Posts Tagged: Solicitors

Training contract offers: how they once looked

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Over the weekend BKRW Solicitors' Oliver Kirk tweeted this picture of his training contract offer — from 1993. The bit about the coal is a joke, right?

TC-offer


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‘The whole chargeable hours thing was a bit of a pain in the backside’

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If-i-knew-639

There’s a reason not many lawyers move back into practice after going in-house, says Mark Smith

It was at law school when I got my first taste of the uncompromising law of supply and demand.

All my peers also had (at least) a 2:1 from a decent university and pretty good A-levels, and yet plenty of us were staring at the end of our Legal Practice Course (LPC) with no training contract in sight. I decided that my law school fees needed paying off and so applied for jobs as a trainee chartered accountant.

In contrast to the misery of law firm applications (at least a hundred applications, only two interviews, one of which was with a recruitment partner who smelt strongly of booze, no offers), I applied to four of what were then the big six accountancy firms, got three interviews and two offers.

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Solicitor at top corporate firm is flogging GDL and LPC notes to hard-up students

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Pound-coins

EXCLUSIVE: A solicitor at leading law firm Kennedys is running a sideline selling law school notes to students online.

Operating under the names of 'GDL Guru' and 'LPC Guru', Helen Neale charges £69.99 per set of notes for the Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) and Legal Practice Course (LPC).

The notes were taken by Neale during the GDL and LPC, which she completed between 2008-2010 before doing her training contract and going on to qualify as a solicitor at Kennedys' Sheffield office. Publicly available salary data states that Kennedys' newly qualified solicitors earn £58,000 a year.

Neale, who also has a degree in philosophy from Cambridge University, makes no mention of the fact that she is a Kennedys lawyer on either the 'GDL Guru' or 'LPC Guru' websites. But she does reveal her own identity, stating in the "legal" section of both sites that all the featured notes and materials "are copyright of Helen Neale 2010". Until earlier this month, Neale also listed 'GDL Guru' on her LinkedIn profile.

Helen-Neale

Pictured: GDLGuru.co.uk, through which Neale sells her "distinction-level" notes to students.

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The success of GDLGuru.co.uk prompted Neale to launch LPCGuru.co.uk.

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Both sites include a notice that guards against the "copying or redistributing of these notes without the author’s permission". Students are warned that this would constitute "an infringement of UK copyright law". In addition, a disclaimer states that the notes "are not a substitute for the need to do your own work on the GDL/LPC course". Copyright

Neale did not respond to Legal Cheek's request for comment.

A representative for Kennedys said: "The firm aren't going to make any comment on this."

Ashurst senior associate to stand trial over death of motorcyclist

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Police-tape

A young solicitor at City law firm Ashurst has been ordered to stand trial in February accused of killing a motorcyclist by careless driving.

Alexandra Verzariu, 32, who works in the firm's corporate department, is alleged to have crashed into Rodrigo Pereira De Souza in west London on October 13 last year.

Mr De Souza, 36, broke his neck after he was thrown off his bike and into a lamppost. He died at the scene in Harrow Road, Maida Vale.

Ashurst declined to comment.