A starting point for any successful candidate is to understand the culture of the company they have chosen. In the case of PwC, this means understanding what it means to be a multidisciplinary practice. It`s helpful for candidates to think of PwC as a standalone law firm within a large organization that offers a range of services, Timothy says, and law is just one of many specializations offered by the Big Four services giant. While a typical law firm would approach a client`s problem by trying a legal solution, PwC is able to offer integrated solutions – lawyers are only part of the picture. International work experience can also work in your favor, Timothy says. Through legal internships in India and Singapore, Timothy was able to use his international work. “To be a good lawyer, you also need to know how a set of skills you learn in one context can then be applied in another,” he says. These factors explain why 70% of senior UK law firm executives expect mergers and acquisitions in the legal sector to increase over the next 12 months, according to the latest HSBC Investment and Growth Strategies in Law Firms report. PwC`s legal arm received approval for alternative business structures (ABS) in 2015. Two years later, it integrated its legal offer into PwC and now offers around 25 training contracts per year. The first list of newly qualified London lawyers (NQ) starts at £63,000. Legal teams assembled by mega-bean counter firms could shake up the law If the Big 4 legal deals address how they practice their audit practices, I`d be afraid to let them approach the driver`s seat of a deal.

Timothy remembers seeing this collaborative environment in action shortly after joining PwC`s data protection team. At the beginning of a client workshop on data protection, the team realized that the scale of the client`s problem required more than just a legal solution, so the team quickly arranged a meeting with forensic and data discovery experts, much to the client`s delight. “I knew early on that I wanted to study law,” says Blair, who comes from Ireland and studied in Dublin. “When I was 16, I interned at a Dublin bar. It was a good taste of what legal life would be like. But professional experience doesn`t have to be international or even legal to be relevant. While Belinda has experience with in-house legal teams, it was her non-legal experience as a ballet teacher that PwC interviewers asked her for the most. As part of her application, Belinda identified the leadership qualities she had gained from her part-time job as a dance teacher – even though she didn`t know it at the time. The articling student advises candidates to actually examine PwC`s competencies, which are expected of all their lawyers, and to assess their own general skills and experience in relation to each competency. News of the increase comes just weeks after Deloitte announced it was making inroads into the legal profession by introducing a new training contract program designed specifically for the Lawyers` Qualifying Examination (SQE).

In collaboration with the University of Law (ULaw), Deloitte plans to hire its first ten apprentices next September. Since then, the UK legal sector has grown steadily stronger. The number of paid employees is now around 400, and management recently unveiled ambitious plans to double that number in the coming years. Blair`s next move was the American firm Morrison & Foerster. Having thought at the beginning of her career that she would work in capital markets, Blair was now firmly rooted in the area of law she had come to love: commercial law, law enforcement law and regulatory law. “This kind of work brings so many interesting challenges, every case has new legal or regulatory issues that need to be addressed, and there`s also a human element,” she says. “As soon as I started doing this work, I realized this was where I needed to be.” I highly doubt that a large company would choose not to get its legal advice from a large Magic Circle firm with specialized knowledge and decades of experience, only to get it from a large “one size fits all” firm that employs silver circle rejects dotted with brown. PwC Legal, as it was then known, began offering legal services in 2014 when it obtained an Alternative Business Structure (ABS) licence from the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA).

Two years later, she joined her legal arm in the largest audit firm PwC. legalsolutions.thomsonreuters.co.uk/en/trends-insights/reports/small-and-medium-sized-law-firm-market-2021.html Well, according to Susskind, the move could allow accounting giants to offer legal and audit advice to the same client. “And that`s the big hurdle for the Big Four in their efforts to build legal businesses: they can`t respond to a deal or litigation when the interests of audit clients are at stake,” Susskind said in a Times editorial. Accounting giant PwC today strengthened its influence in the legal services industry by announcing a “strategic alliance” with US law firms Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen and Loewy. Susskind admits that Big Four bean counters have yet to “crack the legal market”, warns Susskind: “All bets. are disabled” when they interrupt audit services. Compared to the sheer size of PwC`s global business, the firm has a relatively small but nonetheless large number of trainee lawyers – 25 training contracts per year. However, according to Belinda, this small cohort ensures that all articling students establish a good support network with each other – the strength is reflected in PwC`s A* rating for peer support in this year`s Legal Cheek Trainee and Junior Lawyer survey. The firm also focuses on personal development – interns receive a lot of personal support from their supervisors, and each intern is assigned a career coach who focuses on their personal development: where candidates often get it wrong, it`s impossible to know how PwC`s legal arm fits into the larger business model. “A common mistake is thinking of ourselves as in-house lawyers – we are client-focused service and multidisciplinary practice means we offer much more value to our clients,” Belinda points out.