Let me start this by saying how much I love the legal profession - after all, it's where I have focused for over 14 years - and on a personal level, I have some excellent friends and even family members who work in it! Lawyers and their support staff are INCREDIBLE; however, I think all will admit, law is notoriously slow - or it can be, and "Turning the Titanic" is a phrase often associated with it. Things take time and recruitment is often one of the aspects which (and do) suffer.
So why does time matter when it comes to recruitment?
Here's a specific example... A private client team we work with went through this recently.
After the loss of a Senior Fee Earner, they made the decision to bring in more junior support, which, on paper, made sense. What actually happened was that the partners lost confidence in what could be safely delegated, and their case loads grew - to more than 4 times they would usually manage. The result? Client management started slipping. Complaints began to grow. Supervision reduced. Decision-making narrowed. No one had intended for it to happen. It simply crept in. And the team were at risk of losing more staff.
With Gerrard White's help, they have hired two Senior Lawyers along with an experienced Consultant, taking the pressure off the Partners and supporting them with management of a growing junior team. They are now seeing improved client feedback, happier staff and the pressure has massively eased. They are a formidable team, and it's a team which now attracts new talent, rather than repelling it.
That is the hidden cost of slow or misaligned hiring in legal teams. It rarely stays contained to one vacancy.
Delays in hiring nearly always carry an additional cost. In legal teams, they reduce billable capacity, increase errors and write-offs, and create the conditions that give your strongest performers a reason to look elsewhere. Once that cycle begins, it becomes difficult to reverse.
And right now, UK hiring timelines are already stretching.
What the UK data is telling us about hiring speed right now
The context matters here. Hiring is taking longer across the UK.
Totaljobs research reported that average UK time to hire in 2025 stretched to around eight weeks, up from 4.8 weeks in 2024, with larger organisations closer to nine weeks. Source: Personnel Today reporting on Totaljobs
That is not a legal-only statistic, but in my experience it shows up in legal hiring in a very specific way: more internal steps, slower sign-off, and more candidates dropping out because they cannot wait.
The cost is not “one vacancy”. It is the work that moves around it.
What people often underestimate is how quickly a gap changes behaviour.
When an experienced solicitor, associate or paralegal is missing and the role stays open, work does not pause. It shifts. And that shift tends to create three predictable outcomes:
matters take longer to move
supervision and quality control get squeezed
rework increases, which affects write-offs and client confidence
This is why one vacancy rarely stays isolated. It changes the throughput of the whole team.
Slow hiring weakens culture before it shows up in performance
When teams are stretched for long enough, you see it in the small things first: less coaching, fewer check-ins, and more “just get it done”.
The Law Society’s 2025 sector insights report for mid-sized firms flagged recruitment and retention as a key priority for the year ahead. It also found that difficulty recruiting and developing staff was the biggest threat identified by respondents (41.3%).
The same report noted that while productivity held steady for many firms, 30.9% felt office culture had worsened. That matters, because culture is often what keeps great people in place when pressure spikes. Source: Law Society Strategic Sector Insights 2025
Attrition is already a UK reality, not a future risk
When people feel overloaded or stuck, they move. And the UK market is already signalling that pressure.
UK legal resourcing research reported overall lawyer turnover averaging around 27% across organisations of all sizes. Source: Legal Futures
Separately, a Chambers and Partners survey reported by the Financial Times found that two in five associates at leading UK firms expect to leave within five years, citing workload pressure, stress and lack of support as key drivers. Source: Financial Times
This is where slow hiring becomes genuinely expensive. It is not just about filling the gap. It is about avoiding the second and third gaps that follow.
Recruitment costs money, but the indirect cost is usually bigger
Even before you factor in lost billable time, hiring has a direct cost.
The CIPD’s 2024 Resourcing and Talent Planning report puts the median cost per hire in the UK at £2,000 for senior managers and directors and £1,500 for other roles, including internal recruitment time and external spend. Source: CIPD
In legal teams, the bigger costs are usually indirect:
partner time diverted into cover work
contractor or overtime spend
slower client response and reduced service consistency
business development squeezed out by delivery pressure
Those costs rarely appear under “recruitment”, but they are caused by vacancies staying open too long.
In active markets, slow processes lose the candidates you actually want
This is the blunt bit. A slow process often does not produce a better hire. It produces a different hire.
The Financial Times reported a surge in City partner hiring in 2025, driven in part by competitive expansion from US firms. Source: Financial Times
You might not be hiring at partner level, but the signal is the same across levels: when the market is moving, candidates have options, and delays create drop-off.
What legal leaders can do without lowering standards
You do not need to compromise on quality. But you do need to remove friction.
Here are the changes that make the biggest difference:
Clarify must-haves early: Separate essentials from preferences before screening starts. It keeps your process focused and prevents expectations shifting halfway through
Shorten the decision chain: Agree upfront who decides and who advises. Set feedback deadlines after interviews. Avoid adding late-stage steps unless they are genuinely essential
Treat vacancies as capacity risk: Hiring is not just resourcing. It is delivery. Review capacity regularly and identify the roles that would cause the most disruption if left open
Measure where candidates drop out: Track time between stages, offer acceptance rates, and where candidates withdraw. Repeated drop-off points are process problems you can fix
Protect the interim team: If a vacancy is unavoidable, create a cover plan that is explicit about what pauses, what gets delegated, and what gets escalated. “Just cope” is how you lose people
Slow hiring is not caution. It is exposure.
If the story at the start felt familiar, it is because it is happening quietly across the market. The longer a vacancy stays open, the more the cost spreads: into client experience, into supervision, into write-offs, and into retention.
The answer is not rushing. It is clarity, pace and structure.
If your legal team is carrying a vacancy that is starting to affect delivery, I can help.
cam@gerrardwhite.com | 07850 469000
