Over the two years you train with us, you’ll have four six-month placements or ‘seats’ – allowing you to experience different areas of practice. To develop your skills, you could be seconded to a client or spend time in one of our European offices. Most trainees do. In every one of your seats you’ll have the guidance of a supervisor, who’ll help to plan your career and take a close interest in your development.
Our investment in you
We invest huge amounts every year in training and development. As well as on-the-job training, you’ll be attending courses, lectures and workshops to give you technical expertise and invaluable business knowledge, like time management. And because we’re a truly European firm, you could soon be developing new language skills too. Some call this ‘soft skills’ training. But we know that this kind of knowledge gives us the hard competitive edge.
Salaries
As of August 2008, our London salaries begin at £37,500, rising to £41,500 in your second year. On qualification salaries then rise to £66,000.
Preparing future trainees
Before anything else, preparation is the key to success. We believe this so much, we’ve taken the radical step of training our next wave of trainees even before they join our firm. This is called our Client Service Module. We invite future trainees to our London office for five evenings, spread over the course of an academic year. Here you can learn about the way we work, and why effective client service is central to all we do.
These sessions will help you to focus on understanding our clients’ worlds, the industries and markets they operate in, and the key issues they face. You’ll hear from in-house lawyers on their expectations of their external law firms, and from our own partners and teams on how we can really satisfy our clients. Not least, there’ll be a session focused on our business strategy.
Once you join us
From the moment you’re offered a training contract from us, you can expect support, opportunity, responsibility and variety. We’ll sponsor you while you study for the Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) and/or the Legal Practice Course (LPC). We’ll cover your fees and give you a generous grant. You’ll also be invited to our annual Trainee Solicitors Ball, and to many other activities that will help you to get to know us a little better.