Training Contract 2023

A training contract lasts two years. As a trainee, you would be posted to four different teams around the firm – we call these ‘seats’ and each seat lasts six months. We will work with you to understand the areas of law that you are particularly interested, and will try to help you get the seats that best match your career aspirations. Our priority though is to make sure you receive the balanced training that you need to qualify as a lawyer.

At the start of each seat, you’ll be assigned a supervisor who – as well as giving you work – is responsible for mentoring you, and for providing training and feedback on how you are doing. You will have two appraisals with your supervisor in each seat – half way through and at the end to make sure that in addition to regular informal catch-ups, you have opportunity to discuss your objectives and what is expected of you.

As well as technical legal training, we also provide you with the skills you need to succeed commercially. This includes presenting, negotiating, workload management, business development, client relationship management and networking.

The sort of seats you’ll choose from are charities, corporate, divorce and family, private client and tax, litigation and arbitration and real estate as well as possible postings with international teams.

The interview process

First stage

Assessment

You will be required to complete online verbal and numerical reasoning assessments before coming in to interview. Then on the day of interview, a 50 minute written test.

Interview One

Your first interview will be 60 minutes talking to a partner and member of the HR team.

If you do well at interview and in the assessments, you’ll be invited back to the second stage of the process.

Second stage

Interview Two

Your second interview is with two other partners and will include a 10 minute presentation – you’ll be given options to choose from but this is usually on current affairs.

Group Exercise

There will then be a group exercise, and psychometric assessment. If you can speak a foreign language fluently, we might also get you to talk to someone at the firm who speaks that language as languages are so useful for our clients.

What are we looking for?

We our proud of the successful clients we work with. We’ve worked with over 50% of the Top 50 charities in the UK, 51% of The Sunday Times rich list and the leaders of major FTSE and City of London institutions. Everything we do centres around providing great service to these people.

To join us, you’ll have a strong academic record but beyond that you will have the diversity of interests and confidence to work with our client base. We are the largest law firm in the world focused on the needs of individuals and have spent the last decade growing this international platform – the ability to work globally with all sorts of different people is vital. Languages aren’t essential but they are very useful here. In particular for our clients Russian, Italian, French, Spanish,Arabic, Mandarin and Japanese are useful.

Beyond the international, you’ll probably be interested in developing your leadership abilities but definitely be determined to learn commercial skills alongside the law. To support our clients, we develop new solutions locally and globally to help their develop and maintain their success, and doing this means more than knowing the law.

In terms of specific requirements, we welcome applications from all degree disciplines and from applicants at all stages of their careers – in fact, previous roles help bring the maturity required to work with our clients. You’ll have, or be on track to have, a 2:1 degree or higher and a minimum of AAB at A-Level (or the equivalent if educated outside the UK). Please note that undergraduate applicants must be in their penultimate or final year of a law degree or their final year of a non-law degree.

Your career success

We work hard to make sure we operate in the same markets that our clients do. We now have 16 offices globally, and launch new services whenever we spot something our clients need. We want all our lawyers to have the same entrepreneurial spirit and determination to keep moving and developing.

There are lots of opportunities for you to develop your career at the firm, during training and beyond. This might be an international secondment, pro-bono work or joining a firm wide group that keeps everyone up to date on legal developments or non-legal topics like diversity.

Another key way to develop your career is via our global market groups. These teams of lawyers sit across our areas of legal specialism, and develop deep knowledge of the sector that our clients work in. This might mean, for example, developing a particular immigration solution for entrepreneurs or exploring the use of arbitration in trust structures. So many of our lawyers naturally link this with something they are personally passionate about like sport, art, luxury brands, philanthropy, family businesses or a particular jurisdiction they love. We have over 100 lawyers here who love everything Italian, for example, and who spend as much of their time helping Italian clients as possible!