A source has told RollOnFriday that Wragges Birmingham has offered trainees due to start with the firm in September £5,000 to defer for a year.

This kind of offer brings back rather unhappy memories from 2010, when firms which had made offers to swathes of trainees in the heady, pre-credit crunch days suddenly found themselves unable to accommodate them all when times got tough.

But it's a fairly unusual state of affairs now and Wragges doesn't seem to be doing too badly. Whilst the firm's Managing Partner Ian Metcalfe did claim that targets had been missed for 2011/12 , according to a Legal Week report, turnover still rose by 5%. Not too shabby in a tricky market.

Metcalfe was pretty open about the offer, which he stressed was "entirely voluntary", pointing to the sad state of the economy "still having an impact on the legal sector". Metcalfe added "we think it sensible to ask people with a current offer to join the firm's training programme if they would like to volunteer to defer for twelve months."

Sadly for Wragges no trainees chose to take him up on this offer by yesterday's deadline. And despite murmurings in the press that the "voluntary" nature of the firm's offer might swiftly become compulsory,  a spokesman for the firm confirmed yesterday evening that all the trainees will be taken on this September.

Despite the obvious cynicism that accompanies these kinds of deferral offers, perhaps it wouldn't have been the worst idea in the world to take the £5k, go and sit on a South East Asian beach for a year and then return to a job market that has hopefully picked up from its current parlous state. Perhaps securing a better chance of being retained on qualification. Sounds quite tempting.....