Lifting the blinkers - life outside London
Like the quality of work, salaries outside London are also rising. Firms recognise that in order to attract (and just as important retain) the top level lawyers required to carry out this deluge of instructions, they need to pay commensurately. As a result, last year saw newly qualified salaries in many regional practices break through the £30,000 barrier for the first time and it is not unheard of for equity partners in the likes of Wragges, Walker Morris, Eversheds, DLA and Pinsent Curtis to draw upwards of £400,000 a year. Admittedly not the headline grabbing sums linked to some London practices which elicit gasps of surprise amongst young lawyers and of concern amongst paying clients, but nonetheless, not a bad living.
The concentration of financial institutions and blue chip HQ's will always mean that the very largest deals and most eye-popping pay reviews will tend to gravitate to London, but this is sometimes at a cost. High salaries have to be financed by some means and often this is done by imposing high chargeable hours targets on fee earners; sometimes in excess of 1800 hours per annum. This compares with targets of 1200-1300 hours as is commonplace in many of the major regional practices. It's all very well earning huge sums of money but it's also nice to have spare time in which to spend those hard earned bank balances. Cynics argue that regional firms' insistence that they offer a better quality of life is simply a euphemism for the fact that they do not pay as well as their London competitors. Others would say there is some substance to the cliché.
