From the minute you join us, you'll be actively involved in Lewis Silkin life. Not only will you be given responsibility, interesting and varied work, you'll also be getting hands-on training, a chance to work with some of our big named clients, and most importantly, made to feel a key member of the team.
We take on recruits from all sorts of backgrounds- you may have just graduated with a law degree, or, perhaps like some of our previous trainees, you're someone who has been in industry for a while and are looking for a complete career change.
Whatever your situation, you'll have to compete the Legal Practice Course (LPC) before starting your training contract. If you have studied a non-law degree, you will also need to take the Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL), or a conversion course called the Common Professional Exam (CPE), beforehand. If you're successful in securing a training contract with us, we can provide you with financial support for these courses.
At the beginning of the training contract, we provide an induction programme, which includes the core modules of the Professional Skills Course (PSC). Our induction has been carefully put together to help ease trainees into their new role, meet key people, and also give you some of the more practical skills (such as IT) which may be useful during the first few weeks!
After the induction, you will rotate through six seats within our five departments - Corporate, Employment & Incentives, Litigation, Property, Housing & Construction, Media, Brands & Technology. The aim is for you to gain a mixture of contentious and non-contentious experience and real responsibility at an early stage so you can develop as quickly as possible
We provide continuous support for our trainees over their two year contracts. We'll make sure that you're assigned a 'seat supervisor' for each of your four seats. You'll all be allocated a dedicated Training Partner to closely monitor your progress and meet with you on a monthly basis (although their door is always open!) Finally, trainees will be given a key contact in HR who will help answer with any personnel matters relating to the training contract. Working closely with Partners, HR will co-ordinate seat moves and ensure training and development needs are reviewed via the appraisal process once every four months.
When it comes to qualification, if you make the grade and would like to stay on with us, we'll make every effort to find the right place for you.