Never Mind the Equities - Part 5 of my training contract adventure.

This is part five of the story of how I got my training contract. See here for parts one, two, three, and four.

As previously revealed, I did end up getting the vacation scheme at BLP. It was to take place in mid-December, and would last only a week. I was assigned to “restructuring and insolvency”, about which I knew absolutely nothing at all.?

The week ended up being fairly memorable, but for different reasons than I would have imagined. First of all, I had my own office for the week. Exciting as this was, the novelty wore off after about three hours when I realised that this meant I’d have to go out and knock on other people’s doors for work. I did so, on my first afternoon, and introduced myself, but everyone seem to be busy and said that they would get back to me and let me know if they had anything for me to do. Of course, with one notable exception, no work ever materialised and it took me about three days to realise that most people might have meant this as a euphemism for “go away”.

The trainee who was looking after me, Matt, was sat in the neighbouring office and had this vaguely harrowed look in his eyes the entire time. We got off to a bad start when I called him “Ben” by accident the first time I met him. What can I say - he looked like a “Ben”! Anyway, I think he must’ve taken pity on me by day two, because he gave me some of his own work to do. It was a security review - looking over various bits of information about a borrower on behalf of the bank, to check the borrower’s compliance with the charge and the bank’s interest was protected. I found it remarkably boring but was grateful for something to do in my office which had become a kind of cavernous prison by this point.?

The only other piece of work that I did get was from a senior associate called Simon who had previously entertained me and the trainees by showing us this amusing YouTube video in the lift. He was quite nice and called me in on the Wednesday to ask if I could do a bit of research for him about the successor company to a mining business. It was one of those two hour jobs but I spent a good day on it, making sure the note was absolutely perfect, and he thanked me profusely. He was a very nice man and I hear that his career is still going strong all these years later.?

Unfortunately for me though, the actual assessment parts of the vacation scheme went badly. For the group presentation exercise, I was sorted into a group of probably the most argumentative and pig-headed people that ever existed. We spent the entire two hours of preparation time squabbling over stuff that didn’t really matter, which turned into a raging shouting match, which continued over into the presentation itself. About 15 minutes in, the partner who was meant to be assessing us got frustrated, cut us off, and then gave us a lecture for the remaining 45 minutes about her career. No one left that room covered in glory.

The partner interview actually happened in January, due to scheduling conflicts, and as I sat down to mine one cold Monday morning, my heart sank. One of the two partners had rushed in, said he was still incredibly jetlagged and apologised quite openly for the eventuality that he fell asleep. In fact, he managed to stay awake for the entire interview, but it was a close run thing. Either way, it was clear that the lights were on, but no one was at home.

The other partner interviewing me was a lady called Marie who was triple qualified in France, England and California. She was about 4 foot 4 but simultaneously the most terrifying human being I have ever met. Think Aunt Agatha from the Jeeves and Wooster series, but with more steel. She radiated an aura of “literally nothing you say or do will impress me”. And so it proved. Marie conducted the entire interview, which was not so much a verbal sparring contest as my trying to floor Mike Tyson in the ring armed with a rubber chicken. It was disconcerting, delivering well crafted and reasoned answers to difficult questions, only to be met by zero feedback and a continuous icy glare. I remember one line of questioning in particular which centred around a scenario where I had to act for a property developer who wanted to evict loads of low income families to make way for a shiny new tower block. I was asked if I would feel bad helping a client like that ruin the lives of ordinary people. My answer (that I would have to put any personal feelings aside and act in the best professional interests of my client) did not hold any water with her. She intensified her glare, leaned forward, and seemed to try and stare into my mind. It was utterly disconcerting. Lesser men might have crumbled. After what seemed like an eternity, she straightened up, and then moved onto the next topic.?

Anyway, I was unsurprised to get the call from HR 2 days later to confirm that BLP would not be offering me a training contract. Nevertheless, it was a morale crushing blow to receive - especially since as I soon found out, three of the people from the group exercise had somehow received training contract offers. Not that I was bitter…

This news came a week before my next assessment centre, which was at CMS at their old London offices on Aldersgate. I arrived, bright eyed at 9:30 sharp, mentally and physically poised to absolutely dominate the group icebreaker session. I’d even planned out what I would eat and drink when the breakfast tray came over. No croissants, for instance, to avoid the risk of bits of flaky pastry getting stuck to my lip and then being inadvertently sprayed in the face of my interlocutor. Nor anything fizzy either, for similar reasons.?

However, when I turned up, it rapidly transpired that it would just be me and one other person for the day - a perfectly nice girl called Claire - due to various last-minute cancellations. We gave each other polite but cold smiles that indicated we were each being civil but ready to tear each other to pieces like gladiators if push came to shove.?

We were both led to the top floor of the building, which housed the client suite, and without so much of an offer of light refreshments were whisked into separate rooms for a written M&A exercise. That passed without much drama, and after handing in our papers, we were led around the client suite to a different meeting room for lunch with a trainee called Joe. I remember very little about Joe except for the fact that when I asked him about his journey into law, he was vaguely condescending and said that he hadn’t really known what he wanted to do after uni but had applied for a training contract with CMS entirely speculatively, and had received an offer. Which of course did not endear him to either me or Claire. Other than that, the only other thing I remember about the client suite was that the walls were covered in a lovely if somewhat shabby light wooden panelling, with photographic prints of people and animals and plants. The general decor was a bit tired and of a style that might have been described as “1970s Soviet Hilton” but I have always had a fondness for wooden panelling and was saddened when the building was demolished and the firm moved to a shiny new office block above Cannon Street station.

