Elisabeth Bennett

• Degree: Law, St. Hugh’s College, University of Oxford
• Joined: August 2010
• Doing now: Fraud and Contentious Insolvency
• Office location: London
• Favourite holiday destination: the Caribbean

As is the case for many law students I found choosing which firms to apply to difficult. Having decided that I wanted to join a top international firm my tutor suggested that Hogan Lovells would be a good choice for me. I attended an open day and immediately felt this was a place that I would fit in. What makes Hogan Lovells stand out is the people and the culture; the firm is well known as being welcoming and having an ‘open-door’ policy which is something you hear a lot in the graduate recruitment process but it is true at Hogan Lovells. As a trainee I do not feel intimidated about asking as many questions as I need to in order to understand the work I am doing and the wider context of the deal or case, which I think makes this a great firm to train at. The working environment is very supportive and there is a lot of training.

Before joining the firm I studied the LPC at BPP and took a gap year to travel in Thailand, New Zealand and Australia. I highly recommend taking some time out if, like me, you have gone straight from school to university and then law school.

My first seat was Infrastructure and Project Finance, in the Commercial team. I enjoyed my time there because I was involved in several large transactions and was made to feel very much part of the team. I worked on tasks such as drafting board minutes and companies house forms, attending client meetings and taking a note of negotiations then marking up changes in the key transaction documents. In my current seat I have been lucky enough to go to a Supreme Court hearing on a case arising out of the collapse of Lehman Brothers as well as working on some cases in the Commercial Court. Trips to court aside, much of my time has been spent researching various legal questions, mainly on issues raised in corporate insolvencies, and drafting documents such as party-party correspondence and court documents, as well as attendance notes of client meetings. My final seats are in the Pensions department and a secondment, either to one of the other offices or to a client.