These are, as the Chinese might say, interesting times for the legal recruitment market.
The M&A boom and associated hubris of the late 1990s has given way to a sharp corporate downturn. Profitability is static, or falling. Where only two years ago, the talk in the market was of the battle to recruit enough lawyers to handle the volume of work, now it is of redundancies, managed exits, performance reviews and hiring freezes. A generation of university graduates roams the world while waiting to even start their training contracts.
