Law firms pay new recruits to take a year off

City firms are paying young graduates more than £14,000 to take a holiday before they start their first job because of a slump in business.

One of Britain's biggest law firms is offering 30 new recruits from law school a £14,250 lump sum if they defer their start at the firm for a year.

Unsurprisingly the offers have been snapped up by the trainees who are keen to spend their first year out of full-time education travelling around the world at their new employer's expense.

A spokesman for Linklaters, the firm making the offer, said the scheme was already over-subscribed and was now closed.

Linklaters hopes that by the time the recruits return from their travels the legal marketplace will have picked up.

Linklaters is not alone. Another leading law firm, Norton Rose, has offered 20 future lawyers a £10,000 package for a 12-month break. Other City businesses are thought to be doing the same but are not making their offers public. The £14,000 sum is roughly half of what a graduate can expect to earn in the first year as a trainee solicitor. Linklaters' young recruits who have deferred their entry know they can still expect salaries of about £50,000 after just two years of training with the firm.

This year profits across the City are down on the previous 12 months. The Lawyer magazine's Legal 100 survey said the top 100 had grown by 10 per cent but that had not translated into increased profitability.

Charlie Jacobs, the head of graduate recruitment at Linklaters, said the firm still planned to recruit 125 trainees as usual this year and was "confident" that the firm's level of work would recover sufficiently by next year to allow the first batch of deferred trainees to start work.

He said: "Our level of business has dropped and we will not be able to give the trainees the best practical experience on deals. [We feel] they would have a better level of training if they come back to us when the market picks up. We're simply being honest and open with our employees."