Originally Posted by Unregistered

PQE 6 (man, this sounds so awks to say) at a non big4 law firm. I profit share. The big bulk of our work is litigation (in particular, building and construction) with a mix of simple corp/commercial matters.

(1) Different firms (and different tiers of firms) will be affected in different ways. This means that the big4 perspective does not represent the entirety of the industry. The best thing you can do as an incoming NQ is to have a balance of view across firms/tiers to have a more balanced perspective of the industry as a whole. My views as a non big4 are as follows.

(2) Big companies are taking longer to involve law firms. Where they would involve us right at the beginning of a potential dispute pre-covid, they now tend to handle a lot more pre-litigation matters in-house (esp if they have an in-house legal counsel). When they do come to us, most of these big companies have demanded discounts on rates/agreed fees.

(3) We are at a standstill with regards to new building and construction litigation matters. This is mainly due to the Covid-19 temporary relief measures. We are lucky that we have ongoing matters which can sustain us for the rest of the year. We do not expect any juicy new matters until after the 6 months time frame expires.

(4) We continue to receive the same volume of adjudication matters (SOPA) as our pre covid-19 days and this is another source of revenue that has helped to sustain us thus far.

(5) We were expecting a big increase in family work - this has not happened. There has been no change in terms of volume. This could be due to the fact that family is not our specialization and it is not what we are known for.

(6) We have seen an increase in debt collection matters.

(7) We have seen an increase in SMEs seeking corp/com advisory work (mostly involving restructuring of small group businesses).

We did not retain any of our trainees this year. We made this decision due to economic uncertainty (what big4 dude said about hedging). Instead, we offered our trainees the option of carrying on as legal execs (low pay) if they were willing to ride out the covid situation with us.

We will be in a better position to offer retention after the 6 months time frame expires. We also told them that they can continue job-hunting while working with us as legal execs and leave with 3 days notice if they find work with another firm.

None of our trainees accepted. We did not ask why.

I know that a few of my batch mates in other non big4 firms have offered the same arrangement to the trainees they could not retain. I understand that not many trainees have taken up their offers as well.