Bird & Bird

How many partners and lawyers does your firm have?

Bird & Bird has 1,350 lawyers across our 30 fully integrated offices worldwide. Our Sydney office has been growing rapidly and currently has 14 partners and 55 other lawyers, ranging from Associate to Senior Counsel.

How many clerks are you intending to take on this summer?

Our intake numbers vary but we are planning to take 4-6 clerks for the 2020-2021 summer clerkship.

How many graduate lawyers did you take on this year?

We took on 5 graduate lawyers during the 2019-2020 period.

How does your firm embody the notions of social and corporate responsibility?

We were most recently named as an Australasian Lawyer Employer of Choice 2019; in recognition of our ongoing commitment to CSR initiatives. Our comprehensive global CSR framework is comprised of 5 local pillars of Environ- ment, Diversity & Inclusion, Fundraising, Volunteering, and Pro bono. This allows us to channel our focus into each specialised area of CSR through initiatives steered by com- mittees comprising a full cross section of our people.

How does your firm strive to protect its junior lawyers’ worklife balance?

Work-life balance is important for all of our people. It is why we joined Bird & Bird, a firm with one of the lowest turnovers of staff in our market. • We enjoy weekly “morning tea” town hall meetings (a gastronomical delight and a Sydney office institution). We encourage and support lunchtime sporting groups (touch, soccer and netball). • We provide a well-equipped kitchen/café area for meeting and eating, hold social committee events and we also subsidize on-site yoga classes (with amazing end-of-journey showering facilities downstairs). • We actively encourage all our people to benefit from the many supportive lunch n learn sessions, educational articles and the talks we share, and also the 3rd party services available such as accessing pro bono work via Vollie (our volunteering partner), seeking support and coaching from Grace Papers (our parental support partner) and the “well-nest” via the Centre for Corporate Health (our EAP partner). Importantly though, we are not a firm that encourages long hours of work for its own sake. While we are responsive to client needs, we neither have nor want a stressed and unhappy workforce being asked to work well beyond that which is reasonable or desirable. Firstly, we are unique in our summer clerk hiring process. We read all applications several times and make an informed overall judgement, rather than cull solely based on one criteria alone. We engage in warm and authentic conversations with our candidates. There are no psychometric tests or group culling exercises here.

Our selection of clerks is based on our assessment as to whether the applicant has what it takes to become a future part- ner of our global firm. We are an international firm with a focus on innovation and technology. Our clerks are exposed to high profile matters with market leading national and international clients from the very beginning.

Once qualified as Associates they will have the opportunity to attend a regional Associates’ Retreat held at a beautiful destination in our Asia Pacific region (previously Bangkok and Bintan Island).

Does your firm offer any opportunities to work overseas?

Yes, many. In addition to the regional Associates’ Retreat mentioned above, our lawyers are given opportunities to attend our frequent global sector group and practice group retreats in Europe, which allows you to network with partners and colleagues in different jurisdictions and build your internal profile. Bird & Bird also provides opportunities for client secondments as well as overseas inter-office secondments during the course of your career with Bird & Bird.

What makes your firm’s culture unique?

We seek to be the number one firm in the world for businesses being changed by technology and the digital economy. We are a fully integrated international law firm with just over 100 employees working within the Sydney office. Our Sydney numbers allow us to build warm interpersonal relationships with every team member in the office, regardless of their position, which is further reinforced by our brand-new office design.

We pride ourselves on our CSR initiatives and we are always looking for ways to better our offering, recognised most recently through our naming as Australasian Lawyer Employer of Choice 2019.

A truly unique offering for which we are well-known is our weekly morning tea – bringing together the entire firm to reflect on what we have achieved in the past week and what we can look forward to in the following week. This is a great way for us at twobirds to celebrate birthdays and special events, share stories and hear global updates directly from our Managing Partner and international guests and our many visitors from other Bird & Bird offices.

Day in the Life

5.30am – My ‘optimistic’ alarm goes off in the hopes I might get up early and do something productive before work; it’s quickly snoozed before my much more realistic alarm goes off at 6.30 and my day starts.

8.30am – I jump off the train at St James station and start the short walk to work (a perk of being in the CBD). Usually on my walk I’ll start to think about the tasks I have for the day and prepare a mental to do list.

8.40am – I like being in the office a little earlier so I can settle in for the day ahead, I read through any emails I received overnight and check the daily Birdtalk newsletter which has all the major updates from our teams around the globe. I also spend some time chatting with the team and catching up on the latest news in the office.

9.00am – I start the morning off working on a piece of research I’m hoping to finish today, it was an unique topic about secondhand dealers so there was lots of work involved in pulling it together and it’s quite satisfying to have a the final product almost ready to go.

10.30am – All work stops, the whole office heads to the kitchen for our end of the week morning tea. Shane, our Managing Partner, runs through some notices and important mentions (there are some birthdays this week) and we all have some time to catch up.

11.30am – I sit down with the special counsel (we have both snuck in an extra brownie from morning tea) and Shane to discuss the second-hand dealer research and our response to the client.

12.00pm – A client from one of our international offices has sent us a table of questions relating to privacy and data regulations in Australia. I enjoy privacy law so I’m excited to get started.

1.00pm – We have a lunch time CPD on today, Sophie Dawson, one of the partners from Litigation is giving a talk on defamation law and there’s lunch provided which is always an added bonus.

2.00pm – Back to working on my research task, I have just discovered exactly what a biometric template entails and am looking into the use of sensitive information.

4.30pm – To close out the day, I sit down with an Associate, to discuss our privacy research task, joined by the Special Counsel in charge of the matter. She walks us through her review of client’s privacy policy in relation to the questions we’ve been working on and points out where Australian Privacy law differs to European.