How would you rate your amount of client contact?

Quality client contact is so much more than silently attending meetings or offering cups of coffee. For trainees, the amount and variety of client interactions plays an important part in their experience on the training contract. Sometimes client contact goes much further than a routine transaction, such as at Duncan Lewis Solicitors where a trainee describes ‘getting asylum for clients, justice for clients, damages for clients such as obtaining £85k for a vulnerable client’. An Ashfords LLP trainee comments that ‘the sheer amount of exposure I have experienced during my training so far is astonishing. On a daily basis I am entrusted to work on live, chargeable matters and I am encouraged to take initiative in progressing cases, meeting clients, counsel and other third parties’. Trainees at Forbes Solicitors identify a highlight in their training as ‘dealing with clients and completing high-value transactions’. ‘Exposure to entrepreneurial clients and the vast responsibility given to trainees’ is applauded by Fladgate LLP trainees. They highlight the ‘opportunity to develop as a trainee, including building a network in specific areas of law that are of interest’. At Howes Percival trainees found a ‘high level of client contact and responsibility given from an early stage’. A trainee at Hodge Jones & Allen Solicitors Limited comments that ‘my supervisors give me such a great range of work to do. I also attend their clients in prison to go through disclosure and evidence on my own and am able to manage files with their supervision’.