"I am about to enter the second year of my training contract at a large US firm, and need to seriously directly my seats towards the area I would like to qualify into. But rather than chase partnership at a law firm, I would prefer to aim towards a senior role at a FTSE 100 company. What kind of practice area would best help my fulfil my ambition?"
Click 'Comment on this article' to post your advice in confidence - or click here to share your wisdom on the Legal Week Wiki, where no topic is off limits. Rate or slate your firm and its rivals with our ground-breaking insider's guide to City law.
And remember, Career Clinic is only as good as the questions we receive, so email your career conundrums to community@legalweek.com.
Corporate and commercial are the best areas if you want to be an in-house lawyer. However, if you want to work outside the law in a FTSE 100 company look at other areas of the business to get experience in - marketing, business development, understanding accounts etc (also useful if you want to work as an in-house lawyer).
The lack of responses here are disappointing. I would be very interested to hear advice on this too.
At the risk of sounding trite, if you want to go for Barclays I would go for banking, if you want to go for British Land, perhaps property, that kind of thing? In any case, it cannot do any harm to have a mix of corporate, finance, employment and tax experience as those cut right the way across the corporate grain for in-house counsel.
Has nobody else got any advice? :(
C'mon people!!!
What follows is a horrible generalisation, but, as has (sort of) been acknowledged already, the FTSE 100 covers a multitude of sins and sectors. Depending upon what area you qualify into, it should therefore be relatively easy to get a junior lawyer position in that area, e.g. IT contracts, property etc. The difficulty will come when you want to progress higher as you may then find that a specialism in only one area turns out to be somewhat restricting. The best cure for this, if this really is your long-term plan, is getting good corporate experience early on - you should be able to branch out from this if required when junior and, the more senior you get, the more you may find yourself returning to it - this tends to be where the action is at general counsel level.
It really isn't an easy question to answer. Some FTSE 100 companies have small legal teams, some have hundreds. In the larger companies you can be a specialist, so you should just qualify into whatever you want to do - IP, property, litigation, corporate, employment etc - pretty much every specialisation has positions in-house, so if something interests you then go for it. Clearly some companies will want specialised lawyers – so if you’re interested in banking you may want to do that.
However, if you're not sure what you want to do (and it sounds like it from your question) then commercial is the best area. Many in-house lawyers are required to be generalists, particularly in smaller departments, so getting a breadth of experience in commercial will stand you in good stead. Also, you should think about where you end up – most heads of legal in FTSE 100 firms report to the company secretary, who is often a lawyer. So you may want to consider company secretarial qualifications. Often, smaller companies will combine the head of legal and company secretary roles, so pursuing that will broaden your options later.
Latest Jobs