The afternoon was spent doing two interviews. The first was with an imposing guy called James - someone senior in HR - who started by welcoming me to the firm and announcing that CMS was a firm where there were very few arseholes. He then conceded that there might be a few, but that no one spoke to them. An arresting start! The rest of the conversation was more sedate, and centred around why I chose CMS, and why I was interested in property law. We ended with a short monologue from James about his previous career as a successful 7-figure entrepreneur. I think he was trying to demonstrate his passion for the business of HR. After all, why else would a multimillionaire sell their business and go into HR? However, I felt it would be rude to point out that it was I, not he, who was being interviewed for a role here, and reserved comment.

The second interview was with a partner called Sam. We got on immediately like a house on fire. We ran through a couple of the competency questions (“Tell us about a difficult situation you have to handle”, “Talk about a commercial story that has interested you recently”) before moving onto the technical ones (“which teams within the law firm might be involved in a corporate M&A transaction”). I remember those questions, because when I pause to think, halfway through, Sam very kindly started giving me prompts, which I’m fairly sure he wasn’t meant to do. In any event, I found the prompts slightly off-putting. But I also don’t think what I said really matter that much, because from the motion of his hand flicking up and down from behind the clipboard that he was holding in his lap, it was fairly clear that he was simply ticking every single box on his evaluation checklist in a perfunctory way. This was mine to lose!?

Anyway, before long, Sam turned to me and said it had been a lovely chat but we had to wind up soon, so were there any questions I wanted to ask him??

As I had prepared, I asked him about his journey into law. Had he always wanted to do so, had he studied a law degree initially, and if not, had he considered a previous career??

He smiled wanly and said, “Well, like you, funnily enough, I went to Keble College and studied a non-law subject. When I graduated, I hadn’t the faintest idea what I wanted to do. I remember applying to the Deutsche Bank graduate scheme and ticking the box on the form labelled “equities”. At the time I thought it was some kind of social justice or redistributive scheme because when I somehow got an interview, the head of equities there sat me down looking slightly confused and asked me if I had any idea what “equities” actually were. About 20 seconds into what must’ve been a very confused explanation, he stopped me, explained what “equities” actually were, and suggested gently that perhaps banking was not a career that I should go into, unless I did some more research first.

So then I started looking at other careers and a friend of mine was doing law and applying to law firms, so I thought I would give it a go. Back then of course it was much much easier to get a job as an articled clerk - though you had to pay for the privilege at most places. Anyway, a little but well-known city firm called Cameron Markby Hewitt offered to hire me, and I’ve been here ever since.”

I remember feeling l disappointed as soon as he’d mentioned Keble and Oxford. Had we established this rapport, and had I only done so well because my interviewer had gone to the same Oxbridge college? Had he already made his mind up when he saw my application? Was that why he had been extra helpful with the prompts? I don’t doubt that Sam was a lovely man and maybe I was overthinking things, but part of me wished that he hadn't told me what he had.

Before I heard back from CMS, I had my assessment centre with Macfarlanes. I don’t remember actually doing much preparation, and being very confident about assessment centres by this point. The only assessment I actually remember was an ethical dilemma exercise where I was grilled on what I would do if I were a trainee who accidentally received some documents by post from the other side in a litigation context which divulged confidential information that suggested the other side actually had a very weak case. I think the partners in the room had been briefed on conducting a robust debate about the conflict between helping your client, and one’s duty to the court. They must have been disappointed with my reaction which was essentially that the matter was EXTREMELY above my pay grade and as a trainee I should not be making decisions like this - so I would ask my supervisor.

The partners gamely tried to steer me back on track.

“But what if your supervisor wasn’t available?”

I wasn’t so easily sidetracked.?

“Then I would wait until they were.”

“What if your supervisor was off for a fortnight?”

I had been expecting this.

“Then I would ask a partner in the litigation team. Or if they were unavailable, any partner. They’d know what to do.”

The frustration was showing now.

“What if all the partners and associates were away?”

“Then I would ask all the other trainees to see if they ever encountered something like this before”

Beads of sweat were beginning to form on foreheads.

“But what if it was late at night on a Friday evening, and there was literally no one else left in the office and you HAD to make a decision now?”

This was clearly an insanely implausible scenario and never going to happen. But I was determined not to get struck off and lose my licence to practise, especially before I'd started my career!

“Then I would prepare a detailed email to the partner handling the file explaining exactly what had happened. The email would then recommend that, due to the conflicted position I was now in, I should be taken off the matter. And then I would go home.”

The partners slumped back in their chairs. Game, set and match.

(Since then I have recounted this anecdote to multiple litigators who have found it very amusing and suggested what they might have done. Perhaps the most intriguing one was that obviously they would return the documents immediately, but then to put a disclosure request in immediately afterwards for those specific documents so that we could then rely on these in court. I would be interested to know if anyone has ever tried this successfully. If so, please message me.)

Other than that, the day went smoothly. I had to sit in someone’s office for an afternoon and do some supervised work. For me this turned out to be comparing about 15 different redlines of a 250-page contract that had been gratuitously violated by unauthorised amendments by multiple parties without any semblance of document control. The lucky associate-turned forensic investigator whose job it was to “plz fix” the problem decided to palm it off onto me. I spent two hours combing through text, my mind turning slowly to mush, before the associate took pity on me and?took the assignment back.

That aside, the other lasting impression I got from Macfarlanes was that everyone I met was perfectly dressed and had perfect hair. It was slightly unnerving and may have been the ultimate reason I decided to turn them down when I received an email literally the next day from CMS congratulating me on getting a training contract offer from them.

And the rest, as they say, is history...