Completing a Training Contract at HFW is your passport to becoming a truly global lawyer.
As a Trainee, almost all of the matters that you work on will have an international dimension. We also offer international secondments to our Trainees to provide them with the opportunity to experience our international network first-hand.
Our Training Contracts
We look for Trainees who are pragmatic, can rise to a challenge, and who are motivated to work hard and learn from every opportunity. Our Trainee intake is diverse, with Trainees coming to us from a variety of universities and disciplines, some having had previous careers and others joining straight after their studies.
We look for Trainees who have an interest in our industry sectors, and in doing international work, but you don't need any technical knowledge of our sectors – we can teach you that.
Each year we recruit approximately 50% law and 50% non-law students. To apply to us you should be at least a penultimate year law student or a final year non-law student, although we also welcome individuals who apply at later stages.
Recruitment overview
We are committed to recruiting Trainees from a wider range of backgrounds with different perspectives and experiences. During the application process we assess candidates on a "CV blind" basis. This helps us to ensure that individuals are selected on merit alone, and details such as the name of the school/university that you attended do not form part of our selection criteria. By doing this, we aim to remove unconscious bias from our selection process and to ensure that decisions are made entirely on merit.
As a part of our commitment to social inclusion, we have partnered with Rare, a multi-award winning diversity company, to integrate their Contextual Recruitment System (CRS) into our recruitment process. We understand that not every applicant’s achievements look the same on paper, and the CRS enables us to further understand the context in which applicants’ experiences have been gained. The CRS helps us to open access to the legal profession, and recruit the very best people from a range of diverse backgrounds.
Our recruitment process consists of an online application, a virtual half day assessment centre, the vacation scheme (if applied for) and a final round Partner interview. We assess applications for our vacation schemes and training contracts on a rolling basis.
Requirements
We have moved away from having strict academic criteria as we prefer to assess individuals' achievements in the round. We are committed to recruiting Trainees from a wider range of backgrounds with different perspectives and experiences, to reflect the diversity of our clients. Where our Trainees are alike is that they are all hard working, ambitious and globally minded.
