Position: Trainee
Education: BSc, Economics and Economic History, London School of Economics; GDL, BPP London; LPC, College of Law, Moorgate
Joined Clifford Chance: February 2010
First seat: General Corporate
Second seat: Capital Markets - Debt and Equity
Third seat: Antitrust

So far it's been a really good experience. Each seat has been very different, though the transactional seats which I've done so far have had some similar aspects in the type of work you do. You get quite a lot of client contact and responsibility to manage aspects of a deal, which is really good.

In my first seat I got to work on the Kraft takeover of Cadbury towards the end of the deal. In fact there were four trainees who did due diligence on that deal together, each taking responsibility for different elements of it. I also worked on another deal in both Corporate and Capital Markets, for eight months altogether, when GDF Suez took control of International Power to form the world's largest energy company.

That was really high powered. I worked on that in Corporate when the transaction first started and when I moved seats, I was put on the same deal. In fact I saw that through from the beginning right through to the end, which is quite unusual for a trainee I think.

As I had a good understanding of the transaction from my time in Corporate, I was given quite a lot of responsibility on the deal while in Capital Markets. Acting as the main internal contact for drawing up the prospectus for the transaction, I had to liaise with various departments in the firm, the client and the other side's lawyers to make sure all the necessary information was included and to obtain their comments on each draft of the prospectus. It was particularly interesting because the deal covered lots of different jurisdictions and provided me with an opportunity to work with various departments around the firm.

In Antitrust, at the moment we're doing a lot of merger work. Many mergers are across borders, so you need to look at competition issues in multiple jurisdictions. We obtain turnover information from the buyer and the target to conduct an analysis across the various jurisdictions to figure out in which countries a filing is triggered. This will impact on the merger timetable. That's the first step that the trainee gets involved with. We also conduct a lot of research into previous cases. We assist with the filings and with putting together various annexes of evidence to support what is written in the filing.

My fourth seat will be in Finance in Dubai. When you're in your first seat, you get to choose four preferences for an international seat and Dubai was one of my choices. I think it's a great opportunity to gain an understanding of the type of work undertaken in another jurisdiction. I am likely to be working on banking and finance, project finance and asset finance, so again it will be quite varied: three types of work in one six-month seat.

In the future I would like to work abroad for a year or two, maybe somewhere in Asia because that's an area which is really developing. I also think the types of transactions you are going to see there will be really interesting and unlike anything that's going on now. I'd also like to go on a client secondment and possibly even work in-house for a client, just to see what it's like from the client's perspective.