I have been speaking to a lot of trainee solicitors over the past month about their upcoming qualification in September and their imminent, potentially rude, awakening from what is usually a comfortable, spoon-fed training contract to the rather more competitive reality of securing a qualification position and becoming an NQ.
I covered a fair bit of qualification ins and outs in my article Everything you always wanted to know about Training Contracts* (*but were afraid to ask) which it would make sense to read first, but I feel like there is more to add and they are not necessarily things that anyone will tell you prior to or during your training contract.
The reality is that most training contracts (which are typically 4 six-month seats in different departments) are not going to allow a trainee who hasn’t yet made up their mind what they want to qualify into much insight or variety before they are asked to decide what area they – most likely – will spend the rest of their career working in.
It is difficult to qualify into your first seat because you’re so new to everything and there will likely be more scope for trainees doing that seat in their second or third seat to impress, and it’s almost impossible to qualify into your final seat (unless it is a department that is always desperate for NQs – potentially Corporate of Finance but more likely whatever department is unpopular – often for a good reason) because you are usually less than halfway through by the time you need to put qualification choices in. The system is unlikely to change so, unfortunately, you need to be tactical about things and you may have to compromise.
Things to think about
You can’t predict the future, but it helps to have an idea of what you might want to do later on in your career. Do you want to go in-house? What about being able to move overseas and work somewhere exotic? Do you want to work in an area that is more technical or one that is more practical? The answers to those questions could have quite a lot of bearing on what department you should qualify into.
If you want to go in-house, often the easiest route is if you qualify into a general commercial contracts department. Because being an in-house lawyer often requires you to be a jack-of-all-trades, commercial contracts is the most common area to source lawyers from. Beyond that, if you’re looking at Financial Services in-house roles rather than Commerce & Industry, then a background in Banking/Finance, Funds, Corporate or Private Equity can be the way to go. The pay tends to be better for FS roles, but the hours may be more taxing.
If you want to be able to move overseas, often a transactional department can be the way to go – Corporate and Finance offer fairly good mobility, Funds probably more so, and both Commercial Litigation and International Arbitration can give good prospects. You’re very unlikely to be able to move with a more niche area like Employment or Pensions.
If you love technical, black-letter law, then you might want to think about an area like Tax. If you prefer more practical decision-making then perhaps Private Equity.
Should I settle?
There are a lot of different things to consider, and not a lot of time to do so. The other thing to not lose sight of is that you want to be employed when you qualify, so you may end up having to qualify into a department you’re not so keen on if there are no roles in the area you want. Being out of work can make your CV go stale very rapidly and make it that much harder to find something else. It’s not easy, but it is sometimes possible to switch practice area in the year after qualification even if you’ve qualified into a team you’re not so keen on.
What are the easiest and hardest areas to qualify into and why?
This is perhaps something that trainees need to have more in mind when making seat choices during their training contracts. My view is that you should always try to qualify internally even if you actually want to move somewhere else. Having an internal offer means that you have a safety net. It can also demonstrate to other firms that you’re valued at your own firm, and it means you don’t have to take the first offer that comes along.
Look at the make-up of your own firm. The largest departments are probably the ones that are most likely to hire qualifiers, and the smaller ones less so. Typically firms have large Corporate and Banking/Finance teams – the work can be tough, so associates don’t always stick it out. This means that there is usually a good reason to hire more people into that area, knowing that there will be attrition.
Harder areas to qualify into are the more popular ones such as IP and Commercial Litigation, and the more niche ones with smaller teams such as Employment and Pensions (and many other areas depending on the firm).
What about moving firms?
When looking at the lateral market, the same broadly holds true. The lateral NQ market (at least in London) is driven by the US law firms. Some US firms don’t have trainees, others just need more NQs than they produce themselves. The focus of most of the US firms is on transactional work – PE, Funds, Leveraged Finance etc. The reason for this is because it’s the most profitable.
Historically English law firms have prided themselves on being “full-service” – meaning a client never needed to use another firm. The US firms came to London and realised that they could make far more money by focussing on the more profitable transactional work and outsource their “Corporate support” work to UK firms, allowing them to pay their primarily transactional lawyers far more than they could earn at a full-service English firm. They will poach NQs from non-US firms and those firms may end up hiring to replace those who left.
Summary
It’s very difficult to try to offer advice to cover everyone’s individual circumstances, but hopefully the above will help somewhat. For those who don’t have a strong idea of where they want to qualify, the typical training contract is unfortunately not usually very helpful. It can be very limiting and set you off down a route that is very hard to divert from. You may be lucky and have seats that work, but you may need to accept that you won’t be able to do what you would want to do in an ideal world, and find a compromise that will be satisfactory to you.
As always, I am happy to give ad hoc advice to trainees or future trainees, so drop me a line.