DLSS Seasonal Clerkship Guide 2023

INSURANCE If your uni friends and classmates are anything like mine were during our final years of law school, you might start asking yourself a bunch of Nate Cheng questions like, ‘how will I get a job at Lawyer the end of this?’ ‘How do I decide which area of law I like best and what to focus on?’ ‘Is law really what I want to do?’ Like many things in life, you’ll find that these questions have a way of working themselves out, even if they cause a great deal of worry at the start. If you’re like me, you might want to ‘try before you decide’. My clerkship then graduate program at Hall & Wilcox both provided great opportunities to do just that.

Hall & Wilcox has a strong reputation for delivering legal services through its Smarter Law approach.

Smarter Law involves constantly thinking about doing things innovatively and efficiently so that we can save time and money without compromising our excellence, accuracy, common sense and foresight. This reputation was what attracted me to the firm, and I found myself undertaking the seasonal clerkship program in mid-2021 where I worked with the employment and migration services team.

As a clerk, I was exposed to a variety of work. Employment law involves a mix of litigation, advisory and transactional work, so I had the opportunity to prepare deeds and contracts, attend conciliations, mediations and hearings, and undertake a variety of legal research that would be incorporated into submissions in court. A law firm is built up of so much more than just lawyers. The seasonal clerkship program was the perfect chance for me to learn about the structure of the firm and to discover the role and impact of the corporate services, marketing and client solutions/innovation teams.

I enjoyed working at Hall & Wilcox so much that I re-joined the firm as a paralegal with the banking and financial services team a few months before starting my graduate rotations. Hall & Wilcox has a strong team of paralegals working across each team, and the firm always keen to invest in its people, including university students who are curious and who aspire to work in the legal profession. As a paralegal, my focus was working with investment funds. I was fully integrated with the team, and my colleagues involved me in work such as drafting and amending trust constitutions and credit contracts.

I then started the graduate program at the beginning of 2022. Entering into a graduate program can be both exciting and nerve-wracking. There are many opportunities to get involved in interesting matters, even beyond the scope of your rotations. This allows you to develop both the foundational skills to become a lawyer, as well as the commercial and industry-based knowledge that enables you to understand the ‘business’ side of running a law firm.