RollOnFriday can reveal that Freshfields will only keep on around 70% of its September 2009 qualifiers.
 
14 of the 48 trainees who will qualify in London this autumn will not be retained, and so will be forced to look for new jobs in the most difficult recruitment market in memory. The firm has not officially released any figures, even internally, but informed each trainee by phone and told them to keep the news to themselves. Apparently Freshfields was hoping to wait for its competitors to announce their NQ retention figures before doing so itself

 


A Freshfields trainee yesterday

A spokesman for the firm said that trainees had always been informed by phone and that the partners had been told of the retention rate. He added that "despite challenging market conditions, we have worked hard to maintain a reasonable trainee retention rate as well as avoid a redundancy programme".

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