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29 Oct 2025
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Join Isabel Elsey, Legal Recruitment Manager at BCLP, for a live Q&A session. Get details on secondments, innovation, growth areas, and everything else you’ve wanted to ask about life at BCLP!
There is some crossover between both IP Law and Competition Law, especially in the area of patents, but they are quite different areas at the same time. 🥲
I want to explore both during a training contract (I did both as final year optional modules and really liked them). It would definitely...
This is really useful @Amma Usman! 🐐
Competition law is acc proper interesting. I’m a fiend for it at this point. I really liked it as a undergrad module. In almost all of my applications I have yapped about each firm’s competition practice for at least one of my ‘why this firm’ reasons. Even...
I have a controversial question. Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? It appears it’s technically both at the same time (botanically and culinarily). It therefore seems tomatoes are very versatile and adaptable. I would also like to be a tomato. 🥲🥲
“If you were a fruit, what fruit would you be?” is a crazy question what the hell. 😂😂
I didn’t realise these kinds of questions would be asked in interviews. It looks like I need to spend some time on figuring out which fruit I want to be. I’m thinking maybe an apple. 🍏
You may have seen my posts on the forum in the middle of last week where I was on the verge of crashing out because I hadn’t heard anything from Paul, Weiss and I had convinced myself it was a PFO (seeing others had also been PFO’d). 🥲🥲
To my surprise (literally I was shocked and I still am)...
I don’t think there are many city law firms that offer TC’s to majority of the candidates on the VS. In most cases, I think that the VS to TC conversion rate is between 25-50%. Some firms, such as the Magic Circle, only recruit 1/2 of their trainees from the VS. The rest of its trainees are...
I might be wrong here, but wouldn’t the offer of a TC to those that did the VS, be based on the fact they did the VS and not based on their AC performance? I don’t think city law firms (who invest at least £100k in training) would be able to make a decision solely off of an AC. In the instance...
I think I saw someone say on the forum recently that they had either been invited to the HSF AC, or completed the HSF AC, but were told that HSF’s Spring VS was full and that HSF was recruiting for Summer VS’ only from now on. Best of luck for HSF! 🙂
Hi @Ram Sabaratnam,
In relation to the final point, what would you say about a hypothetical situation where the firm may have made its initial judgement that advising a client would not impose harm to their professional branding and reputation, but it actually later turned out that it most...
White & Case post-VI/TI PFO. 🥲
For reference, I think I applied on the 5th of Jan, received VI invite around the 28th of Jan, and sat the VI around the 31st of Jan. I had applied for both Spring and Summer VS.
Thank you for your kind words, I really appreciate it. 🙂
PEP = Profit Per Equity Partner.
I actually first came across PEP on Legal Cheek (the firm’s most list), way back in July/August when I was beginning to think about which firms I wanted to possibly apply to in this application cycle. On...
Just adding to this that you won’t be at a disadvantage if you don’t have straight A/A* at A-level or a 1st in your degree. I have neither of these and got invited to a Paul, Weiss interview on Friday. 🙂
Whilst I went to a RG, it wasn’t a university like Oxford/Cambridge/LSE/Imperial so that...
I think a good one would be the change in M&A activity from the start of last year compared to this year.
I saw a post on LinkedIn by Paul, Weiss which was a memo discussing this topic. I have linked it below:
It has a lot of tables, charts and graphs but I think it is a current commercial...
Fair enough perhaps the word new isn’t the best to use, although I did put relatively as it isn’t literally brand new in London. Neel Sachdev has emphasised how they are building something from scratch in London. 🙂
To be fair though, I did refer to Paul, Weiss as “relatively new in London” in...
Since late 2023 - early 2024 they have been rapidly expanding and now they have over 200 lawyers, 40-50 of which are partners. I think it’s relatively new in London because it opened its London office in 2003 but has only really began focusing on growing its London presence since 2023. Some US...
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