Position:  One year qualified solicitor
Education: History (BA and PhD), University of Leeds; GDL, Nottingham Law School; LPC, College of Law, London
Joined Clifford Chance: 2008

My first seat at Clifford Chance was in Banking and I really enjoyed it. I was terrified when I first started, but I had a fantastic supervisor who took the role of a mentor to me. He still takes an interest in my career and I often go to him for advice - for example, I spoke to him a lot when I was thinking about which practice area I wanted to qualify into.

In my first few months, I was worked on the Bank of England loan to Northern Rock. It was a highly sensitive transaction, which obviously limits what you can say about it externally, but it's exciting to be working on something you see in the headlines and that people talk about in a social environment.

After Banking I moved on to Securitisation, which is another transactional department. Lehman Brothers collapsed while I was there and we worked on a number of deals that were structured to take advantage of the schemes introduced by the Bank of England and the European Central Bank to improve the liquidity position of the banking system - again these were very interesting transactions.

My third seat was Insolvency, which is the group I decided to qualify into. It's really interesting because it is a great mix of transactional and advisory work. It also counts as a contentious seat. During my Insolvency seat I worked on the restructuring of British Vita, a group of manufacturing companies, and of Sanitec, a Finnish bathroom company. Both restructurings involved debt for equity swaps aimed at reducing the levels of debt on the balance sheets of the relevant companies. The British Vita restructuring was implemented by way of a creditor scheme of arrangement - a court-based insolvency process - and I attended court for the first hearing of the scheme. This transaction involved 18 jurisdictions, from New York to Australia, which made it especially challenging.

I then completed my final seat in the Private Funds Group, which advises private equity houses on raising funds to buy various types of asset. It was particularly interesting because it allowed me to understand the funding arrangements that sit at the top of the debt financing structures I had seen in other groups. The formal training here is great. The training programme in each department is comprehensive and people are committed to keeping you abreast of new developments, so the learning process continues throughout your seat. The formal training is complemented by the support you receive from senior colleagues when you are working on transactions. People here take the time to explain things to you during the course of a transaction - that sort of support and insight is invaluable.

I love the diversity of Clifford Chance. It's a fascinating mix of people from all over the world and from different universities. It's an environment that I know will help me to achieve my ambitions - to excel at what I do and to keep learning as much as I can.