Learning the game

What a Twit
June 2011

So you've heard the one about 'the footballer' (Ryan Giggs to be exact) suing Twitter and 'persons unknown' who discussed his private life. Although you probably heard his name several days ago it was only when an MP used his parliamentary privilege to tiptoe around an injunction that the sportsman can be named by the press. Had the MP not taken advantage of an obscure loophole of the British constitution, the media would still be gagged by the ominously sounding 'super injunction' taken out by the player. The problem was that regardless of the English court order, people in other countries were not subject to the same rules so his name was freely pinging around the web.

And that's the difficulty with the internet '“ it's one global forum, but governed by umpteen jurisdictions. There are numerous legal complexities to this case: the controversial use of super injunctions, the difficulties in suing Twitter (arguably just a vehicle for other people to express themselves), the use (abuse?) of parliamentary privilege to circumvent the law and so on. But the jurisdictional question is a real legal minefield.

I'm not going to get drawn into discussing the details of cross-border libel litigation or taking on users of social networking sites '“ but a quick Google search will show there are many people, far more qualified than me, who can tell you just how tricky this all is.

The internet has made the world a much smaller place. Thanks to the web, we were kept abreast of civil unrest in the middle east and we were granted ready access to the Wikileaks files. But it is easy to forget that while the internet is in one place, its users are scattered around the globe and subject to very different laws governing what they can write about.

Slowly governments are getting a grip on how to govern cyber-space. It's no longer the legal wild west that it used to be and websites have to be careful about what they publish. But serious questions remain over who has the right to dictate how the internet should be used.

The football saga has only just begun and no doubt there will be plenty more injunctions and court cases to follow. It will be interesting to see whether Facebook, or your average Twitter-user, is going to have to start behaving differently because of another country's privacy laws.

Ringside seat

May 2011

I was having lunch with some trainee colleagues the other day and it dawned on me that you could tell what seat they were in by their attitude.

Training contracts are like little life cycles - you start off from the same point and travel towards qualification together passing numerous bench marks along the way. Of course, every person harbours different ambitions, yet a trainee's attitude towards work seems to develop along similar lines.

The first-seater at lunch was very chirpy, laughing heartily at every joke and keen to show she was fun to be around. None of this is surprising: people work hard to find their way into a firm and it's only natural that they would want to make a lasting impression. We've all sent and later received keen capacity emails' offering help to anyone who needs it, no matter what the job may be. 'Freshers' seem a trifle baffled or even intimidated whenever someone speaks to them or asks them to do something. With time, this nervousness settles down and, towards the end of the first six months, you feel more at home; you know where the library is, you know how to use LexusNexus and you know that you can call partners by their first name.

Just as you were settling in, it is time to go on secondment, away from the main office. The distance between you and the HQ means there's less pressure to impress. It's like school-leavers heading off on their gap years. For six months you are way from the bustle of the London office or the prying eyes of other lawyers in your firm. Whenever I meet trainees on secondment, they seem slightly aloof. If you're not in London, you can't offer to help other teams even if you wanted to, so you relax a little bit.

And then the third seat comes around and it's back to reality. Most of third-seaters seem content with the choice of department. After all, the third seat is normally your 'priority seat' - your chosen department that you suspect might be where you want to qualify. But, because you've chosen to work there, there is added pressure to make the most of it. Back inside the fray of the firm - and sitting with a supervisor that you may end up working for - third-seaters adopt a renewed seriousness that had abated slightly while on secondment. Thankfully, with this new focus, comes a certain detachment from the issues that concerned you as a first-seater. Your main priority is to impress your team (who might, hopefully, offer you a job at the end of it all) and so responding to tenders for help from other departments seems less important. Third seaters seem to switch into qualification mode. With qualification less than a year away, the spectre of potential unemployment looms large.

Interestingly, final-seaters seem to split into two camps. There are those that have already decided what they want to qualify in and the final six months are but a formality. They need to keep their heads down, ride out their time and not do anything which suddenly makes them unemployable. This trainee was a positively calming presence at the lunch table '“ an elder statesman sort of figure, who had been through it all and who you could ask for advice.

On the other hand, you have the final-seaters who are still at a loss of what they want to do. Perhaps they couldn't get the seat they wanted. Or perhaps there were no jobs available in the department they were gunning for. Either way, they are into the final straight of the training contract without a clear focus of where they'll end up. A slight sense of panic tends to ensue, as they attempt to put themselves back on the map. Capacity emails begin to fly once again, but with a more determined focus than those sent in their first seat.

Their lunchtime conversation seemed somewhat targeted as they want to find out everything they can about every department, even those they previously had not thought would interest them. After all, there might be a job tucked away in there that they didn't know about. And then the training contract suddenly comes to an end, just as lunch did. The cheery first-seater disappeared back to her desk, the third-seaters had work to be getting on with, and I left the fourth-seaters chatting together.

Bottoms up
March 2011

Training contracts are funny things. Some days you feel like you're really getting somewhere '“ that you're learning and developing as a solicitor. Other days you're right back at square one; you feel like you know nothing and that you never do things quite right. Such is the way training contracts roll.

Moving seats every six months adds even more twists and turns to the emotional roller coaster of a training contract. In some ways, it is very exciting: you get to throw yourself into a new department and work in a different area of law with new people. But, at the same time, you have to start from scratch: you don't know how to use the new photocopier or navigate the team's intranet. We've all been there.

I've just started my third seat of a training contract. I am slowly familiarising myself with how the team works and re-acclimatising to life at the firm after six months on secondment. Although I've walked through the firm's front door several times, I am still very much the new kid in class. This is one of the departments I chose to work in (as opposed to one of those compulsory seats thrust upon you by graduate recruitment or the Law Society) so I thought the transition into it would be a little easier. But the process wasn't any less daunting.

On top of that, I'm trying hard to maintain that ever sought-after work/life balance. Training contracts with City firms don't leave hours of free time to play around with, but, for the sake of your sanity and general well-being, it seems important to maintain interests outside of work.

Everyone finds some way to escaping from the pressures of work at the end of the day. Along with learning Portuguese and training for the odd half marathon, I'll be using this blog to keep in perspective the trials and tribulations of being a trainee. Over the next few months I'll try to cast a worm's eye view of life in a big firm and jot down some thoughts on legal issues that catch my eye.