The Flight To Quality
July 30, 2009 by Damian
I was talking to a lawyer at one of the big firms here in Wellington the other day and he commented that he was busier than ever. When I asked him ‘how come?’, he laughed and said that it was because during tough times, there is always ‘a flight to quality’.
Reading this article from the UK magazine Legal Week, it seems to be the same the world over –
http://www.legalweek.com/legal-week/analysis/1495487/editor-comment-tough.
In the same edition of the magazine, I also found this very interesting article about the headcount in the top 50 firms in the UK – http://www.legalweek.com/legal-week/news/1495495/headcount-holds-level-set-fall-2010.
Contrary to what I thought, headcount has hardly dropped at all in the year to April 2009. The bad news for any Kiwi lawyer thinking about going over in the next year is that the prediction is that it will drop in the year to April 2010.
I will keep you up to date with any information on this that I come across!
The Importance Of CVs
July 15, 2009 by Damian
It never ceases to amaze me how little time and effort some people put into their CVs. I regularly see CVs with typos, bad grammar, inconsistent formatting etc. I remember one CV where a candidate wrote that he had excellent attention to detail but he had spelled ‘detail’ incorrectly! This sort of thing is unforgivable and would result in the CV automatically going into the bin.
Apart from your passport and birth certificate, your CV is probably the most important document that you will ever have. You may be the best lawyer with the best personality but if your CV is not good enough, you will not get the chance to prove this in an interview.
When writing your CV, two things should be paramount in your thinking:
(i) write it from the perspective of a partner/general counsel/hiring manager who does not know anything about you apart from what is on your CV. What information does he/she need to know about you before making a decision on whether to interview you or not? Just because something is obvious to you does not mean that it will be obvious to someone else. Explain everything – if you leave too many questions unanswered, you will not get the interview.
(ii) when you have finished your CV, you must be impressed by it. If you are not, then no-one else will be. I remember being at a seminar and the speaker said: “good enough is not good enough”. What he was trying to say is that if you do something and you think that it is ‘good enough’ to get the job done, that is not enough. It must be the best that you can do and that is surely better than ‘good enough’. So in terms of your CV, if you do not sit back and think that you look good on paper, you can guarantee that no-one else will either.
Writing a CV is a very difficult and time consuming thing to do. At Simply Legal, we can help you put together the best CV possible for you. If you want some information on how to do this, give us a call now or drop us a line. We would be delighted to help!
Only £85,000?
July 8, 2009 by Damian
I laughed when I read this story this morning on The Lawyer’s website -
http://www.thelawyer.com/1001294.article.
Doesn’t your heart just bleed?
I would also recommend having a read of some of the comments made by various posters about the issue. Thank goodness we don’t have that arrogant attitude over here!!!