Commercial Academy

Slaughter and May are looking to recruit talented individuals to join the first cohort of our Commercial Academy in September 2025.

The commercial Academy is a unique two-year programme designed to give you a thorough understanding of business development, legal operations and knowledge and learning within a law firm.

Start your career with us and you’ll work alongside some of the world’s best lawyers and the most astute professionals across the Commercial teams, who will challenge and stimulate you to be your best whilst working together, growing and developing our fantastic client relationships.

The programme is supported by a range of coaching and training, all designed to support your profressional development.

What is the Commercial Academy?

During the programme, you will undertake a total of four rotations of six months’ duration each across five Commercial specialists. The seats include:

• Marketing and Communications
• Business Development
• Research and Analysis
• Legal Operations
• Knowledge and Learning

Each rotation will see you learning the key skills unique to that discipline, as well as honing your commercial acumen and developing a range of more general skills essential in today’s business environment.

Your role in each seat will vary according to your skills and interests but the goal of each seat will be to enable you to thoroughly understand each area and whether working within it aligns with your longer-term aspirations.

The Marketing and Communications seat will provide you with experience of content creation and production, as well as the creative process required to share our messages in a way that reflects our reputation for excellence, connects with our audiences effectively and drives tangible outcomes.

The Business Development and Pitching seat will enable you to understand how we target and build relationships with clients and potential clients, and how we convert those relationships into fee-earning opportunities.

In the Research and Analysis seat you will learn about the sources of data available to guide our decisions, how that data is used to drive strategic choices, and how it can be presented in the most effective way. You will also learn about how law firms make money and the different metrics that are used to drive success.

In these Legal Operations seat, you will be introduced to the fast-moving world of legal innovation and learn about how the delivery of legal advice is changing as a result of the introduction of new techniques and approaches that are driving efficiency and new ways of working.

In the Knowledge and Learning seat, you will discover how we identify and share best practices and legal knowledge, as well as how we provide the on-going training and support to both our legal teams and our business services colleagues that enable them to deliver world-class solutions to legal challenges.

Qualifications:

• A-Level BBB or higher.
• Final year university student or graduate.
• Undergraduates should be on track for a 2:1 degree; graduates require a minimum of a 2:1 degree.
• You will need to have the right to work in the UK for the duration of the scheme (until September 2027)

Location:

The role is to be based in the firm’s London offices with the opportunity to work from home for part of the week.

Salary:

The role of Commercial Graduate attracts a salary of £38,000.

How to Apply:

As part of the application process, you will need to answer some questions about your background and attach your CV. We will also ask you to complete a voluntary diversity and equality questionnaire.

We expect candidates to use technology in an appropriate way to support them in preparing their applications, and in particular we are open to those who use generative AI to improve and correct their statements. However, applicants that use generative AI in a way that creates generic text that has obviously not been reviewed before submission will be automatically discounted. The questions we are asking are deliberately designed to test your individual skills and capabilities, as well as your motivations and thinking processes, and generic AI generated answers will not provide us with the information we need.

Successful candidates will be invited to an in-person assessment centre in April 2025.

Slaughter and May is dedicated to an inclusive, barrier-free recruitment process. For any questions or adjustments needed, please contact us.