Trainee Solicitor
I am currently in my second seat, in the Employment department. I got my training contract in 2007 in the second year of doing my law degree, and then took a year out before I did my LPC. I felt I didn’t want to immerse myself in my career straight after university, because I’ve got the rest of my life to do that.
Initially I’d looked around at a lot of firms. I think it’s important to do your research, because there’s a huge number of different choices out there. So what I looked at mainly was the size of firm and number of trainees. I didn’t want to go somewhere where there were 200 trainees, nor conversely, anywhere where there was only a couple either. I knew I wanted a firm of this size, but it’s not until you start applying and talking to firms that you start getting a feel for how they really are. It sounds corny, but every firm has a personality and I definitely felt that I fitted in with this one.
A two-week vacation placement convinced me that I’d be comfortable working here. Pinsent Masons came across as very welcoming and down-to-earth; as well as producing high quality work for high quality clients they seemed, for want of a better word, normal.
As a trainee in Employment you do get quite a lot of client contact. I definitely feel very integrated – less like a trainee than one of the team. At the moment I’m involved in a mix of transactional work – assisting in putting employment contracts together – and contentious tribunal work, which involves drafting documentation, assisting counsel and attending tribunals. For this, you have to know the client’s policies and procedures, as well as all the facts of each case inside out, because you will be interviewing the witnesses. You probably end up knowing more about your cases than your clients do!
So far, the high point for me would be the feeling you get when you complete a given task and it goes back to the client. Essentially, they’ve had a problem and you’ve solved it for them, and there’s a lot of satisfaction in that. Especially because at times there’s also a lot of responsibility, and learning to cope with it can feel quite hard.
That said, there’s an enormous amount of support within the firm. The training is a support network in itself. Should I need to, I can talk to my supervisor, or to other members of my current team who may quite recently have themselves been trainees. I’ve never felt isolated because if I ever did need support in any matter, I’ve always felt able to ask for it.
The sports and social side is incredibly rich and varied. I’m in the touch rugby team, which is a mixed team and very good fun – I get a real buzz out of it. The benefit of any social activity is that you mix across different departments and also with people at different levels – so it’s very good for networking within the firm.