Law Training Contract Application Specialists
Addleshaw Goddard will typically open applications for its training contracts near the beginning of April – they close at the end of July.
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The firm has around 1200 lawyers spread across London, Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen – as well as a handful of offices abroad. The firm is best-known for its real estate work, although it also advises FTSE 100 clients across corporate, commercial, finance and project, and has a fast growing litigation practice as well. It has a strong tech focus, and offers a ‘lawtech’ seat for trainees in which they will work alongside lawyers and technologists to develop products in innovation and legal technology. Its latest financial results saw a profit per partner of £849,000, a 23% increase on the year before. AG’s revenues increased 12% to £321 million. The firm has continued to hire new partners and grown its litigation practice despite the pandemic. It is the top employer for women in the Times Top 50 list for the last 12 years, and the 2nd in Legal Week’s national league table for the best graduate employers.Â
The firm emphasises that the training contract is ‘as unique as you are’ and that you have plenty of choice therefore. You will benefit from group exercises, assessed work and info sessions / tutorials, social events, and of course hands-on training too. Before each seat, you will have at least one day of training to bring you up to speed with the basics of the work that you will be doing. There is a wide range of practice work, and you will cover four seats each of six months over the course of your training contacts. You will cover corporate and commercial, litigation, finance & projects, and real estate divisions. International secondments are rare but possible – you can spend six months in either Hong Kong, Dubai, Oman or Qatar. You might also be able to benefit from a client secondment with a ‘FTSE 100 or household name’ company. Secondments have recently taken place with clients in London, Manchester, Leeds and Edinburgh.
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The assessment centre is split into four sections. These are a contract review, a group exercise, an interview and a partner review.
From previous applicants we can learn the following:
Contract Review
The contract review is essentially a glorified proof-reading task, in which you need to correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors as appropriate. According to one previous applicant, many of the errors were very obvious – like an incorrect postcode, misspelled names, misformatted numbers, etc. Other errors were subjective – and you are required to correct these too (i.e. you need to correct the ‘form’ or ‘style’ if it is especially poorly written).
Group Exercise
The group exercise is business-orientated, and you will not need to have or display any previous legal knowledge. You will discuss issues within the group, create solutions as a group, and then present these solutions.
Partner Review
This is thought to be the hardest part of the day. You will be provided with a scenario and an extensive set of documents relevant to that scenario. There will likely be too much information to read everything in detail. You are then given 45 minutes to formulate a business proposal based on the information that you have assimilated, and you then present this verbally to two partners from the firm. The partners will then question you on your decision, as well as seeing how you respond to new information (i.e. they will add new elements in and see if you change your answer or reasoning). Another student explains that they were given a list of documents, some of which ‘were deliberately useless’ and provided half an hour to make a note of the key issues. They then had a discussion with partners about how they would approach the problem and next steps. They emphasise that they were allowed to take in only one side of notes, and none of the documents.
Interview
You will face a series of typical questions here. Examples from previous applicants include:
– Why AG?
– Why law?
– What would you do in this [situation]?
