It's that time of the year again; trainee retention figures are starting to trickle out.

It's a sphincter-clenchingly nervous time for trainees, desperately awaiting news of their fate. Will they bag the NQ position of their dreams or be dumped on the pyre of rejected trainees to desperately fight it out for the handful of jobs left in this crappy economic climate?

It can also be a nerve racking time for firms. Trainee retention is one of the key statistics prospective trainees look out for when considering training contract applications. After all, it's unlikely that there'll be a plethora of top notch candidates battering down the doors of Mills & Reeve or Dickinson Dees, for example, after both posted woeful 36% retention rates last September. Who'd fancy those odds?
So it's no wonder that every year firms quietly resort to a little massaging of the statistics. 'Our retention rate is 90%', they will trill, 'isn't that fab?' Well it would be, if it were true. A closer look often reveals that a firm has unilaterally decided not to include all those trainees who turned down NQ roles or worse, who didn't even bother applying.

Every year, simply extracting the number of qualifiers and the number taking up NQ jobs from certain firms is like getting blood from a stone. Every excuse in the book is offered for excluding a chunk of trainees from the overall figures: "they've left for very personal reasons", "they've decided to quit law in favour of organic hemp farming", "they've moved to Ulaanbaatar" etc. etc. 

But clearly these drop outs and rejections are important. When a firm spends the fat end of £150k moulding a trainee into a perfect drone image of themselves, it's hardly a ringing endorsement when that trainee jumps ship at the first available opportunity without so much as a backward glance at the NQ jobs list. And it's certainly something somethings prospective trainees should consider.

For a comparison of the retention statistics over the past year, take a peek at the table below which will be updated as more results come in (click here to let us know about your firm, anonymously of course):

Firm	% March 2011	% September 2011	% March 2012
Allen & Overy	84	72	89
Ashurst	95		78
Baker & McKenzie		80	80
Bircham Dyson Bell	57
Bird & Bird		81
BLP	95	95	88
Cameron McKenna	70	80
Clifford Chance	91	83	76
Dickinson Dees		36
DLA Piper		90
Dundas & Wilson		70
Eversheds		84
Freshfields	89	96	85
Herbert Smith	90	80
Hogan Lovells	56	73
Kirkland & Ellis		100
Linklaters	82
MacFarlanes	86	92
MacRoberts		56
Mills & Reeve		36
Nabarro	85	95
Norton Rose	87	88	78
Osborne Clarke	100
Pinsent Masons	79	71
Reed Smith	94
Simmons	80	59	25
TLT	100	89	83
Travers Smith			100