Macfarlanes’ Felicity Powell on what’s kept her at the firm since her training contract, and the opportunities on offer for young lawyers joining it
“I’ve actually been at Macfarlanes my entire career,” Felicity Powell tells Legal Cheek Careers. A partner in the firm’s M&A team, she trained there and never left. A legal career wasn’t always the plan. She took mainly science-based subjects at A-level and was “always torn between being a doctor or doing law,” until a blunt piece of careers advice tipped her towards the latter. “A chemistry teacher once told me that my bedside manner would have left a lot to be desired had I become a doctor, although lawyers need a rather different kind of bedside manner!” she says.
She opted to study law at Cardiff University, where she first came across Macfarlanes at a university law fair and secured a place on a vacation scheme. “I think vacation schemes are really good things for people to try to do” she says, though she acknowledges how competitive they can be. Nothing can quite replicate a fortnight or so inside a firm, she explains: “It’s a really useful way to understand what a firm is like and if it’s the right place for you — no firm can put on a show for two weeks.”
After a successful vacation scheme, she went into her training contract without fixed expectations of what department she might end up qualifying into, an attitude she recommends to anyone starting out. “I don’t think I went into my training contract with a preconceived idea as to what type of lawyer I would be,” she says. Now more senior, she’s seen too many trainees caught out by the gap between “law in practice versus law school.” Better, she thinks, to stay “open-minded and resist the urge to start your training contract with a fixed idea of the ultimate department or team you want to end up qualifying into.”
Powell sat in a mix of transactional and advisory seats, but it was her M&A seat that settled things. “It became clear during my M&A seat that I was a transactional lawyer,” she says, drawn to “the pace of it and the client contact”.
So, what’s kept her at Macfarlanes since qualifying? Part of it is the shape of the team. Unusually for the City, Powell explains that Macfarlanes’ M&A practice doesn’t “subdivide into specialist areas” and credits it with leaving lawyers free to take on “a broad range of work.” The firm’s model adds to that variety, drawing in, for example, corporate work from private wealth colleagues acting for high-net-worth individuals and from a finance team acting for credit funds. “I’ve never got the same thing coming across my desk,” she says.
Naturally, it also comes down to people and culture. “People always think that culture is just a buzzword,” Powell admits, but a genuine fit matters when the hours are long and stress levels high — working with people you genuinely get along with “does make those harder periods easier to deal with.”.
Macfarlanes’ global strategy is equally distinctive. Without a network of fixed overseas offices, how does the firm maintain such global reach? A common misconception, Powell says, is that “we don’t do international work.” In fact, “every single transaction I’ve been involved in has a global element.” Rather than route matters through a fixed overseas office, Macfarlanes collaborates with firms around the world to “ensure on any transaction that we get the best lawyers in that relevant jurisdiction for the client.”
Asked what makes a good lawyer at a junior level, she points to a willingness to take ownership of work. The key is “taking ownership of whatever you’ve been asked to do,” rather than treating tasks as isolated boxes to tick.
Her advice to aspiring solicitors follows the same thread. For anyone on a vac scheme hoping to turn a placement into an offer, it’s fairly simple. “Show real interest in the firm you’ve applied to, not just in law”. Most candidates, she notes, “can sort of come up with an answer to why law” at interview. The harder, more revealing question is “why this firm.” A vac scheme is the chance to work out, firsthand, what makes a candidate decide “this is the firm for me.”
On commercial awareness, which she admits is “something which takes a bit of time to build-up,” she offers the tried-and-tested advice to “read some newspapers, read articles online,” while also being “a bit sensible as to what you’re reading.” Just as useful, she says, is talking to practising lawyers at open days and events on what they are seeing with their clients and matters, because “you can’t underestimate the benefit of just speaking to people.”
Finally, her message to anyone about to embark on the autumn recruitment round: don’t be disheartened by rejection. A knock-back, she suggests, may simply mean a firm wasn’t the right fit. “Keep going, and “don’t get too discouraged by it.”
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