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‘Shanghai, Dubai or goodbye’ is the phrase currently doing the rounds in law firms at the moment. Such an uncompromising ultimatum may come as a shock to today’s assistants, all but the most senior of whom will have enjoyed a career dominated by a seemingly endless bull run. Most will be unaccustomed to such inhospitable treatment from their employers.

But the last 18 months has seen a dramatic change in assistants’ collective job security. In early 2007, associates were still very much in demand. Firms were scrambling to bring in talent to cope with the glut of instructions being generated by a still-booming corporate transactional market. And the bubble refused to burst; the deals kept flowing, firms kept hiring, salaries and bonuses kept rising, and partners continued to get richer.

Nobody needs to be told that those days are well and truly over. What started as cracks in America’s subprime mortgage market has exploded into a full-blown global economic meltdown.

Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley have both been nationalised; Lehman Brothers – the world’s fifth-largest investment bank – has gone under; and share prices have plummeted. The FTSE 100 dropped over 13% in September alone; the largest monthly fall since the Black Monday crash of 1987.

The ever-worsening financial climate has called for a change in emphasis for our 2008 Assistant Survey. For, while the Legal Business 100 – the country’s top 100 firms by turnover – had enough deals in the tank to narrowly exceed the previous year’s record financials this April, the UK’s legal elite are finally feeling the pinch. Therefore, whereas the last two years’ surveys considered issues such as alternative career paths and retention, this year will focus on the steps firms are taking to manage their cost bases in the face of mounting economic adversity.

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