Applying for locum work in a field of law I don’t specialise in – is it possible?

We often hear an assumption that if you have covered a field of law at some point in your career
you can then at a later stage go back to it as a locum to cover. So, for example, in the past week, we had an application from a commercial litigation solicitor looking at a commercial property locum role and wanting to apply for it. We indicated to them that this would not be possible, as the firm was specifically looking for a commercial property specialist. The solicitor got back to say that they had commercial property experience, albeit from some years ago, and could they be put forward ?

The simple answer is that if you do not have recent experience which is evident on your CV, there is little point applying for a role. A law firm is not going to be interested. However if you are looking to get into other areas of law then you may want to look down the route of local authority locum work. We have seen this time and again over the years with solicitors looking to change fields of law and using local authorities as a stepping stone to enable them to do this.

Local government roles tend to be much more flexible in terms of who they are prepared to recruit to cover for them, partly because they seem to be more desperate than private practice, not as selective and a bit more flexible in terms of when your experience was or how little you have. So for example if you have a piece of experience dating back 10 years in commercial property, and you are a commercial litigator wanting to switch to commercial property, then finding the agencies who undertake local authority locum work are probably your best port of call.

Once you have the work on your CV, then you can start to make the transition across to becoming a specialist in that particular area of law in private practice.

As a final note, it is possible to switch from one area to another if you have related experience. So in the case of the commercial litigator above – if they have property litigation experience – a firm may well be interested in them for commercial property work if there is a reasonable element of litigation work that could potentially be completed as well.