7:30am - I start my day and head towards the tube some point past eight. I am new to London so still getting used to the tube. Headphones in, move all the way down the platform, mind the gap…
9:05am - The firm provides good coffee and free breakfast in the morning, but today I buy a coffee at a café outside London Bridge.
9:15am - I check my emails and plan out when I will complete the tasks I need to do today. The team I am in specialise in FIDIC contracts, a particular kind of construction contract. This month we are preparing for an International Chamber of Commerce arbitration, which is due to be held in Paris at the start of next year. We are making good progress but there is still much to do.
9:30am - I start compiling documents to load onto the third-party software platform that hosts the hearing bundle. There are exhibits across tens of thousands of documents and so we link the references and document names in an Excel model. The firm's IT team are assisting us to extract file and pathnames for batches of documents and I insert the latest batch they have sent across.
11:20am - A letter arrives from the opposing side in relation to a technical aspect of how the exhibits will be formatted on the platform. The partner on the matter talks this through with me and suggests I draft a response so that we can reply later this afternoon. I begin drafting the letter.
12:58pm - Draft done, I email it to the partner for her review.
1:00pm - The international team have a weekly Monday meeting where they discuss and debate the latest FIDIC and construction related cases, journal articles and news. After the meeting, my supervisor sends me a link to some further FIDIC reading in relation to one of the more complex payment points discussed.
1:50pm - I head to the sixth floor and manage to catch the end of the free lunch (pasta ragu, mixed leaves, focaccia). I run into a fellow trainee and we discuss a pro bono project we are working on together. The firm regularly sends round pro bono projects through LawWorks and trainees often get involved.
2:20pm - I receive a call from a Parisian hotel that is a candidate for hosting the arbitration hearing. We discuss our requirements for the event and the hotel promises to send across a proposal.
3:30pm - The partner emails across some amendments and suggestions for the draft letter and I incorporate these into the document. We discuss a final point and then send the letter across to the other side.
5:00pm - As the trainee in the team, I am tasked with filtering news articles for the internal FIDIC newsletter. Articles are collated automatically by a news aggregator, and I spend fifteen minutes flicking through and selecting those that are the most relevant. I schedule the newsletter to be sent out at 8am tomorrow.
5:20pm - I discuss a point with the paralegal on the team who has been working on another document for the case. I proofread the document and she explains a couple of points in relation to the filing procedure we will follow. We send the document to the firm's in-house document production team so that the formatting can be put into house style overnight.
6:15pm - I make sure that all my time recording for the day is up to date and close my laptop. The firm is very flexible on where we work, so I take my laptop with me so that I can work from home tomorrow.
6:30pm - Another trainee has organised some after-work drinks at a nearby bar, so I head there to round off the day.
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