RESEARCH YOUR WAY TO A TRAINING CONTRACT
Law firm research is crucial – it is impossible to net a training contract without it. Here we give you a handy guide to this much talked about, but rarely explained concept, and reveal why it is so important. Careers advisers and legal recruiters love to impress upon students the importance of doing detailed research before making training contract applications. However, they rarely explain why it is so important and just where all this insider info is to be found. Detailed research into legal practices is vital if you are to convince legal recruiters to offer you a job for two reasons. First, to earn a training contract, you need to show future employers that you fully understand the areas that their firm operates in and what training Research checklist You’ve done some basic research and spotted a firm that you like the look of. So how to find out more? Well, we suggest using this set of questions (originally from The University of Law) to drill down into the organisation that you hope one day to join. Many of the answers can be found on the LCN directory pages – just search for the firm name. Here’s the list of questions – some answers may require more sleuthing than others. Having done one firm, you can then roll this out for all of the firms you are targeting.
with them involves. You also need to demonstrate that you are prepared for and up to the challenge, and have targeted the firm specifically. Second, research is vital in differentiating firms and identifying which might be right for you. It’s hard to distinguish between medium-sized commercial firms based in London, for example, until you get to know them individually, discover their USPs and get a feel for their culture. Now you know why researching firms to learn what distinguishes them from each other is important, here’s how to do it. LawCareers.Net Kick off your investigations on that font of law firm knowledge, LawCareers.Net (LCN). But instead of bookmarking your browser into oblivion or getting out your pen and paper ready to scribble down your findings, why not create a free Recent cases/deals • Identify some recent cases/deals. • What, if anything, do these say about the firm/organisation? • What did the organisation do? • Who were its opponents? Place in the profession • Who are its competitors (eg, in practice areas or location)? • Who are its main clients? • What is its ethos or culture? • Does it have a mission statement or guiding principle? • What is the organisation’s reputation and on what is this based? • Has anything happened to the organisation recently (eg, has it merged or become an alternative business structure)? • Category (eg, corporate, national or high street). • Main practice areas. • Deadline for applications.
MyLCN account (more on which overleaf) and store all that data online? The web tool will dramatically reduce the time that your research takes and avoids the risk of losing track of what you discover. LCN’s training contract search can give you a list of firms which meet the criteria that you are looking for (eg, location, size or practice areas). From there you can click through to a firm’s LCN directory entry (which you can also find by entering the firm name in the search function). This provides an overview of the practice and its vital statics, including office location(s), salary, training contract application deadline and areas of specialisation. This allows you to identify quickly and easily whether the firm is somewhere that you could imagine training. Before you begin the next step and visit the firm’s own website, see if its LCN entry contains additional The firm and you • What are your career prospects at the organisation? • What are the retention rates? • Where could you go if you decided to move on after qualification? • Have you met any employees of the organisation? • Have you asked anyone else in the legal profession their view of the organisation? If you can say something in response to all these questions, you will be on the right track to application success. To perform well during the application process (and particularly at interview), you need to understand what makes this firm tick. Armed with this information, you can also then work out what you don’t know and ask some probing questions of the firm’s representatives. • Are there likely to be any major changes soon (eg, looking tomerge)?
• Basic details • Name of firm. • Age of firm. • Number of partners. • Location(s). • Number of offices.
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