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Solicitor: Heidi

This Case Study belongs to Non-commercial solicitor.

Heidi has been with Gordons since September 2006.

I like problem solving but I’m not a mathematician. That's why I chose law as a career. I wanted to use the skills I enjoyed from my history degree: doing research, looking at documents, and analysing situations from a broad, human stand point. I also enjoyed public speaking and advocacy.

As you will know well, one of the toughest parts of becoming a lawyer is getting a training assignment. You will find when you go through it that it’s very rare to speak to anyone who gets a place from their first five applications or from their first interview. The applications are tough - they can take several days to complete - and the selection process is extremely rigorous. You can take it for granted that everyone you are competing against will have got a good first degree and have done well on the Legal Practice Course (LPC).

What got me through, I think, was determination and targeting the kind of firm that would suit me. It’s tempting to apply to big national or City firms on the basis that they pay for you to go through law school. But they don't suit everyone and, as I began to narrow down the firms that would work best for me, it helped make my applications more and more focused. I worked very hard on getting them right. I would ask the careers service and non-lawyer friends to look over them, and I made sure I emphasised the broad interests and experiences I had outside the law.

Now that I’m working in a law firm, I can see how important this last aspect is. When you’re a student, you think that being a lawyer is about the law but, while your employer of course expects you to do the law part of your job really well, the fact is you’re selling a service to clients. You have to understand the need to keep clients by selling them services and to market the firm to new clients. And to do this you have to be good with people. Having a range of outside interests means you have something to talk about when you take a client out to lunch, because they certainly won't want to talk about the law for much of the time! Having this ability in embryo is something firms look for when picking people for training contracts, so it makes sense to have plenty of outside interests.

Case Study sourced by David Williams of AGCAS, 01 March 2009.