In house VS/TC opportunities?

[BuddingLawyer]

Hi

Apologies in advance for sounding naive and stupid.

From a penultimate year law student's perspective, I find the whole industry and forums ( chat forums, portals like chambers/legal cheek etc/uni career fair) dominated with tips to secure TC/VS in commercial law firms. While I am extremely grateful by the quality and quantity of advice available , I wonder why there is very little discussion or information about in house VS/TC opportunities , specially with big 4 entering this space . Do these in house VS/TC opportunities exist ? If yes, where to look for them and how to apply? Or is that market simply disorganized and one has to look at multiple sources ? Or is that market too tiny to bother putting in time and effort, both of which are limited for us students. I am asking from the perspective of penultimate year Russel group law student looking to apply for VS/TC

Thanks.

 

[I’m_Batman]

Hi

Apologies in advance for sounding naive and stupid.

From a penultimate year law student's perspective, I find the whole industry and forums ( chat forums, portals like chambers/legal cheek etc/uni career fair) dominated with tips to secure TC/VS in commercial law firms. While I am extremely grateful by the quality and quantity of advice available , I wonder why there is very little discussion or information about in house VS/TC opportunities , specially with big 4 entering this space . Do these in house VS/TC opportunities exist ? If yes, where to look for them and how to apply? Or is that market simply disorganized and one has to look at multiple sources ? Or is that market too tiny to bother putting in time and effort, both of which are limited for us students. I am asking from the perspective of penultimate year Russel group law student looking to apply for VS/TC

Thanks.

My experience has been that unlike traditional law firms that have a specific recruitment cycle, in-house opportunities may not be as widely advertised or come about sporadically opposed to the Winter/Sping/Summer VS or TC window. That isn't true for the Big 4 but speculative applications sent to the legal department's general email or the head of legal could be a way to get your foot in the door in these cases. With law firms, there is a long history of firms engaging with universities and students. This is only now slowly changing with the entrance of the Big 4 and other in-house options, but they still have less visibility in career fairs and forums. Traditionally, folks go in-house after gaining a few years of experience in private practice. This has been the traditional route, and there is a notion (though it is changing) that a lawyer needs private practice experience before going in-house.

The Big 4 have Chambers Student pages and have been covered but I think that you're asking a question that is quite insightful, and not naïve or stupid at all. The focus on training contracts and vacation schemes in commercial law firms tends to overshadow other pathways into the legal profession, there's no doubt about it. I think in-house aren't advertised as much because law firms have been running TCs for a much longer period of time and generally potential trainees might be worried that they'd have a smaller infrastructure set when it comes to training junior lawyers from scratch in the same volume. That's palpably untrue for the Big 4 or big in-house companies but it's a perception that still hasn't gone away in my opinion. Also, if you're a young potential trainee (or older potential trainee) I feel like (at least in my case) you'd want to experience a variety of seats. In-house would probably have a different route where those roles require lawyers to have specialized experience in specific areas of law. They may not have the variety of work that allows for a rounded training contract experience. Law also seems to be a bit classist still, where if you start at a big company* that isn't considered 'big' you'd be scared you would never work in a big firm with big money (and in London big money doesn't even feel like big money any more).

It's a shame because in-house is better than private practice in so many ways imo.

 

[BuddingLawyer]

Thank you so much. This is so insightful.

 

[Becks]

I did two inhouse legal internship. I found my first one by just looking up internships. Most in-house internship are similar to vac scheme in a way. I found my second internship through @inhouselegal on Instagram. Highly recommend the page. You'd mostly find in-house role by looking everywhere. Also there are starting to be more inhouse- TCs I think due to the sqe so you should hopefully start to see them more without searching too hard.