No billing targets. 35.5 days' leave. A bonus the receptionist and the directors receive in equal measure.
Plenty of firms will tell you they put quality before billing. Our client wrote it into policy. There are no billing targets, not soft ones, not team ones, none and there never have been. Progression is judged on the quality of your advice and how well you look after people, which is a very different job from the one most property lawyers are currently doing.
They are a long-established practice in the Eden Valley, Cumbria, advising the same farming families, in some cases the same farms for well over a century. One office, sitting between the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales, covering property, private client, litigation and family. The reputation has long since outgrown the county: a growing share of the work now arrives by referral from clients nationally.
- Sales, purchases and remortgages of farms and agricultural land
- Farm business tenancies, grazing licences and agricultural landlord and tenant work
- Title investigation and reporting, including the unregistered and the genuinely awkward
- Easements, overages and rights of way
- Working directly with land agents, rural lenders and the clients themselves, not through three layers of process
- Commercial or residential property alongside it if that appeals
- A flat, firm-wide bonus.
- 35.5 days' leave in practice — 33 days including bank holidays, your birthday off, and around a day and a half at Christmas
- Funded professional development. The firm has put its own people through qualification and continues to.
- Genuine flexibility. Full-time, part-time or 0.8 FTE, with hybrid working considered according to experience and circumstances.
- Pension, free parking on the doorstep
- A real route upwards. Head of Department and, in time, a directorship are both on the table for someone who wants them. This is a small firm; there is nobody queued up ahead of you.
- A qualified solicitor or CILEX legal executive.
- Some agricultural or rural property experience. If you have been doing residential or commercial work for farming and estate clients and want to specialise properly, say so — the firm can train, and has.
- Comfortable with landlord and tenant work
- Someone who would rather know a client for fifteen years than close a file in fifteen days
- A sense of humour. It is in the client's brief, in writing, and they mean it.
This is a lifestyle move, not a commute. It is a small market town and a close team, where everyone knows roughly what everyone else is carrying. If you want the anonymity and the escalator of a large firm, this is not that. If you have been looking for somewhere to stop moving, it may be exactly that — people here tend to stay for years, and the ones who leave have a habit of coming back.
