Summer clerkship

Lisa Millar: I work at Allens as the Graduate Resourcing consultant for the Sydney Office, my focus in everyday work is to recruit our summer clerks and graduates into the office and really try & attract the best quality students into the firm.

Allens is a fantastic place to work, it is a supportive environment, it recruits excellent lawyers, and it’s a great place for students to start their careers. Really key competency for us as a firm to recruit people with that commerciality, number of other competencies that we do look for obviously is technical excellence, I think resilience, I think the ability to work effectively in a team, to lead a team, and to communicate effectively.

There are a number of tips that I would probably give students thinking about applying for a clerkship, and that would be probably the number one tip I would say is just really research the firm & understand the differences and what makes each firm unique. The top 2 firms are similar in the work they’ll do and similar to the client base, but the culture & the people are often quite different so I think it’s important for students to definitely research the firm, and tailor their applications accordingly. So rather than just, I guess, copy & pasting their applications to a number of firms out there, they should really spend the time to really understand who we are, understand our clients, and understand what makes us unique, and also just to I guess, be yourself, so that would be the final tip. Try to let your personality come through, it’s really important for Allens to ensure that we’re recruiting interesting people with a wide variety of interests, so I think being able to show who you really are, and what you really want in your career is something we really value.   

The academics are important, but they’re not the be all and end all. We look at your application holistically, so we don’t just screen out because of your grades. We’ll look at your extracurricular activities, your work experience, your commerciality, what you really enjoy doing in your spare time as that’s just important sometimes as the grades. We also appreciate that your 1^st & 2^nd year grades are sometimes not as strong, and that is something that we completely understand but we would like to see I guess the inclination of the grades improving over the years that they’re studying.

Obviously Allen’s is a full service commercial law firm, so commercial awareness & commercial interest is something that the firm is really looking for. The commerciality is a tough one because I guess we often say it and people might not understand what we really mean. For us it’s really just an interest in the commercial world, what’s happening both within the Australian market and globally, it’s important that they are interested in that, they enjoy seeing, you know, reading stories in the financial press about what’s happening in the market, recent deals that we’ve been a part of. It’s important that they try and research those deals and try and bring that into their application as well, for any high profile deals that the firm has been involved in, they’ve read in the business reviews, or the business papers.

Ed Copeman: My name is Ed Copeman & I’m in my last semester of the Juris Doctor program at the moment, at UTS, and I currently work at Allens here 2 days a week, paralegally.

My advice for someone applying for a clerkship at any firm is a number of things. I think firstly, you want to put yourself in the shoes of the law firm & think about what is it exactly they are looking for in an employee. At the end of the day the aim of the firm is to serve its clients in the best way possible, and as a result if you think about that aspect of it, then that will help you understand, ok what is the firm looking for in this interview & how can I get across those aspects of myself which will help the firm achieve its goals. 

The 2^nd piece of advice I’d give is to really make use of the workshops & seminars that the Universities and the law firms put on. Those seminars are hugely helpful in terms of providing practical tips about how to operate in social scenarios, how to approach the interviews & also how to write cover letters and things like that. I think those skills are invaluable and the more practice you get at them the better you are going to perform over the application process.