Finding the right practice area
Well done – you've made it through all the applications, interviews, and cocktail evenings to offer day, where you successfully landed yourself a clerkship! Now the next big decision looms: what area of law do you want to try?
Choosing your rotations for your clerkship can feel overwhelming. The good news is that clerkship and graduate programs at law firms are designed to give you choice, and there are support systems in place to help you navigate those choices.
Whether you have one or two practice area rotations during a clerkship will depend on the firm, but most will give you three rotations as a graduate. There's no right or wrong way to choose what practice area you'd like to try, but here are a few tips to help you to navigate the choice.
What are you interested in?
The first and most important question to ask yourself "what areas of law am I interested in?" It's common for high-achieving law students to focus less on what brings them enjoyment, and more on what they think they should choose. Instead, a good starting point is to consider what areas of law or industries you're interested in. What subjects did you enjoy the most in law school? When you were going through the clerkship process, what partners or lawyers did you hear from that interested you?
If you enjoyed administrative law, maybe a rotation through public law is for you. If you loved learning about contracts, maybe you lean more transactional. In the law, sometimes there will be long days. It's important to choose a practice area you enjoy so that those long days won't eventually lead to burnout or an unenjoyable experience.
What is the firm's expertise?
Researching your firm's expertise and learning what they're known for in the market can help you choose a rotation. A rotation in a team that is well known for their work can give you valuable skills and experience. A team in a firm that is known for being the top of a certain market will attract the best talent, and as a junior lawyer it's helpful to surround yourself with the sharpest legal minds so that you can make the most of your rotations.
You can find out your firm's expertise by looking at the Doyle's Guide or the Chambers Asia Pacific Guide. If you're struggling to figure out where you want to land, choosing an area where you will get access to the top work, clients and lawyers is a valuable way to spend six months.
What breadth experience can you gain?
The idea of choosing rotations to gain a "breadth of experience" is something that many will spruik to you when it comes to choosing rotations. It's normally along the lines of trying one litigious and one transactional practice area. Even if you are certain you prefer one type of work, it is still useful to have a background in both. Working in litigation often demands knowledge of how contracts come into existence, and the process that occurs during drafting and working in transactional work includes an eye to any future litigation that may arise as the result of what you draft.
However, there are many ways to craft your rotations to gain a breadth of experience. I chose three litigious teams that also had an advisory arm or worked alongside a transactional team at the firm, so that I could gain a breadth of skills in a different way.
If you think you like a specific area of litigation, you could consider a broader commercial litigation practice. Or you could choose an area of litigation such as restructuring and insolvency, which tends to partner quite closely with front-end teams such as banking and finance to gain insight and knowledge into transactional work.
Who can you speak to?
The last piece of advice that I will give is to talk to people. Most junior lawyers or current graduates will be happy to have a coffee and a chat with you about the work you'll be exposed to. Each team will have a different level of autonomy and different type of work that they're able to give their juniors, depending on the scale of the projects or litigation that the team is working on at the time.
Talking to people is also a good opportunity to gain some insight into the culture of a team.
While choosing your rotations feels like a huge step in your career, it's important to remember that this process is designed to give you choice and access to a lot of different areas of the firm. Law firms understand that you likely won't have worked at a law firm before, and you need to access different areas before you can decide what you're good at and what you enjoy.
So, chat to people who can help you make an informed choice, do some research into the firm, and don’t forget to ask yourself what you enjoy about the law.
Karly Banks, Lawyer