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Is soaring NQ pay impacting trainee retention rates?

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By Lydia Fontes on

19

The Legal Cheek team discuss NQ salaries, retention rates, financial results and a petition to reform the SQE — listen now 🎙️

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The Legal Cheek Podcast returns this week as publisher Alex Aldridge and writer Lydia Fontes discuss this week’s biggest legal news stories as firms have released financial results, trainee retention rates and some have further boosted salaries for newly qualified lawyers.

This week we kick off by discussing the NQ salary rises that firms have announced so far this summer. We dig into what this tells us about how the UK legal industry is performing and how the growing presence of US firms in London impacts these figures. We also address the concept of “salary bunching” as associates complain that their pay hasn’t risen in line with that of NQs.

We ask whether the continual rise in NQ pay may be having an affect of the amount of qualifying trainees that firms keep on, examining some anecdotal reports from our readers that retention rates may be dropping. We discuss the figures which firms have released so far and what they tell us about the NQ market this year.

Finally, we touch on a student-led petition to reform the Solicitors Qualifying Exams (SQE) which has garnered attention from mainstream media outlets as well as from former Home Secretary Suella Braverman. Is this an example of Gen Z snowflake culture (as Braverman suggests) or valid criticism of a flawed set of exams?

You can listen to the podcast in full via the embed above, or on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

19 Comments

West Indian & Co.

It does. Rather than 10x $175k NQs to handle execution pages and printing, we not require 3x only. The rest can be handled by AI and paralegal

Reply Report comment
(1)(20)

Duh

Yes. What else did anyone expect?

Reply Report comment
(10)(1)

Michael

Yes it does. I own a successful high street practice in a medium-size town, and it’s absolute madness what young lawyers expect these days!

We’ve had lawyers ask to be paid 60,000 pounds just for qualifying! When I qualified in 1992, I was paid £28,000, which was a good salary then.

I know there’s been inflation, but these new lawyers shouldn’t be paid more than 40 or 50k, maximum – that’s the way the world works. When you work hard and become a respected partner like me, then you can earn six figures, and not before.

Yes, “the times they are a changing”…

Reply Report comment
(2)(85)

PEP Guardiola

Here is a link to a helpful inflation calculator, which shows that £28,000 in 1992 would be £61,915 today. Your trainees are selling themselves short! https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator.

I don’t see why associates shouldn’t be paid well when city firms’ PEP has soared in recent years. The fixation on NQ salaries is tedious.

Reply Report comment
(82)(1)

Michael

Is it almost £62,000 today? Gosh. Just goes to show how much inflation has “screwed the pooch” in this country!

I’m still not paying it, not with all these desperate paralegals around lining up to work for 30k… feels good to be the boss!

Reply Report comment
(2)(51)

Pffft

Sounds like someone’s upset that 23 year old NQs in London are out earning him! So much for being a “highly respected” high street partner, which, by the way, is the equivalent of saying you’re a highly respected vagrant or PE teacher.

Reply Report comment
(42)(2)

Hey Michael, screw you

You’re clearly an insecure and incompetent speck of a lawyer in a nowhere no-one-cares town and have no critical thinking skills. If the 20k went 3x (approx) to 60k BY INFLATION, that means the revenue of a comparable firm ceteris paribus also went up 3x in the same time period. So the proportional payout for NQs at that firm is the same you got “back in the day”. Therefore your point on salaries having gone up unreasonably has been refuted in full, and your point on inflation having “screwed the pooch” is banal, dense, and irrelevant. You are a failure and also a bad person for not wanting to pay your employees.

Reply Report comment
(17)(4)

Don't feed the Goon

He’s also clearly a sock puppet of the editors of Legal Cheek to stir the pot, rage-bait commenters like you and I and pump up the clicks.

U.S SA

“the equivalent of saying you’re a highly respected vagrant or PE teacher”

“You’re clearly an insecure and incompetent speck of a lawyer”

If I saw this even being muttered to another member of the profession, I would make it my mission to have you served your p45 due to the utter lack of professional conduct. It is sickening how you feel you have the right to speak like that to anyone.

Reply Report comment
(6)(20)

Snob

Highly doubt this is a real US or even City SA given such reaction

Reply Report comment
(16)(1)

U.S SA

I am not bothered about what you believe. I am just telling you that there is an appropriate way to treat people and this way is not befitting of the profession. Company culture has changed to such a degree that you would not go far if you expressed these opinions when you came out from behind your keyboard.

U.S partnah top of equitah rah hah hah

Ok thx 4 comment son, now g b to billing ye?

Reply Report comment
(6)(1)

Archibald O'Pomposity

“If I saw this even being muttered to another member of the profession, I would make it my mission to have you served your p45 due to the utter lack of professional conduct. It is sickening how you feel you have the right to speak like that to anyone.”

Quite right. Regardless of the accuracy of your credentials, the Internet has desensitised the use of language such as that you take issue to. Sadly, the OP cannot be brought to book, but perhaps he or she will feel a little silly knowing that their satisfaction derives wholly from their veil of anonymity on a sophomoric website.

Reply Report comment
(4)(5)

That’s a bit rich

That’s a bit rich coming from you. Sure your tone is better but the content of what you say to people is consistently disparaging. Maybe the old guard needs to do away with the nicety and bring in the substantive manner of not bragging about underpaying your employees. For one, describing someone who has shown a lack of character as a “speck” is a colourful way of beinging about a perfectly valid criticism, and characterising them as insecure and incompetent is a fair assumption clearly made on what they said whay they know and their view of the world. And honestly the PE teacher thing is one centimetre away from quotes from you yourself, Archibald. Maybe you don’t like that michael here has been called out on wholly flawed arguments, so much so that you focus on the one line about him, and leave out everything else? Because the contention is ludicrous, you cannot be disciplined, let alone struck off (lol nice try michael), for criticising another lawyer or their credentials. We’re not under that kind of regime yet.

…

Fork found in kitchen

Reply Report comment
(7)(0)

Tommy

Rather than blame trainees or NQs, perhaps we should be looking at the partners who have long gotten overinflated salaries and profit shares yet 95% of their work involves getting drunk with clients (paid for by the firm under the guise of ‘business development’).

Partners who complain about NQ pay sound just like the boomers who blame millennials / Gen Z for everything.

Reply Report comment
(27)(4)

Anonymous

Sorry but this is such an idiotic opinion that I struggle to believe anyone who works at a law firm could seriously hold it.

Firstly, partners at almost all firms remain subject to billing targets and (at top City firms) will be billing in excess of 1800 hours. That’s excluding any non-billable work like BD, interviewing or attending industry body meetings.

And secondly, the notion that BD is some sort of fun exercise is utterly ridiculous. Not only does most BD consist of things like running training sessions – almost nobody actually enjoys going to dinners or drinks with clients. People would much rather spend their evenings with their friends and families, not drinking rubbish wine and thinking of clever things to say about recent market developments, all the while knowing you have two SPA mark-ups and an advice note to review when you’re done.

Reply Report comment
(13)(7)

Hey Michael, screw you

Partners at city firms work longer hours than everyone else in the place and getting drunk with clients has not been tax deductible since the blair government, because of the “substantially and wholly for business purposes” test

Reply Report comment
(4)(7)

Disgruntled Former Employee

Someone ask Gateley Legal what their retention is this year 👀

Reply Report comment
(1)(0)

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