Traineeships in Different Practice Areas

As a trainee at Gilson Gray, you get the opportunity to rotate across different departments and experience the work that those teams undertake for six months. This is a great way to get an insight into the type of work each team does and help you decide what area you’d like to qualify into – you essentially get to ‘try before you buy’!

Gilson Gray is a full service firm which allows you the opportunity to try departments ranging from corporate and commercial to conveyancing to litigation and all things in between.

Every department is very different and comes with its own rewards and challenges. A key aspect is figuring out whether you prefer transactional or litigious work. For example, corporate and commercial are very transactional based departments compared to litigation, which as the name suggests, is a litigious department.

I have been fortunate that my first seat was within the Commercial Real Estate team dealing with commercial property transactions which gave me experience of transactional work and my second seat was within the Litigation team, where I quickly learned that I was best suited to litigious work and this was the area I was most interested in. Having experienced both types of work, I was able to gain clarity on the area I wanted to qualify into in the future.

As the traineeship at Gilson Gray is so hands-on, you get a real flavor for the type of work you would be doing as a qualified solicitor in the team. Every department provides great experience and exposure for trainees – you really can’t go wrong whichever team you end up in!