Tatiana Gracheva, Manager of Antal-Laurence Simons (International Legal Recruitment)
Recruitment activity of mid to senior legal professionals remains stable. Many companies, having recovered form the downturn, are growing their offices and opening legal vacancies of differing levels. A number of companies who had to cut their headcount dramatically last year, are now looking for legal professionals to hire due to an increased volume of work. There is also a lack of middle level layers on the market as some people preferred to wait until the downturn was over, instead focusing on additional professional education. The experienced litigation lawyers are still in the highest demand as well as lawyers specializing in the M&A field.
The requirements to candidates remain high. Many employers still think that it is possible to find professionals with excellent experience for a relatively low salary. But even on the contemporary market they have to either compromise on some of their requirements or extend the budget for recruitment, because really highly professional lawyers are quite expensive.
The demand for foreign lawyers has decreased over the last year and 2010 remains the same so far. If foreign managers used to be required in different legal fields, now they can find a job only in those fields where there is no Russian expertise. For example legal companies specialized in deals under UK law. Traditionally employers can regard foreign candidates on high managerial positions on the on equal terms with Russian candidates.
We should not expect the growth of salaries in legal disciplines. Lawyers of different levels already step over the psychological barrier and got used to the idea that the times of “crazy money” has passed. Now they enter candidate market with reasonable salary expectations.
The period of panic has passed. Now there are basically no professionals who are not interested in information about career opportunities. Generally all legal professionals started following labour market trends and listen to recruiters.
