Allen & Overy

"working at the client's office allowed me to feel very much involved in the matter and a key member of the team.."

Allen & Overy is the only magic circle law firm with a dedicated Private Client department and therefore provides a great opportunity to trainees to gain exposure to a wide variety of transactional and non-transactional work whilst at the same time complementing their experience in other seats (in my case, banking and securitisation).  With 6 months to go until qualification, I am already able to appreciate how these different experiences have helped ensure that my training contract has been as diversified and all rounded as possible.  This should be further enhanced by a six month secondment to Amsterdam next month!

A client facing department, I frequently accompanied associates and partners to meetings and was even lucky enough to work at a client's office for two weeks undertaking a trust review. 
The trust company concerned was in the position where it needed to repay certain of the fees it had charged to its clients for a period going back many years.  This required a large amount of investigative work, examining trust documents and correspondence files, to determine the trust structures for each of the trusts (and there were rather a lot of these to examine!).  It was forensic type work and our key objectives were to work out who had been the beneficiaries throughout the life of the trust, who would be entitled to a repayment and in what proportions. This was not as simple as it sounds and required the application of trust rules concerning income and capital as well as come serious analysis of the correspondence between beneficiaries and trustees in order to paint the overall picture of the trust structure and payment pattern over the years.  It was then up to the accountants to work out exactly how much each beneficiary should be repaid.

As well as enjoying playing the role of detective and undertaking this investigative style of work, reading through the files provided an invaluable insight into the workings of a trust company and the relationship between trustee and beneficiary.  Given that I undertook the work in the client's offices it was also an excellent opportunity to interact with a client on a daily basis.  For me the experience was as much about building client relations as in the exposure to the type of work undertaken by the particular trust company. 

As it was just me and one other lawyer working at the client's office this allowed me to feel very much involved in the matter and a key member of the team.   The matter itself was a sensitive one and the content of the files was highly confidential and so there was a high level of responsibility that went with the role.  At the end of each day we had to lock up the trust documents in the company vault and had a strict filing system to keep track of all the documents we examined so that nothing went missing. 

Working in a client's office is very different from just dealing with them on the phone every day and you realise the importance of making a good impression and maintaining client confidence.  So all in all a very valuable and rewarding experience!