This April we welcomed the REACH Academy students from Exeter College to Michelmores. This was a chance to open the doors to some gifted sixth-form students who were considering a career in law. Some of the trainees were given buddies to look after, and together with the lawyers in our team, we set them tasks to do and supervised them during their time.
I was the buddy for Jack Ford, who was lucky enough to come and join the Clinical Negligence team for three days. I asked him to prepare a blog on his time with us, so, I’ll let him do the talking:
For the past 3 days I’ve been doing a work experience placement at Michelmores and it has been an incredibly interesting experience. Work experience like this gives you a deep insight into a legal career and how to pursue it.
I am currently in my first year of studying law, psychology, geography and English literature at A-level and while I’ve been studying law I have gained a deep interest in the law and the effects of it. I found out about this work experience while talking to my law teacher at Exeter College and I applied as soon as I had found out about the chance to work at Michelmores. Luckily, I managed to secure a place.
This is my first experience of working in a law firm and most people expect working in a law firm to be following a grumpy old solicitor around and making tea. However, working here is completely different to this and there is more of a level of responsibility placed on us. During my time here I was given tasks which actually helped people out and were incredibly interesting to me. Also, there are not as many statutes and cases that are needed for this job in comparison to studying law which surprised me.
During my time here I have worked for the clinical negligence team. It has been an amazing experience and I’ve been working on their current work which is really involving and useful. It really has given me a feel for what working in a law firm is like.
As well as spending time in the department, we attended workshops on a range of different departments which meant we could get a view into what the other departments do and allowed us to ask any questions we had about the profession. Also, we could ask about the route to becoming part of the profession and it surprised me how many people had used different routes to get here besides the traditional law degree route.
This experience at Michelmores has been incredible and I have learned so much about the legal profession and how it operates. It has removed all of my preconceptions about legal work and I would like to thank everyone at the firm for making working here possible.