Building my career at Blake Morgan

I am a Paralegal in the London Real estate team and a future trainee solicitor at Blake Morgan LLP.  I’ve been at the firm for over two years. I joined as an Admin Assistant in January 2018 and was promoted to Paralegal in 2019, before being offered a trainee contract shortly thereafter.

The most noticeable thing when joining Blake Morgan was just how friendly the office was. There was and remains a strong sense of collegiality amongst colleagues and a culture of openness and transparency throughout the firm.

Having an open-plan office certainly contributes towards this; I am free to communicate and engage with my colleagues, irrespective of seniority and this presents more learning opportunities and enables greater connectivity within teams.

The small teams and relatively small intake of trainees allow for more hands-on experience and greater client contact. I regularly partake in client calls and meetings, help organise networking events and I am currently leading several property finance matters. Being entrusted with these responsibilities has been crucial to my personal development at the firm and is emblematic of the type of work a trainee would be expected to undertake.

The firm has an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) committee, which is dedicated to ensuring the equality and inclusion of all staff. I am personally a member of the BM Pride and allies group, which is one of the networking groups within the firm. As a group, we are constantly in dialogue about how we can improve our working environment and what work and social events we can run to help ensure LGBT+ visibility and inclusion.

I am looking forward to starting my training period next September. I am eager to experience other areas of law, but also to expand on some of the extra-professional and social initiatives that I have involved myself in already. I hope that the experience I’ve gained over the past two years will lend itself well to any forthcoming challenges and I can’t wait to learn new things and make some new acquaintances too.