City of London law firms are paying trainees record amounts. First-year trainees can now expect base salaries of £60,000–£65,000 per annum in some firms, with pay for year two trainees rising to £70,000 at the top end. 

However, with salaries in the Government Legal Service averaging between £60,000–£70,000 per annum, the rise in trainee renumeration at law firms has further highlighted the discrepancy between private practice and public sector earnings. 

David Patient, Strategy Officer of the IBA Law Firm Management Committee, says that US and City firms are ‘creating the market’ for higher salaries because there’s so much competition for junior lawyers in private practice. But he says the gulf that this creates between the private and public sectors is stark. 

‘The salaries that you read about for junior lawyers in a number of City and US law firms, where newly qualified solicitors can earn anything from £150,000 upwards before bonus, are probably significantly different to what junior lawyers can earn if they’re working in the public sector,’ says Patient, who’s a senior adviser at Travers Smith in London. 

Carl Gardner, a barrister, former government lawyer and author of the Head of Legal blog, agrees. He says senior partners earning huge profit shares may baulk at the thought of giving up that money, even to head up a government agency. However, he highlights that the cachet attached to such positions means that, in reality, the pool of applicants probably won’t be drastically reduced. ‘There’s such a CV boost in having those jobs,’ he says. ‘There’s an extra aspect to those jobs that mean they’re attractive.’

However, Gardner says this has implications for lawyers who have worked their way up on public sector salaries, but who can still find themselves locked out of the top jobs. ‘If there’s a lot of recruitment from outside for these top jobs, that’s a bit of a problem for the people already working in these services in mid-ranking roles,’ he says. 

‘I remember when I was a government lawyer being asked at a conference whether people who have ambitions for those top jobs would need to leave the service and then come back,’ he adds. ‘The real problem is in the middle ranks, with the people that will never get those top jobs.’

Paul Marmor, Co-Chair of the IBA Law Firm Management Committee, agrees, and says that retaining people in those mid-level jobs can be particularly difficult for the public sector as, after several years of private practice pay rises, that’s where the real gulf in salaries begins to be felt. ‘There is a disparity between what junior lawyers earn in the public sector and private practice, but when you get away from the elite firms it’s not as great as you might think for those with up to two or three years of experience,’ says Marmor, who’s Head of Litigation at Sherrards Solicitors in London.

‘The problem in the public sector comes later on when you get to four, five, six, seven years’ PQE [post-qualification experience],’ he says, as here the public sector is significantly affected by the seduction of elite and second or third-tier firms. ‘That’s when public sector lawyers reach a plateau and that’s where you find the dearth of resources.’

Perhaps even more worrying for the public sector is that the pool of people who’ll probably reach that point is dwindling, with growing signs that law students aren’t even considering government jobs as a career path at all. 

Paul McConnell, Co-Chair of the IBA Academic and Professional Development Committee, says it’s ‘very unusual’ for students to ‘express much awareness’ about public sector careers and that little is being done to rectify that.

McConnell, who’s Director of Careers at the University of Birmingham’s Law School, explains that ‘what students see at a university like Birmingham is that all the big law firms come onto campus and take students to London for on-site days. They get a lot of attention from those firms and that’s what they perceive a law career to be. There’s not been a lot of activity from the public sector and in the last few years that activity has declined.’

McConnell adds that in the past, the civil service and other public-facing legal authorities attended, but with budgetary constraints, they’ve ‘not been recruiting for some time and now they’re not on students’ radar at all’, he explains. 
 

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