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Jonny Perera Dan Jarman Ed Walshe
Oliver Cooper Juliette Vaughan Russell King

Career Timeline

September 2000

I started my Law Degree at the University of Bristol.

June 2002

I undertook a summer placement in the Birmingham office of a mid-sized commercial law firm.

July 2003

I graduate from Bristol with a 2.1.

September 2003

I began the LPC at BPP Law School in London.

January 2005

I decided that I wanted a break after the LPC, so I elected to join here in the January intake. This meant that I was given a £1,000 travel grant, which I had a lot of fun with!

TRAINING

Seat 6...

"As a final seat trainee, I was able to get involved in transactions in much more depth, and was given a greater degree of responsibility within the team, effectively being treated as a junior associate."

Russell King

Banking

By the time you have reached the final seat of your training contract, you will know which department you will be qualifying into at the firm, you can therefore choose whether you spend your final seat in the department in which you are qualifying, easing your transition from trainee to newly qualified associate, in a related department, allowing you to build up relevant experience for your new role, or take the opportunity to try something completely different, by doing a seat abroad or on secondment, for example.

As I spent my fifth seat in our Athens office, and as I had not been in the department since my first seat, I chose to return to my department of qualification for my final seat, shipping finance. As a final seat trainee, I was able to get involved in transactions in much more depth, and was given a greater degree of responsibility within the team, effectively being treated as a junior associate. It also gave me a four month head start in building up relationships with clients and other parties that the team worked with on a regular basis.

The fact that I spent my first and last seats in the same department allowed me to reflect on how much I had learnt in my two years as a trainee, not just from the formal training sessions, but from the every day experiences of being involved in transactions and working with more senior colleagues. This made the prospect of qualification far less daunting and made the transition from trainee to newly qualified associate almost seamless.