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City law firm sacks £44,000 trainees with a voicemail
Tim Stewart12 Jun 2009
A top City law firm has sacked staff by voicemail and offered them £700 as a goodwill gesture.
Managers at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer left phone messages for trainee solicitors, telling them that they had missed out on £59,000-a-year permanent jobs.
The move emerged as new figures were published today showing the worst ever trainee retention rates at some City law firms.
As few as 10 per cent of workers who qualified last September are being kept on by some firms, according to legal community website RollOnFriday.
Human resources workers phoned Freshfields trainees, who earn £44,000 a year, to give them the news.
When they did not get through to some of those being released, they left a voicemail telling them "It's not good news".
One Freshfields insider said: "This obviously made people feel incredibly valued for their two years of hard work for a bunch of partners who were too gutless to deliver the news themselves."
Freshfields axed 14 of its 48 September 2009 qualifiers, who now go out into the most difficult recruitment market in memory.
RollOnFriday director Mathew Rhodes said the firm had behaved "crassly".
He added: "Leaving a voicemail to say that they're out of a job shows a pretty shabby degree of thoughtlessness.
"Freshfields has nigh on 500 partners worldwide - it shouldn't have been beyond the firm's wit to get a handful of them to deliver the news personally."
A Freshfields spokesman admitted that voicemails were left in "three or four cases" and said: "In isolated cases, trainees were left a voicemail saying 'It's not good news but give us a call, so we can discuss it further'.
"It was not ideal from our perspective but we were trying to get the information out as soon as possible. We did not want to take the chance of them hearing first from someone else."
The proportion of trainees firms keep on as newly qualified solicitors on higher salaries is viewed by industry experts as one indicator of their financial wellbeing.
RollOnFriday's figures show retention rates as low as 10 per cent.
Maclay Murray & Spens has offered jobs to three of its 31 trainees. Macfarlanes kept 18 out of 21 - and Norton Rose 20 out of 24.
Reader views (7)
Bj, you are correct insofar as the trainees' 2-year contract had come to an end and the firm was under no obligation to keep any of them. But at the time of recruitment, firms are not just looking ahead to the next two years. Instead, they recruit a number of trainees that they determine will meet their medium- to long-term staffing needs, their growth objectives etc. In ordinary times, the firm would expect to keep on most of its trainees, with a small number choosing to leave and a few others deemed to be not up to scratch. Obviously these are far from normal times, but one could equally argue that those firms that are currently dispensing with high percentages (up to 90% in some reported cases) of their trainees have got something fundamentally wrong in their business models.
In any case, the point of the story is not the fact that these trainees have not been offered positions on qualification, but rather the shabby way in which they were informed.
- Rob, London, 12/06/2009 17:14
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As the old saying goes, all's fair in love and law.
- Keith, King's Cross, London, 12/06/2009 16:41
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How come 'trainees' were earning a staggering £44 k pa? I've been in my profession for 30 yrs and am now only on £32k. Mind you, we've had redundancies too (who hasn't?) & if I knew I was in the chop, I'd be out there drinking tea in my garden rather than pounding this keyboard...
- Hiddenidentity, Essex, 12/06/2009 15:51
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Where is the story? Trainees to Solicitors enter into a two year contract - for training. There is no question of these people being sacked. They were simply not offered a job at the end of their training contract. It happens everywhere.
- Bj, London, 12/06/2009 13:19
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We're having redundancies here too (household name company but I can't name us). We asked for the news to be sent out by email (with meetings afterwards) so that people found out quickly, and everyone at the same time. It could even be sent out early in the morning so we could find out before we came into work - and stay off for the day if we had the chop. This worked well in my last office and was recognised as the only positive out of the process. Our bosses here won't do this as HR & Legal said it didn't fit with our company's ethos. So now the office will be like a morgue for most of Tuesday (bad news day) and morale will be further damaged even for those who are staying. One of the main reasons is probably they were afraid that some ignorant journalist interviewing some no-body from a useless organisation ("rollonfriday"???) would write a bad headline about them.
- Tax Geek, London, 12/06/2009 11:35
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These trainees got excellent salaries.
- Helen, norwich, 12/06/2009 09:50
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Law firms what can you say about them and their workers, it says it all in private eye. gag anyone
- Val, london UK, 12/06/2009 09:26
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