Last May the quietly successful international firm Stephenson Harwood made an unprecedented – and unwanted – splash by laying down the law on home working. Staff were told their pay would be cut by 20% if they wanted to work from home full-time. 

Paul Rogerson

Paul Rogerson

All other staff were given ‘the option to work remotely for up to two days a week’. The firm said this policy worked well for ‘the vast majority of our people and the candidates we speak to’.

Stephenson Harwood copped a great deal of flak for being a first-mover here, though the policy was far less draconian than it was painted. It is surely not unreasonable for a ‘people business’ like the law to require that its practitioners engage in a reasonable degree of face-to-face association in the course of the weekly grind. (It can be good for one’s mental health too, as a recent Gazette blog chronicling the life of the ‘lonely’ home-based consultant intimated.)

What is more surprising – and counterintuitive – is the notion that hybrid working could actually ratchet up pay rates for some well-placed solicitors. Yet our review of 2023’s jobs market this week reveals that this is precisely what is happening.

The trend is being driven by those – and there are many of them – who now only have to go in to the office a couple of days a week. Up with the lark, they are travelling to far-flung towns and cities, when doing so five days a week would be impracticable. Extortionate train fares (or the costs of running a car) are comfortably offset by salaries that can be many thousands of pounds higher than where they actually live.

For some regional law firms operating on relatively low margins, sector observers point out, this is a real headache. They are under pressure to raise their own salaries to narrow the gap. So will the market cool this year, to ease the burden on squeezed bottom lines?

I suspect it will, as the economy stutters, but only up to a point. The shortage of good solicitors exposed in the aftermath of the 2008 crash remains evident, if not acute, 15 years on. Supply and demand.

No wonder the big law schools are so profitable; and so many young people clamour to study law at university.

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