SPRING 2022
BY JEROME DORAISAMYI n the 25 years that she has been in legal recruitment, Naiman Clarke managing director Elvira Naiman has seen the same skills and experience gap in the market for candidates: lawyers with two to six years of PQE.
Ms Naiman’s observation comes against the backdrop of the supposed Great Resignation, which first entered the market’s consciousness in late 2021, was arguably precipitated by a “disconnection” among individual practitioners and has served as a “wake-up call” for law firms across the country, such a gap in available candidates is likely concerning for legal employers.
And, of course, the legal services marketplace is now grappling with the phenomenon of “quiet quitting” — originally coined on TikTok and embedding itself in the consciousness of professionals across the country. It is a phenomenon that is perhaps already happening in law — even if some are unconvinced that it will be a lasting trend. For those who think it may indeed be an indicator of longer-term evolution, there will likely be debate as to whether or not “quiet quitting” is a good thing for the profession.
The end result of the advent of the aforementioned mass exodus, and potential recalibration of legal employees’ perceptions of how best to work day-to-day, remains to be seen. However, the experience gap in recruitment is a constant that, according to Ms Naiman, recruiters can only do so much to address.
In conversation with Lawyers Weekly, she pointed to graduate programs in law firms, big and small, as being a contributing factor in the dearth of candidates at a certain level.
Such programs, she explained, are “very law firm-specific”, in that a firm will determine what they might need at the present moment, and in the future, and thus set the quantum of graduates to be hired, accordingly.
“Given that only a proportion of the market does formal training, by way of a graduate program, when the market is depressed — for example, during the GFC, the COVID-19 pandemic and other market downturns — law firms make an assessment of how many graduates they can make use of,” she detailed. This, she said, is understandable.
However, from an industry perspective, Ms Naiman went on, recruiters like her can see an increase of 50 to 60 per cent in the downturn in graduate intakes.
This, she said, “then trickles through into the industry effecting PQE gaps for the next decade”. In the post-pandemic new normal, Ms Naiman stressed, recruiters are already starting to see a downturn, as the international market starts to bear the brunt of inflationary pressures and fluctuating oil prices, among other economic and geopolitical factors.
The mass exodus of lawyers to the UK and US-based firms, “which are paying two [to] three times what they [salaries lawyers] are on in Australia”, certainly doesn’t help either.
“Quiet quitting” is more than a TikTok fad. It may have far-reaching consequences for daily legal practice and the evolution of businesses in law. Is this good or bad for the legal profession?
Ms Naiman noted that this gap is a subject she speaks about regularly — however, she pointed out, there is only so much that recruiters in Australia can do. They cannot, for example, create a third-year corporate lawyer out of thin air.
Such lawyers, she detailed, “to have done well in high school, gone to a good university, attained good grades, got into a graduate program, then got exposed to corporate law, had the right mentor, land in a corporate team, and then also be looking for a job, when the client law firm needs them and want to go to said client”.
These are a lot of hoops for a hypothetical candidate to have jumped through — “of which we have control over none”, she said bluntly.
“What we (recruiters) do have control over is access to a large part of the job seeker market at any time — both active and passive seekers; helping firms get their USP to the market; fast-tracking the interview and offer process, assessing a candidate’s motivations and breaking down their skill set to make sure that the right candidates are getting in front of the right opportunities and ultimately harnessing our knowledge of the market in the process,” she espoused.
Moreover, they are also having “a lot of truthful conversations with our clients about where the market is at, and coming up with creative ways to access the best candidates”.
Separate to such contributing efforts by legal recruiters, there needs to be “industry-wide collaboration”, Ms Naiman went on, in reducing the gap that is caused by graduate programs and migration processes and exacerbated by environmental circumstances.
Perhaps, she hypothesised, the top-tier law firms could collectively evaluate how many lawyers with two years of PQE are likely to be needed in the 48 subsequent months, and recruit their graduates accordingly.
She ceded that she is unsure how such a collaborative undertaking would work in practice but stressed that, at present, recruitment programs are “reactionary and short-sighted”.
When clients ask Ms Naiman for multiple corporate lawyers with two to four years of PQE, she is “always inclined” to ask those firms how many graduates they had in rotation in their corporate group in the preceding two-year cycle.
The answer to this question, she said, is “invariably, less than the number that we currently need”. “When this is happening industry wide, and then you add the export pressure — how do we fix this?” Ms Naiman said
.When asked if — even though the experience gap may have been around for years on end — such a dearth in candidates at a certain level offers any windows of opportunity for employers to meaningfully address that shortfall, Ms Naiman responded that she is not confident that any single employer can make widespread change.
“The international firms have an advantage, as they can move candidates overseas by way of international secondments or placements for a period of time, with a guaranteed role on return and also have a direct access to an international candidate pool,” she said.
“We’ve found some of our smaller clients are future-proofing their businesses by offering staff six [to] 12 months leaves of absence to pursue other meaningful things like travel, extra study, other interests, with the understanding that the employee will then return.” This does, of course, subsequently create short-term needs that then become acute, she added.
Ultimately, addressing the “experience gap” is a “really hard one”, Ms Naiman reflected.
For those firms looking to counter the advantage that their competitors may have, she suggested that “flexibility, quality of life and mentorship are things that would make a candidate stay in a role in Australia, especially if the salary was generous and there was access to a bonus and a genuine career trajectory”.
No solution will be a one-size-fits-all. However, the dearth of candidates with two or more years of PQE, across the country, is a hurdle that will certainly have to be overcome, collectively, by Australia’s legal profession in the years to come — particularly if, as is expected, economic uncertainty and market turbulence are a constant for the foreseeable future.
