No billing targets. 35.5 days' leave. A bonus the receptionist and the directors receive in equal measure.
Plenty of firms will tell you they put quality before billing. Our client wrote it into policy. There are no billing targets, not soft ones, not team ones, none and there never have been. Progression is judged on the quality of your advice and how well you look after people, which is a very different job from the one most property lawyers are currently doing.
They are a long-established practice in the Eden Valley, Cumbria, advising the same farming families, in some cases the same farms for well over a century. One office, sitting between the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales, covering property, private client, litigation and family. The reputation has long since outgrown the county: a growing share of the work now arrives by referral from clients nationally.
• Sales, purchases and remortgages of farms and agricultural land
• Farm business tenancies, grazing licences and agricultural landlord and tenant work
• Title investigation and reporting, including the unregistered and the genuinely awkward
• Easements, overages and rights of way
• Working directly with land agents, rural lenders and the clients themselves, not through three layers of process
• Commercial or residential property alongside it if that appeals
• A flat, firm-wide bonus.
• 35.5 days' leave in practice — 33 days including bank holidays, your birthday off, and around a day and a half at Christmas
• Funded professional development. The firm has put its own people through qualification and continues to.
• Genuine flexibility. Full-time, part-time or 0.8 FTE, with hybrid working considered according to experience and circumstances.
• Pension, free parking on the doorstep
• A real route upwards. Head of Department and, in time, a directorship are both on the table for someone who wants them. This is a small firm; there is nobody queued up ahead of you.
• A qualified solicitor or CILEX legal executive.
• Some agricultural or rural property experience. If you have been doing residential or commercial work for farming and estate clients and want to specialise properly, say so — the firm can train, and has.
• Comfortable with landlord and tenant work
• Someone who would rather know a client for fifteen years than close a file in fifteen days
• A sense of humour. It is in the client's brief, in writing, and they mean it.
This is a lifestyle move, not a commute. It is a small market town and a close team, where everyone knows roughly what everyone else is carrying. If you want the anonymity and the escalator of a large firm, this is not that. If you have been looking for somewhere to stop moving, it may be exactly that — people here tend to stay for years, and the ones who leave have a habit of coming back.
Accutrainee provides a unique, flexible and efficient way for law firms and in-house legal teams to take on trainee solicitors and for graduates to benefit from bespoke training contracts designed around them.
Trainees can gain experience in more than one organisation during their training contract or stay at one firm for the whole two years. There is no typical training contract at Accutrainee. To date, all of our trainees have secured positions on qualification.
We employ trainees under training contracts and second them to law firms and in-house legal teams in accordance with our clients' requirements and business needs. The result is improved efficiency and flexibility for our clients and greater opportunities for our trainees.
We work with organisations who have their own trainee cohort as well as those who have wanted to take on trainees in the past but not yet done so. Our role is to ensure clients get access to quality assured trainees but without having to worry about anything else as it’s all taken care of by us!
We are continually talking to firms and in-house teams about their trainee requirements and therefore we have training contracts opportunities starting all year round.
During training contracts, we heavily monitor trainees ensuring that all training requirements are met and exceeded and to ensure each trainee is day one competent. We also deliver additional mentoring to each trainee so that they get the support and guidance they need during this crucial time in their career development.
Our extremely robust selection process takes place all year round enabling us to meet far greater numbers of candidates to understand their strengths and competencies. This method is crucial to supporting our passion and focus on improving diversity within the legal profession.
If you would like more information about Accutrainee, please call us: 020 7871 2822, email us: info@accutrainee.com or visit our website: www.accutrainee.com.
