The recruitment market appears to have come full circle.

Property lawyers, who were ten a penny during the worst depths of the recession - not that anyone was buying - are back in demand.

In some areas, it seems, they are even in short supply.'There are now more jobs going than there ar e good property lawyers on the market,' says Angus Mackenzie, consultant at legal recruitment specialists Robert Walters.Gavin Crocker, partner at recruitment consultant Garfield Robbins, agrees.

'18 months ago, there would have been one, possibly two, jobs in the top 30 firms for property lawyers.

Now we simply cannot get hold of two to four-year-qualified people.'The switch from social pariah to endangered species means that property lawyers, who two or three years ago were lucky to have a job, are now able to name their price.

Mr Mackenzie says: 'They are tending to be paid on merit - rather than where the firm feels it can slot them in.'Mr Crocker agrees, saying 'it is very candidate driven'.

Property may be the area to have seen the greatest change, but Mr Crocker says work and recruitment is up across the board.

'It has changed beyond recognition, since around the second half of last year.'Other areas cited as being particularly buoyant include company and commercial, banking and professional indemnity.

On the downside, litigation - an area of work notoriously resilient (or even boosted) during a recession - appears to have stabilised.The candidates currently most in demand are two to four years' qualified.

Unlike newly qualifieds they do not need much training and, unlike more senior people, are relatively cheap to employ.However, as more lawyers at this level are recruited, so firms will need extra senior staff to supervise.

Mr Crocker says there are already signs of this happening.

'We have had a job come in this week for a property lawyer of six years' qualified, without a following,' he says.It is not just the big City firms which have seen an upturn in recruitment.

Arwyn Lewis, a solicitor and legal practice consultant with Network Law Group, says that now whenever he visits a member firm, he expects to see at least one new fee-earner, which was not the case six months ago.'Of the last 16 member firms I have visited, half had recruited in the last six months,' he says.

There is, however, no clear pattern emerging over in which areas of work firms are adding staff - which may mean the recovery is across the board, or simply that the recruitment picture is still rather muddied.Edge & Ellison, which has offices in Birmingham, London and Leicester, has a similar tale to tell.

According to Digby Jones, senior partner elect: 'The recession is definitely over.' Edge & Ellison is 'actively recruiting' two-to-three-year qualified solicitors in 'virtually every field', he says.

The banking department in particular 'is rushed off its feet'.The picture is similar at Dibb Lupton Broomhead.

According to Paul Firth, managing partner at its Sheffield office, it, too, is taking on two-to-three-year qualifieds.

The particular areas of growth that he cites include property and company and commercial.Not everyone is quite so bullish, nor quite so convinced that the recession really is over.

At the more junior end of the profession things remain rather bleak.

Both the Trainee Solicitors Group and the Young Solicitors Group are still getting calls to their redundancy helplines, although admittedly in smaller numbers than before.But TSG chairwoman Fiona Boyle suspects that the decline may, in part at least, be due to people becoming acclimatised to the poor state of the job market.

'It does not tend to come as quite such a shock anymore, so people are better able to deal with it,' she says.

Overall, however, Ms Boyle describes the situation as 'encouraging but tentative'.Lucy Winskell of the YSG also says that calls to its helpline are down from a peak of ten a day a couple of years ago.

However, she stresses that fewer calls and even fewer redundancies are not necessarily a sign that all is well.The nature of the calls is changing, she says.

'Straightforward redundancy calls are being replaced by complaints about bad practice.

We are hearing from newly qualified solicitors who are being treated worse than slave labour.' Unlike redundancy this type of exploitation is largely invisible and so potentially more insidious and harder to tackle.Ms Winskell says the group is hearing from people who are being told there will be no salary increase on qualifying and that they must pay for their practising certificate and compulsory training themselves.

'Effectively, they are being given a substantial pay cut,' says Ms Winskell.

The group has also had one letter from an assistant solicitor, the 'only female fee-earner in the history of the firm', cataloguing her scandalous treatment by her three-partner provincial firm.The assistant has been left to run a branch office alone, handling 500 current matters with just three part-time staff.

She has, she says, spent countless days alone in the office and taken to locking clients in the office with her 'to repel interruptions from outside callers'.She also claims that essential repairs to the fabric of the office are being neglected.

'We have holes in the floor, a particularly bad one being in the main entrance to my room; the filing room floor is uneven and the carpets are split.

The wiring is highly suspect, given the dampness also present.

Wishing to keep the working environment tidy, and the partners being unwilling to employ any cleaning staff, I have been forced to spend time doing these tasks myself,' she says in a passage which Dickens would have rejected as too far fetched.But, according to David Lawton, partner at Chelmsford-based Budd Martin Burrett, it is not just newly qualified solicitors who are taking pay cuts.

'In this area, we have got qualified people only earning £10,000,' he says.

From his perspective, recruitment prospects remain bleak.'The position on conveyancing is worse.

The commercial position outside London is still not good - certainly in this part of the world.

While litigation is doing OK, criminal work is still down on what it was three or four years ago; the number of Crown Court cases is still substantially lower,' says Mr Lawton.His own firm, for the first time in many years, will not have an articled clerk next year.

'We had someone qualify with us in the summer and had the choice between keeping them on or making them redundant and taking on a trainee.'Firms like his which do a substantial amount of legal aid are suffering from two years of frozen pay rates and, more recently, the spectacular collapse of Liverpool-based Deacon Goldrein & Green.

The demise of Deacons - largely believed to have been caused by over-extension - is likely to make other legal aid firms think even harder about future expansion.But if the optimists are right and the recession really is over, firms like those reported to the YSG may yet get their come-uppance.

Once the job market becomes buoyant again, those who have treated staff badly should stand by for an exodus, according to recruitment consultant Gavin Crocker.

'Where a lot of people were chopped out, the scars remain,' he says.Even the most hopeful observers say there will be no return to the heady days of the 1980s.

It is predicted that the recession will have two inter-related and lasting effects on the profession: greater jo b mobility; and the end of solicitors' instinctive loyalty to their firms.Both legal recruiters Gavin Crocker and Angus Mackenzie says City firms are already beginning to recruit solicitors, of the right calibre, from the provinces.

Mr Crocker says: 'We have one person on our books from a small firm in Watford who has been interviewed by some of the top-ten City firms.' This kind of development - together with a workforce disillusioned with its employer because of the past redundancies - will mean a far more mobile profession in future, it is predicted.Historically, insolvency work - which has inevitably thrived during the depths of the recession - sees an increase as the recovery sets in.

But any such boom is likely to be fairly temporary, just until the recovery becomes firmly established.

If happy days really are here again, perhaps those doing insolvency work should start dusting off their CVs - or even thinking about retraining as property lawyers.