The general feeling since we returned to the office on the 2nd January has been that the market is picking up, so rather than rely on hear-say and office chit-chat we looked at the facts.
Looking at a direct comparison of vacancies registered with eNL in January 2013 versus January 2014 we have already seen an increase of 53% in Residential Property vacancies, 49% in Commercial Property/Real Estate, 40% in Clinical Negligence, 33% Corporate/Finance and 18% Commercial/IP.
There has been no change within Private Client, Employment, Commercial Litigation and Personal Injury. Although not surprisingly, predominantly due to changes in Legal Aid Reform, we have seen a 50% decrease in Family/Matrimonial and 33% decrease in Crime/Regulatory vacancies.
With the areas of law listed above representing approximately 85% of our overall vacancy numbers it is useful to ascertain that the vast majority of key recruitment areas busy.
It is common sense to acknowledge that those areas where there has been a significant increase are the most competitive in relation to candidate retention and attraction and with reported figures suggesting that 72% of mid-sized law firms will be looking to expand in 2014, it looks as though things really are ‘on the up’!
Author: Rebecca Barry, Operations Director – eNL. enllegal.co.uk.