[Music] my practice area is really made up of three parts there's the litigation part they're going to court commercial litigation there's arbitration which is very similar but with an arbitration tribunal it's not actually going to court and then the third aspect is contentious regulatory so that's really dealing with regulators dealing with other authorities so my group which has about 30 partners and 100 lawyers deals with all of those different kinds of work and particularly the more junior lawyers who join the department can do a mixture of that they don't specialise in a particular area we
encourage people to try lots of different things see what they enjoy and get the experience i am a newly qualified associate in the litigation and dispute resolution practice at clifford chance i help on all sorts of matters in our litigation and dispute resolution team i went to uni i did history at university clifford chance consistently was coming up in kind of the things i was reading that was brilliant work on offer you were incredibly well supported and you came out of a kind of training contract as someone who had really been built up by the
firm to go and do the job of being a lawyer so i read law at the london school of economics in holborn i chose to qualify into litigation and dispute resolution because i sat there in my third seat of my training contract and i really enjoyed the matters that i was working on drafting a witness statement engaging with council i got to attend a hearing even though i was working from home and you know the experience was different i was still heavily involved in tasks and i was still getting as much as i could out
of my time there a lot of our work has to stay confidential so no one's ever going to know that we got a fantastic settlement with the regulator or that we won a massive award and an arbitration for a client a case i worked on about two years ago was a very large case where we were acting for a bank which was defending a case brought by a housing association in another jurisdiction the claim was for a billion pounds we had a 10-week trial but actually we settled it in the ninth week of the trial
so we never got to the judgment and you know it's really exciting to see deals i work on in the press it's quite rewarding i have personally worked on some very high value disputes you know we're talking hundreds of millions and the idea that your issue is kind of global in nature does make it feel again a bit more important but it's things that are affecting things going on in asia and europe north america africa you know all over the place so when we have a big case then we'll tend to have a pretty large
team on it there'll be one or more partners uh some senior associates some are junior associates and then the trainees and newly qualified and it's really important that they feel part of the team the trainees and the newly qualified lawyers are often the ones who are responsible for keeping our action lists up to date so they have to know what's happening across the whole of the case see what the different tasks are and see how their role fits into that you're often kind of in charge of managing all the documents that come in we're talking
about like thousands of documents here and so you know that's just kind of organization attention to detail doing witness statements drafting statements of claim and then take forward comments through by more senior people sometimes you might be working on a deal where you do have to work maybe a couple hours on the weekend or you are working really late um on a weekday there always is a break afterwards and you're not just consistently put on like you know really long deals and say for example the deal is published in the ft then you you have
that breathing like it was worth it you know the hard work paid off there's like personal satisfaction from almost everyone in like doing a good job i think some skills or attributes perhaps that trainees and new qualifieds need when they join the firm the first thing i'd say is enthusiasm you need to be excited about what you're doing the second thing i think is intellectual curiosity wanting to know and understand what we do what our clients businesses are what their concerns are and continually wanting to learn more about the cases the clients and where they
fit into them the third thing which i think is really important is attention to detail it can be really really important to get the right sentence the right word in the right place and that is is critical to what we do one of the things i really liked about clifford chance when i was looking at it as somewhere to work is that i didn't think there was a clifford chance person there was a whole spectrum of different people so i didn't have to think about do i fit in do i look like these people do
i not look like these people we're a big office too so there are plenty of other people who will share some of your interests we have sports teams we have a choir we have a music group there's all sorts of different ways that people can be themselves in the office as well as doing the work your relationships with i think certainly people at your level are like very strong i mean these are people who at the end of the day you know i studied with many of them during our kind of law conversion that was
sponsored so like they're genuinely friends of mine we've been on holiday but also we've been sat in the office uh one in the morning together trying to get through something say you seek the peaks and troughs of everyone's life and that kind of brings you closer right i think increasingly as we look at new areas where disputes might arise so technology and esg for example those are areas which it's fantastic for junior lawyers to get involved in they are new no one has looked at them before it's not like there's a textbook on the shelf
that says this is how you do it we're actually relying on our new lawyers to come in and work with us in terms of thinking about how this is going to work applying their thoughts and ideas to coming up with business development initiatives ideas explaining to clients how this works and so it's a really exciting time to be in our department
