What are the key motivators for junior lawyers?

For the last six months I have been working closely with a number of trainee solicitors as they approach qualification. This is the first major milestone in a lawyer's career and while securing qualified lawyer status is a fantastic achievement for many, it is also a time of anxiety as individuals are required to identify a legal specialism that is likely to remain the focus of their career for many years to come.

Decisions of such magnitude, if they are to be made well, require time for reflection and ideally access to impartial careers advice. Sadly for many lawyers, both are often in short supply. Unsurprisingly decisions made in haste or in the interest of others tend not to serve an individual well. This has meant that although the retention rate for the majority of law firms looks healthy at qualification (the sector average among large commercial firms is in excess of 80%), the figures five years after joining generally look far less impressive, with many firms retaining fewer than half their trainees by this point.

Where does your motivation come from?

One of the biggest causes of career dissatisfaction is being unclear about what your current priorities are. Modern life sets the unrealistic demand that we should aspire to 'have it all' - a high-profile role, offering excellent financial rewards, which also offers a sense of fulfilment and allows for a healthy work-life balance. That is a lot to expect from one role! Perhaps unsurprisingly most of us fail to achieve this and we are left feeling dissatisfied with our careers, something which is especially true of Generation Y.

A more healthy approach is to decide what, at this point in your life, are your most important priorities and focus on those, while accepting that this will mean making sacrifices elsewhere. These should be the two or three things that if they were missing from your life would make it very hard to get out of bed each morning.

What motivators are important to lawyers?

First the health warning; to date, this research is based solely on the responses of around 70 junior lawyers in one large UK commercial law firm, but I am hoping that in the future this can be expanded upon in the future.

Using a set of Career Motivation Cards from Talent & Potential, the trainees were asked to identify their two current key motivators from a list of 12 (see image below).

Although it was very rare for any one trainee to pick the exact same pair of motivators as another, certain motivators did appear more popular than others. 'Challenge' was perhaps unsurprisingly the most frequently cited, but tying for top spot was 'fun' - a motivator which focuses on both enjoying the content of what you are doing and the people you work with and for. The least popular motivators were 'competition' and 'money', which might surprise (and concern) the senior management teams of most commercial law firms.

How can this information be useful to an organisation or a junior lawyer?

In my experience of working in the legal sector, most junior lawyers (and those students aspiring to become lawyers) are not thinking about their motivations when they choose either the firm they work for or their ultimate area of specialism.  Instead factors such as the views of friends and parents, their level of interest in the legal subject-matter and how much they enjoyed their vacation placement/six-month seat in a given team, are given much more weight. While these factors are not unimportant, they are often a poor predictor of what a legal career in a particular department will both offer and demand over the long-term.

My suggestion to improve matters would be for each firm or department to carefully consider what they can and cannot offer to their lawyers and to market themselves accordingly. Some teams will recognise that due to the technical nature of their product they are ideally suited to those individuals looking to deepen their 'professional knowledge', but that 'variety' may be in short supply. Other departments may conclude that while they cannot pretend to offer a healthy 'life commitment', they can deliver 'challenge' and 'money' to those willing to put the hours in.

The flipside of this is that junior lawyers need to be clear what their motivations are, so that they can use them as a lens to evaluate what different firms and practice areas can offer them. If the match is not a good one, they should be careful about pursuing that path as it may put their long-term career satisfaction at risk.

Edward Walker is an experienced graduate recruiter who has worked within the legal sector for many years. If you would like to read his future posts on legal careers, please ‘follow’ him via LinkedIn.