No prior legal knowledge or experience required
Anyone, even those without prior legal knowledge or experience, will soon be able to experience life as a magic circle trainee with Slaughter and May’s new virtual programme.
The firm’s ‘Virtual Insight Programme’, which launches next week, on Forage, a digital education provider formerly known as InsideSherpa, will see users complete five tasks that simulate the “multi-specialist” work of a Slaughters trainee. To demonstrate that trainees often work on more than one matter at once, four of these tasks follow the story of a fictional takeover while the fifth focuses on a separate transaction.
The tasks will include a commercial awareness multiple-choice questionnaire; responding to a request for proposal (RfP) by preparing part of a pitch document; creating a decision tree for a client to use to develop an app based on the Bribery Act 2010; checking a draft Heads of Terms (the document which sets out the terms of a commercial transaction agreed in principle during negotiations) for sense, spelling, punctuation and grammar; and drafting an attendance note after listening to a short client call with multiple attendees.
The programme — which is open to anyone and requires no prior legal knowledge or experience — allows participants to gain a greater understanding into what a trainee does day-to-day and how a law firm, like Slaughter and May, operates. Once completed, participants receive a certificate and can include the programme on their CV.
A spokesperson from Slaughter and May said:
“We’re delighted that we will be launching our Virtual Insight Programme with Forage next week. The programme has been specially designed to provide an insight into what lawyers do on a day-to-day basis. The programme requires no prior legal knowledge and is open to everyone. It is a great opportunity for individuals to discover if a career in law, and at Slaughter and May, is right for them.”
The firm isn’t the first magic circle member to offer virtual work experience to the masses. Last year, Clifford Chance launched a year-round global virtual work experience programme, open to all university students from the UK, EMEA, the Americas and Asia Pacific, while Linklaters extended its online internship to sixth-formers. Allen & Overy is reportedly considering launching a similar programme.