Royal Mail launches junior lawyer recruitment drive to keep more work in-house

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Royal Mail general counsel Maaike de Bie is leading a recruitment drive to attract more junior lawyers to handle its business-as-usual work, The Lawyer‘s FTSE 100 report has revealed.

This drive aims to counteract the ‘inverted pyramid’ effect present in many FTSE 100 companies’ legal teams, in which the more ­strategic work is kept in-house and handled by senior lawyers, and private practice is handed transactional work.

“I’m seeing the seniority of the team as an issue,” de Bie told The Lawyer. “I’m hiring junior people to bring some work back in-house. We have looked at the work we do and what we outsource, and I want to move away from having a top-heavy team and create more in the junior and mid-levels for ‘business as usual’ (BAU) work.

“And when we look at BAU, we want to see how we can do it better, automate it or outsource it,” de Bie added.

She argued this will create career pathways, not just for the junior solicitors but also to allow the more senior members of her team to take on a more strategic, business-facing role.

“The team is very demand-led. I want to turn it on its head and empower the business more. We need the junior people internally to handle the BAU work to keep the engine of our company going.

“The real contribution of an in-house lawyer lies in their deep business experience and their understanding and ability to connect the dots in a way that an external firm cannot have.”

In turn, this will affect the type of work the company hands out to its panel. Rather than giving routine work to junior lawyers in external firms, that work will be done in-house, which in turn creates added pressure on private practice assumptions around career paths.

Across the FTSE, 866 lawyers – more than half of the total – have more than 11 years of experience, dwindling to just 113 in the 1-3 PQE band.

What does this mean for career progression? With in-house roles becoming ever more powerful and attractive, many general counsel are voicing concerns about blockages and mobility.

General counsel jobs are much sought-after, but unlike the private practice market, in which partner mobility flourishes, a head of legal with over 12 years’ experience may not find their next role so easily.

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Some postmen would be of more use,me thinks.