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London Vacation Scheme

Our London vacation scheme is the perfect opportunity for you to experience life with our firm. You’ll spend two weeks with us and, although some of your time on the scheme will be about you getting to know what we do and who we work with, you’ll have plenty of time to get to know our trainees, associates and partners too.

Overview

Our vacation scheme is the most in-depth way to see and experience what life as a lawyer here is like. You’ll spend two paid weeks* getting real-world experience from day one. You might be drafting legal responses, offering advice or conducting research. We’ll even try, where possible, to involve you in a court hearing. It’s fully immersive and gives you the chance to gain a place on one of our training contracts.

*£500 per week – tax implications may affect the total amount paid. For further advice see the gov.uk website.

We are now accepting applications until 6th January.

 

Apply now

Eligibility

Programme structure

The vacation scheme runs for two weeks. During that time, you’ll be part of the day-to-day operations of our legal teams. We’ll partner you up with a buddy who will support you during your time with us and introduce you to an incredible network of people.

From day one

There isn’t much to do in the way of introductory courses or chats. After you’ve had a chance to meet your buddy, we’ll get you immersed in life at Clyde. From the start, you’ll be able to be hands-on, this could include: observing cases, sitting in on meetings, offering advice or drafting legal documents.

Witness excellence

You’ll be able to see and speak to some of our most senior practitioners. Observe them in their day-to-day roles and understand how they approach certain aspects of case preparation, research and technical application of the law.

Courtroom insight

As part of the programme, you may attend court hearings, arbitrations or mediations. Here you’ll be able to see the diverse litigation styles we deal with.‎

Networking for the future

Throughout your two weeks here you’ll meet people who could play a huge role in your legal future. We encourage you to take every opportunity to network, so much so we’ll put on a couple of events to allow you to make those valuable connections.

The final interview

Throughout the programme, you’ll be preparing for the final strengths-based interview with help from a senior fee earner and our early careers team. This is your opportunity to really shine. We'll take the results from this interview, along with feedback from your time with us to offer training contracts to top performers.

Let's take it step by step

Our strengths-based recruitment process is based on fairness and equity. It’s designed to help us identify what motivates you to work at a city law firm, over your learnt experiences, and helps you show us the most authentic version of yourself. Here’s how it works:

Applications open

For all programmes, you’ll need to make your application online via our online application system. At this stage you’ll just need to complete your basic personal information. No lengthy written tasks for you to complete here.

Digital simulation

Following your online application, you will be invited to complete our digital simulation. It’s an assessment you can complete in your own time and space. It constraints a variety of questions with responses being a mix between written and video. They’re designed to present you with some of the challenges you can expect to face at Clyde & Co. Some questions will try to understand your motivations behind your application. It’s about as realistic as it gets. For more advice and tips on how to approach this stage, visit the learning hub. We then invite eligible candidates, who performed best in the digital simulation, to the final stage – our assessment centre.

Assessment centre

This is the final stage of the process. Here, we are assessing candidates based on the strengths that will deliver success in a role. As part of the assessment day, you will take part in a short written exercise, a role play scenario, a group exercise and a strengths-based interview.

Offer

Our favourite part – the offer. We’ll call you to let you know if you’ve been successful, if you’re not, we’ll offer you some feedback for your development.

London Vacation Scheme FAQs

Our vacation schemes are held in our London office to recruit for our London/Guildford training contracts, and Glasgow and Edinburgh for our Scotland training contract. We only run vacation schemes during the summer.

As we are recruiting for 2026 training contracts via our 2024 vacation schemes, we require that applicants are law undergraduates in their penultimate-year or non-law undergraduates in their final year. 

No, unfortunately we have a limited number of places on our vacation schemes. We are unable to make exceptions to the eligibility criteria.

Final year law students are eligible to apply for our Bristol training contracts or our June 2024 intake of the paralegal academy (applications will open in February 2024 for various locations across the UK).

Yes – you’ll need to be available to attend the entire scheme (2 weeks).

Our programmes are in-person and we require all participants of our schemes to be based in the UK. We cannot sponsor visas for our programmes (only training contracts), so you will need the Right to Work via a passport or a student visa (our programme dates will need to be outside your term dates to be eligible).

We’ll aim to let you know within two weeks of the vacation scheme end date.

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