doing time

No one ever tells you this, but becoming a fully qualified lawyer involves a lot of waiting and a tonne of advance-planning.

As eager university students we fill out our forms and go for interviews, hoping and wishing and praying we get a training contract. Then we do, and it begins in two years’ time.

Two years later we start our training contract, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, beavering away at all hours of the day for two years before we’re fully qualified and can call ourselves solicitors. 18 months or so into the contract, we apply for jobs on qualification and wait two months to find out about positions in the 20th month. And then it’s only another four months.

So you plan your life around two-year chunks of time, broken down into further four-month periods. Want to get a secondment abroad? Apply four to five months ahead of time. Want to work in a specific department and team in the London office? List your preferences ranked 1 to 26 two months in advance. Got a job on qualification? Congratulations and start planning, because now we’re deferring your starting date so you’ll have to figure out what to do with yourself (and your finances) for the 6 months we’ve put you on unpaid leave.

And what happens after qualifying? Well, you work your fingers to the bone for the next 6 to 8 years at least, of course. Then maybe, just maybe, the partnership machine will start up and there’ll be the rest of your life to carry on working your fingers to the bone, but in addition also have to meet transaction value and profit targets just to participate in a tiny share of firm profits. Nice.

This is definitely not a career for the brash and impatient. Or actually, not even for the uncertain – although those tend to start, falter but wait till qualifying before bailing out like rats on a sinking ship.

tenterhooks

There’s been a lot of apprehension these last two months, applying for a job at my current firm in my current team upon qualification and for last-seat secondments to the Hong Kong office.

Good news is that I’m spending my final four months of my training contract in Hong Kong, the fragrant harbour, pearl of the Orient, etc etc. After slightly oblique conversations with certain partners, it also seems more than likely that I will be getting a job on qualification in the team I want, although it’s all subject to the discussions of the Executive Committee taking place today to finalise offers and places to trainees qualifying in January. For the first six months of being a real solicitor, I’m also quite likely to still be out there in Hong Kong doing lawyerly things.

It’s all worked out quite well since I’ve always wanted to spend some time working in Hong Kong as an associate, even if my original plans envisaged it taking place when I was two or three years qualified instead of when newly-qualified. Still, it’s a great opportunity to be there where I’ll be kept busy, instead of lounging around Singapore and/or London on unpaid leave for six months, which would have been the alternative since all new associates are having their starting dates deferred.

Anyhow, we get told next week whether or not we have jobs on qualification, so there’s still some gut-wrenching nervousness underlying all this. Because, obviously, until I’ve been told by the powers that be that yes, I do have a job and I have that employment contract in front of me, it’s not real.