(also applies to the term ‘Company Commercial Solicitor’)
A company commercial solicitor is usually well paid, deals with a lot of administrative work, and spends an inordinate amount of time being nice to directors of companies from back bedroom start ups through to blue chip multinationals. In essence, company commercial work is all to do with compliance with various regulations, and ensuring that the operation of a company is within the legal framework of legislation. Quite a lot of time is spent reading contracts, agreements, shareholder paperwork, and chairing meetings. This is one area of the law where your LPC can actually have some relevance!
One of the perks of the post is that often you can spend quite a lot of time being nice to clients, and this can involve corporate hospitality with boxes at football matches, race days, bonding sessions whilst playing golf etc..!
Pay is usually good, and a company commercial solicitor at 2 years PQE can be earning anything from about £40k in the regions up to about £90k or more in the city. The regional firms tend to have a very broad spectrum of work for their comp coms, whereas in the city the specialism is broken down into about 20 different smaller areas of work, which can include corporate finance, taxation, mergers & acquisitions, PFI, and contract work.
Working in a smaller practice will usually require a much broader range of knowledge, although you always have counsel’s opinions to fall back on if you get stuck. Working in this field very often gives solicitors the opportunity to cross over into in house roles fairly easily as a lot of in house work is in this area.
Author: Jonathan Fagan MIRP MAC Cert RP LLM Solicitor (non-practising) – Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment (www.ten-percent.co.uk) – save time, skip the legal job boards and register with us! Jonathan Fagan is a specialist legal recruitment consultant, author of the Complete Guide to Writing a Legal CV and the Guide to Interviews for Lawyers. He has recruited for law firms across the UK and overseas in all shapes and sizes. If you have any questions that we have not covered above, please email us at cv@tenpercent.co.uk
