It seems strange to think that it is only a few years since the plea of smaller firms was to find legal staff who would be willing to work for them.

How different the situation is now.

A solicitor based in the suburbs of Birmingham told me the story of the response to a classified advertisement that he placed in the Gazette some time ago for a trainee solicitor.

He was promptly inundated with over a thousand responses, whereas a similar exercise a few years before had elicited only a trickle of largely unsatisfactory responses.The recruitment market is more diverse now, with different problems at different levels.

The fact that there is such a clamour for training places does not mean that experienced solicitors of partnership potential are any easier to find.

The problem seems to be one of quantity at the more junior end and quality with the more experienced.

The complications of the situation make an overall policy for recruitment within the firm all the more important.Personnel planning is mentioned in the practice management standards, but as an advisory element only (D1.1).

The usual personnel plan would have two elements to it -- resourcing and development.

The resourcing part will deal with issues of ensuring that there are sufficient people to do the work that needs doing -- the development side addresses training, appraisals and how new needs might be met.

Many firms might benefit from determining likely recruitment needs over the next 12 months.

This is undertaken by the simple calculation: Current personnel + Likely changes = Recruitment needs.

Current personnel can be addressed from the sort of 'family tree' encouraged by the LAB in its franchising specification.

Likely changes can be anticipated departures, planned changes to the fee-earning activities and office re-organisations.

The recruitment needs should be capable of being defined in numbers and by the roles which will become vacant or, if the firm is contracting, the dismissals needed.The value of this exercise is that proper consideration can be given to important issues which might otherwise be made in too much of a hurry.

The smaller the firm the more difficult it is to predict resignations accurately, but if arrangements are in place to cover those situations that can be identified or on the basis of past trends, mistaken appointments are less likely.One of the conclusions commonly to emerge from this exercise is that a little more imagination might be worthwhile in deciding how to meet the needs of the firm.

A major issue now confronting many firms is the impact of fee-earner access to computers.

Viewed narrowly this could enable firms to reduce the salar ies bill by producing the same amount of work with a more advantageous fee-earner to secretary ratio.

Alternatively, the more able legal secretaries often have the potential to develop into more of a paralegal role and thereby enable the same personnel to generate more fees assuming a ready supply of instructions.The point is often made that the true cost of a poor recruitment decision is the hiatus caused to the work being undertaken and not the agency fees that are easier to identify.

With this in mind firms can benefit from remaining in touch with former members of staff who might for whatever reason want to return to the firm.

One firm that I was discussing this with recently, which was based in the commuter belt around London, said that it had had some success with secretaries who left for higher London salaries, only to find that the time and expense of commuting made the proposition less attractive than they had thought.There are, of course, drawbacks to a more imaginative approach.

It takes more effort to train a former secretary into a fee-earning role than simply to approach the market for new staff: on the other hand the time and expense of supervising and training a member of staff who is well known to the firm may well pay dividends in a number of respects.

First, the risks of appointing somebody who simply does not fit into the firm, or who is disenchanted by life in a new part of the country, is clearly reduced or eliminated.

Secondly, the salary of the paralegal is likely to compare favourably with a replacement solicitor, if that is the choice, enabling profitability to be maintained, particularly in areas such as conveyancing, debt collecting or routine legal aid work where margins are likely to be very tight.All these considerations suggest that firms need increasingly to plan the other element of the personnel plan also -- development.

The issue becomes how to get the best out of the people that we have, recognising that this may be a longer term process than has been the case in many firms to date.

The well conducted appraisal interview becomes central to the development of each individual: partner time has to be made for supervision and staff absences if legal executive courses arranged for weekday afternoons have to be covered.

By combining these areas, and setting out the training which emerges as being necessary annually from the appraisal interviews, a 'training plan' as requested by the Legal Aid Board is compiled and available on any audit.In conclusion, the special difficulties of recruiting in the smaller firm might be said to be financial, with little spare cash for competitive salaries, and difficulties in finding applicants of the right sort of experience.

Planning and imagination can alleviate some of these problems and are responses that many firms will benefit from.