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.

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 took the twenty highest average scores in each survey category to produce our tables. Because the differential in scores between the firms was sometimes negligible, full average scores are shown here.

Be aware that our survey covered a very wide range of firms, from global giants with hundreds of trainees to niche and regional firms with only a handful of trainees, so in these tables we are not attempting to compare like with like. If you wish to do this (eg to compare scores for work/life balance at the Magic Circle firms), then refer to the scores on the individual firms’ pages.