 2018 law graduate who is looking for jobs and getting through only LPOs as to why he thinks he is a good candidate for getting a job in a good law firm.

He said “I have done moots, I have interned at over 10 organizations including big law firms, I have published research papers, I have done online courses. Is that not enough?”

Sorry, that is usually not enough. Unfortunately, people have bought into this myth that doing mooting and writing some college-level articles and getting good grade entitle them to get a good salary at a decent workplace. It doesn’t work that way. You were lied to.

Especially in a legal market that has slowed down, where people who already have jobs are sitting with little work in their hand, in a market in which clients are infinitely delaying their billings and law firm managements have hired consultants to identify which lawyers are unproductive and should be eased out from the system.

Even litigators are hit by fee recovery issues.

The situation is vastly different from an economic upcycle when law firms are growing fast and need tons of new lawyers. They are ready to hire a lot more people with little scrutiny at that time. That is not the situation right now. 

Law firms are still hiring, but they are super careful about what they pay you and what value you bring on the table for them. The mass hiring approach is history.

So is it all gloom and doom? Not really. 

There are a lot of jobs in the market, just the approach has changed. While there are a lot of general hiring freezes in place, they are still interviewing people for specific teams. They will create a position for talented and capable lawyer who would not spend 6-12 months getting trained in the first place. Patience with non-performing lawyers is also at an all-time low. If you got three chances earlier, getting even one may be difficult right now.

What's the difference?

A lot of people found jobs in law firms relatively easily during the growth phase of the market, but soon found themselves unqualified to do the job they were hired to do. What do you think happened to them?

Let me tell you why I think there is a really high demand for hiring qualified and capable lawyers. 

In my organization, back in the early days, I created a rule that we would not hire any freshers. Why? 

Firstly, it takes a while and a lot of effort to train freshers. On top of that, no fresher has a dream of working in a legal education company, they dream of working in a law firm. Even if they join us, they will hear so much from their parents, peers etc that they will leave us shortly even for a low-quality law firm to do law-quality work for a lower pay just because it is a law firm! That is how spellbound young lawyers are with the word “law-firm”!

On top of that, as they get really high-quality training and produce top-notch research and writing work in important areas of law, or even write marketing articles, they learn a lot. If they appear in an interview and can say all that they learned on the job at LawSikho in the last few months confidently, they easily bag a job.

It has happened dozens of times in the past, hence the rule of not hiring freshers or people with less than 3-4 years of experience. We prefer hiring work-from-home mothers. We prefer to hire people who have already worked with law firms or did litigation and want to pursue something else that is more satisfying. 4 different teams in my company are headed by work-from-home mothers. 

However, a few months back my colleagues in the content team decided to hire freshers and those with less than one year of experience. They wanted young people who would work from our Delhi office. I did not want to stand in their way, and since they were in charge of hiring, training and retaining, I went along with the new policy exception. 

What followed was a massacre. We have seen a revolving door in the last 6 months. Many of them left in the first week because they could not handle the challenges of the tasks we gave them. This is understandable. However, those who performed well stayed in the company for an average of 3-6 months. This is in spite of us giving them significant raises post probation. Each of them bagged jobs that paid them double or triple of what we paid even after the hike. 

If you are wondering how much we paid, after hikes, per month salary ranged from 30-50k. However, if a law firm is offering 1.3 lakhs per month, or even 70k, we are completely priced out.

And that has happened every time we hired a young lawyer and they worked with us for a few months. 

Even if they would get the same salary, they want to move on to law firms, because that is what they have always dreamt of! This is a no brainer. We are just a stop-gap job for them. 

So we are back to our older hiring policy and my colleagues have to learn to work with a remote team. We do not have many options until we can significantly hike all our salaries. If we can someday hike entry-level salaries to 60k per month, we will reconsider hiring young law graduates.

It is really not about work culture, work environment or anything else - it is about the ingrained socialization of every law student - that working with a law firm is the dream job.

Education companies do not feature anywhere on the map, while LPOs are considered untouchable, even if they pay well and treat their lawyers in a humane way.

Only exception to our general policy of no freshers are young lawyers who have interned with us long term, are connected with our work and we know that they would not leave us overnight just because they could. In so many situations they have been offered jobs by our competitors and wouldn’t leave us because of the kind of training they are getting from us, and the projects they get to work on.

We happily pay a good stipend to those interns who work long term with us, for the same reason. 

So this is the other part of the story. Many organizations like us are unable to hire junior lawyers because there is such a high demand for lawyers who are actually good at their work. Most are not. They expect an employer to hire them and pay them to learn on the job.

Sure that works out at times, but can you count on it? I will not.

Do not lose hope. There are two simple things for you to do if you want to get the right opportunities that pay well enough.

Step 1 is to learn enough marketable skills. Imagine that you need to learn at least 100 solid skills that clients will pay money for, and you are set. It is great if these 100 skills are in a concentrated area because that would make it easier for you to get a job.

However, I am not talking about skills like “I can read a bare act”, “I can do legal research”, “I can find case laws” kind of stuff. That’s very easy and even most clients can do that today. I am talking about a different kind of skills.

Example of skills:

I can draft a reply to a notice for breach of contract.

I can incorporate an LLP or a Pvt Ltd company without any supervision or guidance (it’s not as easy as you think)

I can draft and negotiate a shareholders agreement involving a foreign investor

I can draft a plaint for a matrimonial dispute 

And so on. I could go on but I think you get the drift. Learn 100 such solid skills. If you do not have ideas, go to lawsikho.com, and open the weekly exercises section of any course. You will get a list of skills you could benefit from learning.

So what is step 2? It is not enough that you have skills. Relevant people need to know that you have such amazing skills. How will that happen? You need to share your knowledge. Through articles, videos, LinkedIn or Twitter, or events. It could be one on one meetings. It could be anything, as long as you are demonstrating your knowledge in a consistent, regular and attractive way.