How to make your way through an international firm as a junior

When I started studying Law, I simply had no idea about which kind of careers where there avaialble for a freshly young and highly motivated lawyer, awaiting its opportunity to shine- like the rest of its generation-. However, the bachelor was simply focused on learning different law subjects, from a practical and theoretical point of view; nothing more, nothing else.

By the time I finished the degree, none of my teachers nor classes helped me anyhow to learn how to survive in my first steps of the professional career; even less how to behave and how to act so as to survive in a big law firm. Of course, it is not the same to work for a little firm of 4 or 5 lawyers than in a multinational firm with hundreds of lawyers from across the world, with a permanent evaluation year after year coming from a dedicated human resources team, and with an homogeneous working way across the different areas that you must learn in order to be somehow useful in your first years.

Numerous studies have proven that a junior lawyer does not report any benefit for the first 3 years of its hiring from a firm. In fact, it just costs money to the firm. How to survive these first 3 challenging years?

As for my experience, when working in a big law firm, you will be looking to invest huge amount of time in working hard to learn. But not only to learn how to deal with a concrete legal issue; you need to learn how to be useful and relevant for the corporation, much more importantly, to be of use for the tutor or advisor you have been assigned to.

When you will be seen by your coworkers as unique, methodic, resourceful, always sacrificing free-time to invest more of it in your tasks, reliable and with high motivation to learn and accept critics, you will have already achieved a strong path towards staying in the firm. It is a fact firms invest a huge amount of time and money into training you, and if we take into account lawyers know what we learn in the university is not exactly what we will be doing in a firm, by showing a strong motivation to learn and aspire to reach high in the firm, we will be selling ourselves better than by knowing how to solve every legal case but on the other hand leaving cooperation and good forms away.