Becoming a Lawyer

The Pathway to Becoming a Lawyer

The Eversheds Lawyer Development Framework (ELDF) has been designed for those intent on becoming a solicitor and aims to support your personal and professional growth throughout your career with us. It not only offers you a clear career structure for the future once you achieve full professional qualification; it will also ensure that you have exactly the right blend of knowledge, behaviours and skills to excel at every new stage of your development.

Hear Naeema and Amrik talk about their careers at Eversheds

Trainee

As a trainee, you will benefit from the world-class lawyer training and the kind of personal and professional development you would expect from a leading international law firm. So in addition to a carefully tailored development programme, designed to support you through to becoming a fully qualified solicitor, we'll help you cultivate key business and leadership skills such as team working, project management, communication and presentation skills. Our aim is to ensure that you get a fully rounded experience of the work we do, the clients we work for and, crucially, how we deliver our service.

Newly Qualified

How and where will you take your career forward once you qualify? As you might expect, there are a number of options. You may choose to stay in the same office where your training contract started, for example, or to join a different office. Equally, you could decide to apply your skills to a specialist area or perhaps go on a secondment.

Our focus is on making sure you get hard-edged experience of legal work, allowing you to develop an in-depth understanding of the market in which you work.

Associate

How far and fast you develop within Eversheds depends entirely on your individual aptitudes, strengths and performance. Once you have a sufficient depth and breadth of experience, you will be ready to take on the role of Associate. We won't just be looking for great technical expertise. By this stage, you'll have proven ability to build client relationships, produce consistent results, collaborate with colleagues across the firm and promote your team and our business with real confidence.

Senior Associate

Your training will increasingly focus on the skills necessary to run key client relationships, market the firm, do specialist work and lead others by example. Having proved yourself as an Associate, you will have the professional experience and credibility to become to take on the role of Senior Associate.

For some people, this role is a staging post on their path to becoming a partner. But we also pioneered this role as a respected career choice in itself. Indeed, one of the key advantages of our size and our international reach is that we have the resources to offer a growing range of career paths tailored to your individual needs, ambitions, strengths and specialist interests. It's also true that Eversheds has trained many lawyers who are today working within industries such as business, finance and law - a clear testament to the quality and reputation of our training environment.

Partner

Normally you will have gained extensive experience at senior associate level or equivalent before you become eligible for promotion to Partner. As we pointed out above, partnership isn't for everyone and there are people who have very fulfilling and challenging careers at Eversheds without becoming a partner. But it is true to say that when we recruit trainees, we are looking for leaders of the future. It's not a numbers game; it's about seeing your potential and investing in it.

Evershed's Pathway to Becoming lawyer