Chelsy Davy waves good-bye to Allen & Overy — and the law?

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By Judge John Hack on

Prince Harry’s former girlfriend has jacked in City legal practice amid suggestions that she probably found it just that little bit too boring

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The on-off-on-off squeeze of the Prince of Mayfair Nightlife has bailed out of high-flying City legal practice “to pursue other interests”, according to media reports.

Prince Harry’s one-time girlfriend Chelsy Davy is no longer on the books at magic circle practice Allen & Overy, the firm where the glamorous blonde Zimbabwean trained and qualified as a solicitor.

A&O declined to comment on Davy’s position, but the 29-year-old is not listed on the global mega-firm’s website. And sources close to the practice indicated that a report in the Daily Mail newspaper that she had quit was correct.

A source familiar with Davy during her law school days said she was highly regarded, “down to earth and not seen as being too up herself”.

However, there was little surprise that Davy had waved good-bye to A&O. One academic close to Square Mile law firms commented to Legal Cheek:

“She’s by no means unusual. Lot’s of bright kids are disappointed shortly after qualification, when they realise just how balls-achingly boring most City legal work is. Chelsy will have plenty of other options to that sort of tedium.”

Davy graduated with an economics degree from the University of Cape Town in 2006, going on to bag an LLM from Leeds University three years later, and then on to the then-College of Law for the Legal Practice Course. She did a paralegal stint at blue blood solicitors’ firm to the royals, Lincoln’s Inn Fields-based Farrer & Co.

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On starting her A&O training contract in 2011, the Daily Mail went into overdrive, suggesting the firm’s partners were already having kittens over her penchant for skimpy clobber.

But her time at the firm passed uneventfully — or at least without much media coverage — and Davy was admitted as a solicitor on 1 October last year. A&O starting salaries according to Legal Cheek research are £66,500, placing them 14th in top 60 list.

A little more than a year on, however, the Law Society’s official register gives no indication of an employer. It seems as though a grinding routine of long days and nights poring over files perched above Spitalfields Market was not the life for her.