Welcome to the fifth edition of The Lex 100 – the insider’s guide to the UK’s top law firms. If you want to discover what it’s really like to do your training at one of the UK’s leading legal practices, this is the book for you. We sent online surveys to 135 firms to ask those already in the hot seat – current trainees – for their honest views about their firm. Once again, we were overwhelmed by the number of responses, with over 2,500 flooding in. This makes the annual Lex 100 Survey the most comprehensive of its kind.

We asked trainees to rate important aspects of their working life, from general job satisfaction, amount of client contact and stress levels to friendliness of the firm, social life (yes, you can still have one – but not, it seems, at every firm…) and confidence of being kept on. The results make very interesting reading – check out some of the trainees’ responses to the best and worst moments of their training! You can browse through each firm’s rankings and the trainees’ comments in the main section of the book. We have also compiled tables of the leading firms in each category of the survey in our Lex 100 Winners section.

If you’re looking for up-to-date commercial information about the firms, we have that too – from our sister publications, the renowned Legal 500 and Legal Business magazine. Now you can find out the truth about 
top-ranked practice areas, clients, deals and the all-important turnover and profits.

In the final part of the book there are some helpful hints from leading recruiters on matters ranging from assessment days to getting the most out of law fairs, together with a section on LPC providers. Altogether a packed but concise read, bringing you everything you need to know at every stage of your legal education – from your first day on campus to making that final decision between those top law firms offering you a job!

We loved reading about the experiences of those already training and hope you will too. If you have any views or feedback we’d like to hear from you.

Happy reading.

Teresa Sandon and Jo Thesiger

Editors of The Lex 100 (and once trainees themselves)

This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it