Inês Pinheiro has launched TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn pages to tell her story
A DLA Piper trainee has gone public with her extraordinary journey from cleaning offices in London to starting her training contract with the global firm.
Inês Pinheiro, who achieved a first-class law degree from London South Bank University, wrote in a candid LinkedIn post that she went “from cleaning toilets🚽 to preparing for vacation schemes👩🏻💻 at global firms in a year”.
“I swiped the street floors in front of 110 Bishopsgate Heron Tower at 5 am in the morning,” said Pinheiro, who grew up in Venezuela. “The reception girls looked at me confused. They’d speak about me. Thinking I didn’t know English. My English was poor but I could read facial expressions.”
Far from discouraging her, those early experiences motivated her to aim higher. “Being there didn’t hurt me but it fuelled me. I come from a different world. A different planet you can say,” she explained.
Within a year of learning English, Pinheiro was applying for vacation schemes and later preparing for a vac scheme at Freshfields. All of this, she noted, was achieved with “No family in England. No financial support. Only an emotional baggage, traumas and a heavy load I carried from the previous crisis I endured back in Venezuela. Oh and the resilience that marks every Venezuelan around the world.”
She credits faith and hard work for her success: “Believing in yourself and having faith takes you places. I can guarantee you that.”
Outside of law, Pinheiro is a former Miss Portugal contestant and spent her childhood in Venezuela, where she experienced violence and instability. “I don’t get scared easily, I don’t feel intimidated easily, and I don’t believe in impossibles. I am super humble and like to work hard,” she told her connections on LinkedIn.
Reflecting on her transformation, Pinheiro said: “I had to bury myself completely to raise this new person out of thin air… Between the possible and the impossible. With my feet on earth but my head up in the clouds — not even the cloud, more like out in space. And I’ve seen it work.”
She ended her post with a reminder to treat everyone with kindness:
“Oh and be kind to your cleaners, waitresses, people in lower ranks etc, you may be working next to them in the future so make sure you’re friendly. 😝”
Follow Inês Pinheiro’s Deary me today account on social media:
TikTok
@dearymetoday This song is everything i stand for and this is how I am dealing with my SQE2 failure. #corporate #corporatelife #corporatetiktok #honest #corporatelaw ♬ original sound – dearymetoday