22rd-26th November 2021

In this event, we heard the career story of Shilpa Bhandarkar. She spoke about her journey to the firm, why she decided to leave the firm, and why she ultimately decided to return, albeit in a different capacity.

After completing a law degree in India, she moved to London and qualified in the energy and infrastructure team. She then retrained and joined the corporate team. She became then COO of the India practice, then the Africa practice.

Shilpa then left the firm altogether to work in the tech startup space. After a few years, she decided to rejoin the firm in the innovation team in Amsterdam. When she moved back to London, she then moved to Nahkoda.

She worked in 8 different roles within Linklaters! I found this fascinating as I never knew how diverse a career at Linklaters could be.

She went on to speak about what Nahkoda is and why it is such a special piece of legal technology.

She then spoke about a typical day at work, advice she would give anyone wanting to start their career at Linklaters, and what makes Linklaters stand out.

After attending this session, I learned a great amount about this innovative piece of legal technology. I also knew that, if I were to train at Linklaters, I would love the opportunity to go on an internal secondment within the team.

This was a session run by my university in order to help us gain high marks on our upcoming assessment.

We went through the key parts of a legal advice note in detail

• what we need to write in every section of the note
• the reasons we need to write the section
• key considerations when writing the section

We also went through general considerations for the note, such as remembering the audience of the note, the best way to format the note to ensure it is concise and focused, the main sources for legal research etc.

I found this session extremely helpful. Not only were we provided with a clear framework for how to best tackle these legal advice notes, we were also given an example scenario to work through together. This allowed us to identify key pieces of information and enabled us to work through the framework in order to create a note.

In this event, 4 Slaughter and May employees at various stages of their careers spoke to us about various aspects about the firm

• the support they received in the firm
• the biggest challenges they faced in the industry due to race
• the ways Slaughter and May contributed to their professional growth
• the culture of the firm

Several things stood out to me

Firstly, the firm makes sure to keep in touch with you before you start your training contract. They will make sure you attend offer holder dinners and firm activities with you during your LPC (similar activities will be held for SQE students).

Secondly, the firm is very keen to see you grow as a professional. Not only are there many networking opportunities, there are also internal and external mentoring schemes, as well as reverse mentoring schemes. This allows trainees (and associates) to take advantage of the wealth of information available at the firm and allows them to seek advancement opportunities.

Thirdly, when mentioning top tips, one of the panelists said ‘know you can always leave if your goals no longer align with those of the firm’. I was taken aback at that statement. It was great to hear that the trainees are not encouraging people to ‘fight through’ and stay at the firm regardless of the cost. I found that honesty made me more interested in what she had to say when speaking about why she chose to stay at the firm.

I thoroughly enjoyed the event. While I will not be applying for Slaughter and May, I thought the panelists were friendly and had a lot of great things to say about the firm while staying honest about the challenges minorities inevitably face in the legal industry.