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Understanding Law Firm Practice Areas

For most larger law firms, you’ll find that they specialise in different areas of law – known as practice areas.

These practice areas can differ enormously, both in terms of core work and also the skills and competencies required from the lawyers specialising in these areas. For example you’ll often find regulatory lawyers different from M&A lawyers. Therefore it’s important for students and those looking to enter the profession to understand different practice areas.

Even within practice areas there can be individual specialisms. For example, a M&A team could have people who specialise in private M&A, or public M&A or private equity. Finance teams could be divided into structured finance or leveraged finance.

One of the benefits of a training contract programme is that most firms operate a ‘rotational training contract’ which means you move from department to department during your training. Typically this will involve experiencing four departments for 6-months at a time.

As trainees approach qualification, most will understand what type of practice area they are best suited to based on the practice groups they experienced during the training contract.

To help you understand practice groups, and how they differ, our trainees have created these handy videos which provide an overview of a number of practice areas:

Mergers and Acquisitions

Project Finance

Bank Finance

Financial Institutions Advisory & Regulatory Advisory

Antitrust (Competition)

Asset Management (Funds)

Tax

Litigation

International Arbitration

There are many different areas of law that you could potentially practice. We hope the information above has given you some understanding of the options you have available.