Work experience student - Unpaid Role Review

I was at Pinsent Masons for a week as a work experience student. This involved attending talks by current Pinsent Masons employees, from personal assistants and team administrators to trainees, solicitors and even senior associates, in the mornings, and then joining practice groups in the afternoons to experience the kind of work a trainee lawyer might do. For example, I was given proofreading and research tasks, and tasks involving extracting certain pieces of information from long documents-which was much more interesting than it sounds!

The business group exercise that we undertook one morning helped me to develop my commercial awareness, and to better understand what is being assessed in these kinds of exercises. Proofreading tasks helped me to develop my attention to detail, and I also became more adept at understanding legal language, and increased my familiarity with the kinds of documents involved in certain types of law. Perhaps more importantly, however, I gained a much better understanding of what being a lawyer involves, and of the differences between the kinds of work undertaken by lawyers with different specialisms.

There were times when our supervisors didn’t have anything for us to do, which could be quite boring, and sometimes the talks in the morning seemed a little long. However, especially towards the end of the week, when I had a very supportive supervisor and was being set numerous interesting tasks, I began to really enjoy myself.

It would be difficult for us to feel valued within such a short period of time. However, I did feel valued by some individuals for whom I did work, and Pinsent Masons certainly invested time and resources in the program eg giving us information packs and lending us named laptops and email addresses for the week.

The program was very well structured in that each day began with activities or talks given to the whole group of work experience students, and then each student went to a different practice group after this. It was also a good idea to have each student go to two different practice groups during the week. My only criticism would be that some of the supervisors didn’t seem to have the time to give feedback to the students, which made me wonder why they volunteered/ been selected to be supervisors.

N/A

The amount of support given depended mainly on the supervisor to which you were allocated. My supervisors for the first half of the week were much more distant than my supervisor for the second half of the week, who was extremely supportive. However, I was pleased to hear that the Graduate Recruitment team seek feedback on each student from their supervisor at the end of the week.

Understandably for a work experience program for students who’ve just finished year 12 or 13, this is an unpaid scheme. Expenses are also not paid, apart from lunch on the first day. This is not something I would complain about, since it was a very beneficial scheme. However, it was more problematic for people who did not live nearby and had to pay for accommodation for the week.

This wasn't really applicable within a week-long scheme

Yes

The scheme was a really great way to gain new skills, find out more about the different departments within a law firm and find out what makes Pinsent Masons different from other law firms. I also hope that it will stand me in good stead if I apply to Pinsent Masons for a vacation scheme in three years’ time.

This is a competitive scheme: this year, 110 applicants were successful across the whole country, out of a total of 700. Therefore, follow the advice on the website and check your application VERY carefully for typos and other small errors. Also, just take time over your application, and think carefully about how you can demonstrate commercial awareness and the other required competencies.