Hi. My name is Kristians Butins, and this is a blog describing my journey about how I managed to secure a training contract with my dream law firm, Clifford Chance. Before I begin, I would like to thank Strive for providing continuous support, guidance and just genuinely being there when I needed it the most. I can’t thank you all enough!
I will share with you 4 strategies that I believe contributed the most in helping me to get where I am today. I hope you will find them useful too.
1) Reverse engineer and prepare early
This part was the most useful when I had to write my applications and prepare for competency-based interviews. Let me explain what I mean by the ‘reverse engineer(ing)’ part. Before you even begin to write your first application or be interviewed, you should know that you will be asked many questions about your strengths, competencies, experiences and motivations for doing law. You can do very well on this part by preparing early. Compile a list of questions that you may be asked in interviews and applications way before you even start writing them by doing a simple google search. Identify areas in which you could strengthen your answers, and try to gain legal and non-legal work experience with positions of responsibility. Easier said than done (I know) but preparation way in advance will give you enough time to acquire a variety of amazing experiences and examples of situations to make you stand out in interviews.
2) Attend open days, events, and network with people
Try to attend as many law and finance events and open days as you can. This is beneficial primarily for two reasons: 1) you always learn about something new from presentation/talks, and 2) you meet great people who may give you useful advice. Such events are informative and can provide you with good talking points at interviews. For example, open days can give you more insight information about the firm you are applying to and conferences can be useful to learn about current trends in finance/legal or other industries which affect law firms and their clients. By meeting people and making contacts in these events, I reached out, received useful advice from and was prepared by 14 people including those who currently work at the firm and others who have extensive assessment centre experience. Don’t underestimate this aspect and view such events as an investment in yourself.
3) Commercial awareness is essential, but so is the business knowledge
This is particularly important when it comes to an assessment centre stage. An episode on a Strive podcast provides a fantastic explanation on what is commercial awareness and how you can stay commercially aware – go and check it out! Understanding what is happening in the world and how it can affect law firms, their clients and industries in which they operate is crucial. Though, what I believe makes a good candidate stand out from a great candidate is the general knowledge of how businesses work, what is the procedure of, and legal and financial tools that can be used in various situations to achieve a specific business purpose, such as to form, raise finance for or acquire a business. Business podcasts, such as ‘Wake Up to Money’, books by Christopher Stokes, Richard Susskind, Philip Coggan, and handbooks by Jake Schogger will give you the necessary foundation for your business acumen to stand out in interviews. On top of all that, Strive workshops were brilliant in talking about both the commercial awareness and business knowledge.
4) Strive support and another critical pair of eyes looking over your application
While you think you may have written a great application, having someone (preferably 2 or more people) to look over your application can be helpful. Having spent hours of writing, you are likely to miss out on hardly noticeable spelling or grammar mistakes or other stylistic ways in which you could improve your application. Remember that graduate recruitment teams receive thousands of applications, and as much as they are looking at great things that you have done, they will look more closely for mistakes that you have made to reject you which makes their job easier by speeding up their application reading process.
If you are looking for a vacation scheme and training contract, I hope this gives blog gives you a good starting point to tailor these strategies to your personal approach. More importantly, even if you have been rejected, trust yourself, don’t give up and learn from feedback going forward.
I want to say a special thank you to Tilly and Sana from Strive for being there at every step of the way, for reading many of my application drafts and giving me incredibly useful advice which led to almost all of my applications pass the first stage.
Best wishes and stay strong,
Kristians