The Lawyer Experience

After finally completing my exams and countless emails, phone calls and faxes, the day had finally arrived on which I would start my week-long work experience at an international law firm in central London.

It took one bus, three tubes, a fifteen minute walk and a total of one hour and forty-five minutes to get me there for nine thirty in the morning. To my great surprise, I was actually on time on Monday morning.

The building itself was very impressive. The name of the firm was engraved into the stone pillars, and we passed through the glass front using one of the several large revolving doors. Inside, a comfortable cool greeted us. All was cream marble and large, potted plants were standing in the corners of the hall, the damp soil carpeted in colourful flowers.

In the centre of the room was an impressive metal pendulum which reached all the way up to the twelfth floor of the building, its pointed end almost catching the glass roof above. Water gently flowed from its end into an aquamarine pool below. However, although this was the right firm, it turned out I was in the wrong building and had to follow a number of complicated directions given by the pretty, blonde receptionist to a far less impressive building a few doors down.

Here, I was ushered into a quiet lounge with two other rather frightened looking trainees. Our attempts at conversation were unfortunately short lived.

Thus began my first day, which, after a safety briefing and the introduction to the members of my department became much more interesting. As soon as I arrived at the cluster of desks assigned to the “Product Liability” group, I was asked whether I wanted to accompany one of the trainee solicitors to the Royal Courts of Justice. After two free taxi rides, getting lost twice in the twisted layout of the Courts and the deliveries of two stamped petitions to various offices around Piccadilly, we arrived back at the firm and I settled awkwardly at the desk I had been assigned.

The next few day were much the same. I was introduced to more and more people of the department, the free hot chocolate dispenser around the corner and to several cases the departments were momentarily working on.

I attended a conference call and a group meeting, which took place on the top floor of the building offering a magnificent view over St. Paul’s Cathedral and the rest of Holborn all the way to Blackfriar’s Bridge.

The more I got used to the way the department worked, the more I was able to make myself useful. My first task was to print out witness statement exhibits, which are pieces of evidence backing up a particular point made by a witness. This job, although not very interesting, made me feel useful especially since I managed to print the hundreds of pages the right way round and in the right order.

When I had no more witness exhibits to print, I was given a folder containing a range of documents providing evidence for a current case. Unfortunately, many of them were in German and therefore not very useful to the department.

Having found out that I speak German fluently however, they employed me to translate pages and pages of letters, test results and manuals.

The rest of the week I carried out lots of different small jobs to help people out. I learned what litigation is, discovered that a lawyer is the same as a solicitor but a barrister is something else and that a letter of claim is the first step towards a legal dispute.

Of course, there were periods of the long days at the office during which I had absolutely nothing to do. Having exhausted my backup “to-do list”, which included some research in the effectiveness of product recalls in Europe, I sat at my desk and felt awkward and silly doing nothing whilst everyone around me was fussing.

Apart from that, I thoroughly enjoyed last week. I met lots of smart, interesting and welcoming people and I felt like I could picture myself in that very office a few years from now. They taught me lots of things and I believe I got a fairly accurate glimpse at what their working day looks like. The free hot chocolate helped against the sore throat and cough I had rather unfortunately caught after the exams and apart from a rather hectic afternoon on Friday when three people needed me to do some work for them at once and the long commuting times in the stuffy, crowded London underground trains, I had a really good time. It was even with a slight twinge of regret that I returned my white security card I had been so terrified of losing and stepped one last time through the glass divides into the bright Friday afternoon sunshine towards my long anticipated summer holiday.