Allen & Overy

The beginning of a rewarding career

Your training will be based on three or six month rotations (known as 'seats') through a number of departments or practice areas, where you will sit with a partner or an associate.

Soon after you join us you'll meet with Isabel Garner, our HR Manager, to create a seat plan tailored to your interests and aspirations.  In addition by choosing your seats you'll discuss the length of individual seats, and explore the possibilities of international or client secondments.  You'll also nominate a "priority seat" which means you'll be guaranteed experience in a chosen department.  Seats are available in all our practice areas, allowing trainees to experience the full range of work we do, with the priority seat system enabling you to spend time in an area that is of particular interest.

Our core areas of expertise are Corporate, Banking and International Capital Markets and as a trainee you will spend at twelve months of your training contract gaining experience in at least 2 of these areas.  All our trainees gain valuable contentious experience during their training contract.  From July 2007, we now offer our trainees the option of completing a Litigation course.  This means that trainees will no longer need to sit in our Dispute Resolution or Employment departments to gain their contentious experience if they are sure their interests lie elsewhere. The course is run by Nottingham Law School and consists of five days' tuition and a monthly visit to a legal advice centre for a year to gain practical contentious experience. The five days' tuition is split into two. The first two days are built into our trainee induction programme and attended by the whole intake. Trainees will then decide whether or not they want to sit in the Dispute Resolution or the Employment department as part of their training contract. If trainees choose not to sit in either, they will start attending a legal advice centre, with the remaining three days' tuition completed a year or so later.

We currently offer 39 international seats in 22 of our offices and trainees usually apply for secondments in the final six months of their training contract. International secondments are particularly useful as they provide trainees with an awareness of cultural and regional differences, which is especially important as most of the work we do is cross-border and international.

We also offer a number of client secondments, which enable our trainees to better understand our clients' businesses, by working alongside them.  These secondments normally take place in the second year of training.