Denton Wilde Sapte will only be offering 17 out of 31trainees places when they qualify in September 2009 and Taylor Wessing is set to retain 13 of 24 trainees due to qualify in September. For both firms that represents only a little over half of their trainees at 54%.

Other firms in the City have seen retention rates falling including magic circle firms Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer although retention is still fairly strong at around 70% . Source

But if qualifiers are feeling hard done by, they might take some consolation from the latest survey (not cheerful reading) by market research company High Fliers Research which has shown that tens of thousands of students graduating this year may well have to join the dole queue. This is the first year students have had to pay full tuition fees and the survey notes that graduate debt has almost reached £26 billion, compared with £18 billion in 2007. So a double whammy of pain.

Martin Birchall, the managing director of High Fliers, said that there was a shortfall of 80,000 vacancies for graduates this year. “There is a massive over-supply of students for the job market and as the Government moves closer and closer to its target of 50 per cent going to university, that is only going to be exacerbated.”