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