There was an interesting posting by an Allen & Overy partner on legalweek.com's Career Clinic section the other day. The partner was responding to a question from an assistant who was wondering what to do about the fact that she had been asked to cancel her holiday five times in a row. The partner accompanied his advice with the following remark: "If the magic circle firm you are at is my firm… this [advice] applies just as much if not more. This sort of practice is completely against everything we stand for, so please help us put a stop to it."

Presumably, this is just the type of partner Linklaters managing partner Tony Angel had in mind when he penned a thought-provoking article on the recruitment and retention challenges facing law firms that appeared in last week's issue of Legal Week. While acknowledging that there were structural factors making it harder for solicitors to follow the traditional trainee-solicitor-partner career path, Angel claimed these were somewhat over-egged. He placed greater emphasis on the different expectations and motivations of a new generation of lawyers who are more savvy about what they want from their employers and who will not stick around if firms are failing to meet their needs.

Angel's solution was for law firms to reinvent the old apprenticeship model by placing partners back at the centre of training. His analysis of the problem facing law firms is backed up by an employee satisfaction survey that was conducted by Legal Week's research arm, Legal Week Intelligence, earlier this year. It found that law firms were good at satisfying their assistants' professional needs in terms of the quality of work on offer, but were falling well short in the pastoral care department.

When they were asked to rank various aspects of their working lives in order of importance, the assistants who took part in the survey placed 'work/life balance' first, followed by 'treatment by partners', 'firm culture' and the extent to which they were valued by their firms. Unsurprisingly, 'treatment by partners' also crops up as one of the main reasons assistants want to leave their firms.

During the past year or so, a host of firms have launched welcome initiatives to explore ways of providing their assistants and associates with alternative career paths.

But this is only one part of what is a very large problem for law firms. Until now at least, there has been far less debate about the need to secure a fundamental change of approach from the people who not only have it in their power to require assistants to repeatedly cancel their holidays, but who are actually stupid enough to exercise that power.