I don’t think there are many city law firms that offer TC’s to majority of the candidates on the VS. In most cases, I think that the VS to TC conversion rate is between 25-50%. Some firms, such as the Magic Circle, only recruit 1/2 of their trainees from the VS. The rest of its trainees are recruited from the DTC route. As a result, they probably only have very limited VS spaces anyway, so they can afford to have a higher conversion rate. Other firms however, don’t recruit as many trainees as the MC firms do.
For example,
White & Case recruit 50 trainees a year. The firm has 3 VS and for each one there are 25 places (75 in total). To my knowledge,
White & Case offers TC to around 50% of its VS candidates, but as a % of the TC offers available, it’s almost 80%! This leaves 10 slots open for DTC. However, of the 75-80 VS candidates, 35-40 don’t convert into a TC. It just appears that most people who do the VS receive the TC offer. It’s a similar situation with
Hogan Lovells, who also offer 3 VS in each application cycle.
In reality, there is only ever a 1-3% chance of securing a TC with top city firms that receive between 1,000 to 5,000 applications for between 5-100 TC spaces. In my
White & Case example, the firm gets almost 5,000 applications (same with
Hogan Lovells), but both firms only offer up to 50 TC’s. For firms that offer fewer TC’s but receive lots of applications, it’s very risky to offer the bulk of TC’s via the DTC route (hence why most US firms that recruit between 5-20 trainees rely on their VS as the sole method of recruiting).
I think it’s better to broaden your choices of firms and focus on firms that offer the DTC route in addition to the VS route. Once you become an NQ, you can always laterally move to the firm you wanted to work for originally (that probably doesn’t have the DTC route). I just think firms are always going to be extra cautious about offering TC’s because it’s such fierce competition. They want to ensure they recruit the best talent in the market.
