Legal Practice Course (LPC)
This vocational training course helps you develop greater awareness of the fundamental legal and practical skills required by lawyers working in a firm like Herbert Smith. These might include the application of contract and company law to clients, the conduct of negotiations and legal drafting.
We support an innovative LPC run by BPP Law School, which is specifically designed to prepare our future trainees for life in a City law firm. The course has been developed by five of the City’s leading law firms who have worked together with BPP, one of the UK’s top law and business schools. The other firms are Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Lovells, Norton Rose and Slaughter and May.
As a future joiner on the LPC you can enjoy the following benefits:
- A maintenance grant of £6,000 in London or £5,000 outside of London
- Payment of course fees
- Solicitors Regulation Authority student membership
- Discretionary grants for additional courses which could add value to the firm
- Advice and guidance on relocating to London
What you will learn
The City LPC is designed to help students learn how to handle corporate and finance transactions, real estate transactions and commercial dispute resolution matters, based around client examples.
As well as allowing you to focus on these core practice areas, the course will also enable you to look at a number of specialist areas including EU/competition, employment, private equity and tax law. This provides a perspective on the different requirements of cross-border and domestic transactions.
The course embodies elements of an MBA qualification to give you a broad grounding in business and finance, as well as providing a full grasp of the black letter law that applies to practice in the City. The course is also designed to allow a high level of individual guidance and attention. Emphasis will be placed on developing client and business skills.
Course content
We are committed to providing you with the most relevant training and we ask you to take Private Acquisitions, Debt Finance and Equity Finance as your three elective subjects. These will provide you with a strong grounding in preparation for your training contract with Herbert Smith. During the year you will also be invited to our offices on the LPC firm days to learn more about us and our different practices.
Course structure
A new Legal Practice Course, specifically designed for Consortium students, has recently been validated to run as an accelerated programmme over 7.5 months (including foundation study) as opposed to the traditional course length of 10 months. This gives some of our students the opportunity to start with us 6 months earlier than they would otherwise, though there will be a transition period to implement this. We agree your LPC and Herbert Smith start dates with you on an individual basis.