Allen & Overy

Achieve the right balance 

This section of the website has been contributed by Ricky Cohen - trainee, joined September 2006

Starting work is tough, there are numerous drinks evenings to attend as you meet all your new work mates, then there are drinks with your non-workmates so you can tell them about the new trainee who had one too many at the 'meet the partners' evening, and then there are dinners, lots and lots of dinners, not only dinners 'out' but dinners 'in' as well.  I found that once I started getting paid the thought of congealed spag bol after a hard day at work had lost some of the glimmering appeal it once had.  This was great news for a number of my local take-aways, it was unfortunately bad news for my ever expanding waist line.

Staying fit once you start work is a bit challenging but at A&O things are made a lot easier.  One of the biggest perks is our large gym, which you can nip down to either after work or during lunch, it is equipped with all the things gyms should be equipped with, like TBs on the machines which let me forget the excruciating pain that I'm going through as I enter the third minute of my run.  There are lots of classes.  Personally I'm not a big fan of classes, I prefer to suffer alone, but those that go say they're great.  My trainer goes to spin classes which involves extensive cycling and he always comes back looking suitably invigorated.  There is also the ominously entitled SAS circuit training which, by all accounts, effectively bridges the seemingly wide career gap between SAS commando and city lawyer.

At A&O pretty much every aspect of your health has been considered.  We all have private medical cover which hopefully you won't need to use, though it did come in very handy last year when I hurt my knee playing rugby and the £300 pound physio bill was picked up for me, all I needed to do was take the lift downstairs to our surgery.  There is also an onsite dentist and GP, which is very convenient if only because it means that when I do attend the doctor, I'm not forced to sit in a waiting room for hours reading a three month old edition of Marie-Claire.

There are a surprisingly wide variety of treatments available, you can have all sorts of massages, from deep tissue massages to Indian head massage, there are also manicures and pedicures, again not really my thing, but I'm told that the Friday pedicure lady is excellent.  There is something called eye lash tinting, which I didn't know existed before I started writing this and then there is the long and frankly exotic list of waxes, but I think the less said about that the better.