It’s not often that on a Legal recruitment blog about lawyers we rant a lot about lawyers as probably just about everyone reading this is a lawyer, but this is a rant about lawyers and I make no apology for it before starting!

Ten Percent Legal Recruitment over the years has offered numerous free services and then instantly regretted offering them, because people always want more than the free service offers, or they view it as a free service and simply don’t bother going ahead. 

Free CV Reviews

One of the remnants of our free services is our free CV review which, although we no longer advertise, still exists on our website and comes up quite prominently in any searches where somebody types in ‘free legal CV’ or ‘free legal CV review’.

Information Published

The free legal CV review has a rather large catch with it, which is that if you send us your CV for a free legal CV review we will take your name and contact details off of it and publish it on our website along with our feedback on the CV. For those who do not want their CV published on the website together with our feedback, there is the option to purchase a legal CV review from our legal careers shop, a service we have been offering for many years and well below the actual cost price.

The free legal CV review gets used about once a month by law students, graduates, paralegals and occasionally solicitors, and this article is a rant about a qualified lawyer who recently came to use the service.

The webpage for the free legal CV review is very specific, and in fact looking back at it as something I wrote back in 2014, it is a little bit rude. We state very clearly that if you send us the CV we reserve the right to be as blunt and to the point about it as we like, and we will definitely publish the CV along with our guidance and advice on our website and we will not accept any email correspondence in relation to it. 

Paid Reviews only £65

The cost of a paid CV review is £65, and for this our clients get a full CV review by one of our directors, together with a full breakdown of everything that’s right or wrong with it and suggestions on improvement, together with a further CV check. The actual cost of this service is probably somewhere closer to around £250 in terms of our director’s time, but we’ve always enjoyed giving legal careers advice and so it’s almost a bit of a philanthropic gesture for us to provide the service at well below cost price. 

The free CV review goes one step further and in fact has only any value at all to us if we’re able to publish the review on our website for others to see and to follow our advice accordingly, which is why we offer the free CV review service (and make it very clear on the website).

Senior Legal Counsel - Free Review

A few weeks ago we received a CV from a senior legal counsel based in London and with extensive background in the banking and finance sectors. This particular lawyer had requested a free CV review.

We completed the CV review, which, it has to be said, was particularly complex because this particular lawyer had extensive experience and we needed to read it all, blanked their name, most recent firm and contact details off their CV and posted the CV together with the extensive advice from one of our directors onto our website. We then sent the lawyer a link to their CV and our feedback.

We were expecting a quick email back to say, “Wow that’s wonderful, thank you very much for your efforts, most appreciated, and what a great service you offer to lawyers without actually charging them,” but alas this was not the case. Today we received an email from the lawyer advising us that, although they were aware of our terms and conditions in relation to the CV and it being published on our website, they wanted us to remove the CV from the website because it identified them through their previous work history and experience and skills. 

Free Services - never straightforward

We refused point blank to remove the CV from our website, pointed out the terms they had agreed to when they sent it to us, and suggested that if there was anything identifying them on the CV that was on our website, they should tell us and we could remove it, but under no circumstances were we removing the CV or the article from our website having completed it. I did politely suggest that if the lawyer wanted to have a private CV review then they were very welcome to pay the £65 and I would delete the CV. We await their response!

Rant about Freebies

So this article is essentially a rant about providing free services with an altruistic intention and immediately finding that in fact it is more trouble than it’s worth, because people never appreciate why a service is being provided and always want something more regardless of what it is. The person who has contacted us has indicated to us that they are fully aware that one of the conditions of the service is that we are able to publish the CV and our feedback on the website, but has then gone completely against this and asked for it to be removed. 

I’m still slightly annoyed that a service that was more suited to law students and graduates who may not have £65 to pay us to do a professional review has been exploited by a very senior lawyer who no doubt is earning a six figure salary (or capable of earning a six figure salary) but still chose to use the free service and then not just satisfied with that, has then attempted to get round this and get the same service as the paid service by threatening us to remove their CV from our website.

Disappearing Service

This will probably be coming up at our next board meeting, and I suspect the free CV review will be disappearing from our website sometime soon as the directors will not be wanting to be bothered messing about with ridiculous claims like this one. 

Disastrous Free Job Creation Scheme

It takes me back to when we first set the company up and had the great idea of offering a free job creation scheme to paralegals and graduates. We would enable law firms to contact us to request details of non-qualified or experienced recent graduates, and to just pay us a £50 fee if they were to take anybody on. We found within about six months that this simply didn’t work, not because we didn’t get anybody enquiries from graduates or firms – we got loads – but that when we actually found a couple of people good quality jobs through it, they either turned up for a few days and then disappeared or simply didn’t turn up at all, which left us needing to look around for someone else, all for the price of £50. This was utterly and completely uneconomic and made the company directors at the time so annoyed we decided we would never be doing anything like this again. 

Free services never work

When you offer a service for next to nothing or nothing, it’s almost guaranteed that this will cause you more headaches than a service that you offer at a reasonable price, and I guess the difference is that when you’re offering it for next to nothing, when something goes wrong you immediately get more annoyed than you would have done if someone had challenged a service you were offering and getting paid the correct amount for. 

Okay, that’s the end of the rant and I hope the senior lawyer in this case doesn’t decide to threaten us with all kinds of different actions, but we shall see!

Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and a non-practising Solicitor. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment provides online Legal Recruitment for Solicitors, Legal Executives, Licensed Conveyancers, Legal Cashiers, Fee Earners, Support Staff, Managers and Paralegals. Visit our Website to search our Vacancy Database.