Clifford Chance retains 43 of 55 qualifying trainees

There’s a good answer in the comments in the CMS retention article, it seems like it’s a mixture of firms being strict with who they decide to keep and lack of available jobs because firms are being careful.

Qualified, and left, a couple of rounds ago but this was something that baffled me for some time. Although there is no single explanation, I believe there are three main factors (apart from the pay disparity, but that applies to all MC firms).

1) The training is genuinely very good, particularly in the finance seats. If I were at a US firm looking to hire good associates, I would also look to CC trainees.

2) A significant number of senior CC staff already at US firms. I know Weil, Simpson Thatcher, Milbank and others are stuffed with ex-CC staff. It is a small number of US firms that seem to disproportionately hire from CC. Many US firms expanded in London in the 2000s, when CC was the world’s largest firm, so it makes sense that the firm’s footprint, and network, is wide.

3) A near-blind recruiting process and some questionable hiring decisions. From what I know of other firms, everyone is generally of a similar profile (strong a level + uni grades + some legal experience).

The main differences in the way CC hires is:
– CV blind before interviewing
– No grade requirements
– Little testing (even when I applied there didn’t seem much testing at all, and HR seem very anti-standardised testing)
– No vacation scheme
– HR, not Lawyers, making too many hiring decisions – especially given no vac scheme

None of this is to say that CC’s hiring process is necessarily wrong. However HR (despite being much bigger at CC than at other firms) seems to ask remarkably little of its candidates and therefore knows very little about them. No process is perfect, but CC’s is particularly brief – meaning if you nail a test and an interview, then boom you have a two-year job. I’m therefore not surprised that CC loses its lawyers, that it has nearly blindly recruited, in greater numbers than does a firm whose lawyers have been through a CV check, partner interview, written test, vac scheme, vac scheme assessment and final interview.

As with most things CC, it is a firm full of exceptional lawyers, just with an intoxicating level of DEI koolaid (if you were wondering why vac schemes were abolished, it was because they were “inaccessible” to those who were not offered a place on the schemes).