Internationally-renowned businesses, including over 50 Global Fortune 500 or FTSE 100 companies, and over half of the world's top twenty banks, rely on BLP's lawyers for clear, practical legal advice to help them achieve their commercial objectives. They tell us they come to BLP because of our excellence in technical legal quality, our close understanding of their business realities, and our ability to deal flexibly with complexity.
Our personal commitment to their success has seen clients entrust us with their most complex projects, and come back to us time and again - our year-on-year client loyalty exceeds 90%. The quality of service we provide to those companies has been recognised with eight Law Firm of the Year awards since 2004.
Helping clients succeed internationally has also seen the firm expand into emerging markets and global financial centres. We have delivered client projects in 130 countries via our 12 international offices - our international business doubling in the last five years.
A culture that fosters and rewards new thinking has seen BLP become a leading innovator in the legal services sector. BLP is ranked in the top ten most innovative law firms in Europe by the Financial Times for delivering solutions such as: our Integrated Client Service Model; Streamline - BLP's proprietary legal service improvement service; our Integrated Dispute Resolution capability; Lawyers On Demand; and other innovations in client-service that we can share with you if you join us(!).
Our achievements for clients have only been made possible by amazing people. BLP thrives on talent and we invest heavily in helping our people to fulfil their potential. Across the entire firm we run 1200 training courses per annum - roughly five per day - and BLP has been named the best graduate legal employer for four consecutive years by Legal Week.
Our LLM+
Before you can start your training contract, you will need to have completed a post-graduate qualification that is the bridge between academic life and life as a professional lawyer. You may have got the jump on this and already completed a Legal Practice Course (LPC). But if you haven't, we can help. We will enrol you on our bespoke Masters in International Legal Practice (LL.M+ ), the first course of its kind.
The LL.M+ has wider and more comprehensive, practical and international subject coverage than any other available LPC programme and is designed to prepare you much more practically for the start of your career.
Even better, while you're studying we'll typically make an investment in you of around £40,000 to cover the cost of your fees, living costs and in providing lots of additional training. Time and money well spent.
Your training contract with us
When you start at the firm you will participate in a comprehensive induction programme, which is designed to prepare you for practice and to equip you with the practical skills needed to excel as a trainee here.
You will work on real projects from the outset, rotating through four, six-month seats in different parts of the business during your two-year training contract. We encourage trainees to undertake a secondment to one of our clients or an International secondment to one of our overseas offices.
You will have a lot of guidance and input into your seat allocations. Before each seat change, you will meet with your partner mentor and a member of the Graduate Recruitment & Development team, to discuss your future ambitions and which seat options best meet those goals. We work hard to match your seat preferences with the needs of the business; on average 85% of our trainees will receive their first or second preference each seat. That way, when decision time comes on your career, you'll be fully equipped to make the choice that's right for you.
You will receive in-depth department training at the beginning and during each seat, which will give you the legal know-how needed to get stuck-in. You will also have support from a dedicated training team and can expect to receive 232 hours of training by the time you are a qualified lawyer.
When you are approaching qualification, we will meet with you several times during the qualification process to talk through the direction that you want to go in, the options open to you and to understand what you are looking for from your career. We work hard at ensuring that trainees stay within the firm, placing them in areas of work in which the trainee wishes to pursue a career. Our intention is to be open with you, and to try to ensure, ultimately, that you stay with us beyond the training contract.
Find out more and start your journey with BLP HERE.