Degree qualification and year of graduation: Politics and International Relations, 2023
Why did you choose Weil?
I did a vacation scheme here and left fairly sure it was where I wanted to train. The main reason was the work. The firm acts for clients on large, complicated deals, and even in a couple of weeks you sit close enough to see how those deals actually run. The other reason was the size of the teams. They are small, which means trainees are given real work early on. I also liked the culture of the teams and could picture myself working there.
What does your role involve?
I joined in September 2025. I am now in my third seat, in Funds, after seats in Private Equity and M&A and then Tax.
In Funds, a lot of what I do is running fundraisings through to closing. That means reviewing documents, sending them out for signature, chasing investors and the client, keeping the internal team up to date on where things stand, and checking that every document matches the capital commitments behind it. It is detailed work, and getting a number wrong is not a small problem when the number is how much someone has committed to invest.
Tax was different. There I spent most of my time reviewing and marking up documents, changing the wording so that particular taxes were either covered or excluded. How you approach that depends on which side you are on. For example, what a buyer wants from a tax clause is not what a seller wants, and the same wording gets pulled in opposite directions.
Corporate had more in common with Funds. Much of it was keeping a process moving: telling people where documents had got to, and making sure the right people, whether that was local counsel abroad or specialist teams like Tax and Antitrust, had what they needed with enough time to do something useful with it.
What does a typical day look like?
There isn't really one, and that is a big part of why the job is interesting. One day I might be running a closing, working through signatures and keeping several parties moving at the same time. Another day, especially in Tax, might involve spending most of the day on one complicated document, doing a fair amount of reading before I put a view forward. On another I might be given the first draft of a contract for a pro bono client. The variety took some getting used to, but you learn quickly how to switch between the two, and how to work out early on which kind of day you are having.
What have you enjoyed most so far?
The responsibility and watching my confidence catch up with it. Because the teams are small, you are often the only junior on a matter, so the work is genuinely yours. In my Tax seat I worked directly with a partner, which meant the first draft of anything came from me.
On one multi-billion-dollar sale, that included confirming the share numbers that would go into the SPA. I worked through hundreds of documents, checking that signatures were in order and that the share numbers matched the spreadsheet the client had given us. Being trusted with that in my first year surprised me, and it was daunting at the time. But seeing the table I had checked sitting in the final agreement was a good moment, and it changed how I thought about the job. Being trusted turns out to be a quick way to learn.
What is the training like?
Each seat starts with training sessions, but they run alongside live work rather than before it, and you pick up matters in your first week. I think that is the right way round. Sitting through sessions before you have touched anything real makes it hard to know what to ask. Doing both at once means the questions I bring are about the work in front of me, and I get much more out of them as a result.
A lot of the training is also informal. Working in small teams means you see how associates draft, how they speak to clients and how they handle the other side, and you pick up a great deal just from being close to it. If you ask questions people will answer them, and nobody has ever made me feel I should have known already.
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