Hello everyone!
Okay I know you all are dying to know how work went…so I’m
going to do something a little different and update you on the whole week. My Sunday
before work was mostly being sad and crying after saying bye to Tanja and then
being a whole mess of nerves for my job the next day. I knew how to get to my
office (for the most part) so it was mostly me trying to tell myself I was
prepared for whatever was to come. And you know what? I was. Next time I will
not underestimate myself so.
I’ve changed the names of people so this blog never becomes a
liability. I walk into the office all suited up (see picture above, plus shoes of course) and meet my supervisor Emma. My
first rotation was in Real Estate Law and I was shocked by how much I loved it!
Okay, I’m getting a little ahead of myself so I’ll backtrack. My head boss
Molly was feeling a bit under the weather after returning from a polo trip in Spain
(someone please sign me up for this lifestyle! That’s it, Europe here I come). However,
Emma was deemed my handler for the time so she was the one who took me around the
floor and introduced me to all the other associates. She’s 28 and literally has
already been working in the field for five years, has a trainee, and an intern
(aka me). I’ll be 28 and only a year into my legal career. Can someone please
tell the US to get on this system! Man I feel so behind.
Essentially in the UK if you decide you want to be a lawyer,
you go to school for a year. Then you do two years at a firm and rotate every 6
months into a different field. Like how practical is that? Suddenly I am
regretting all my decisions to do an American JD over doing an English barristers.
I digress.
Being a work experience intern means that you do basic work,
so my days have been spent ticking deeds. So when you buy a property the other
side (either the owner or solicitor) has to give you all the deeds to that land.
Since England is old, I was literally working with vellum deeds from 1902. How
friggen cool is that? That is, until I learned that vellum paper isn’t paper,
it’s sheep skin. Bleh. Yup friends, your girl here was handling hundred year
old sheep skin. Let’s just say I pretended I never heard that little tidbit
after Emma so kindly mentioned it to me while making a face.
It’s funny because it was like going through history, even
though my job was to just make sure that everything in the packet they said was
there was actually there. I got the black carbon paper that my grandpa and my
mom always talk about when they say how lucky we are to have photocopy machines
these days not on this inky paper. I looked through some beautiful calligraphy
from the 1910s and then saw it slowly transition to typewriting to our modern day
computer fonts. Also, who knew keeping the lines straight with a typewriter was
so hard? Some typewriters were definitely superior to others…or the models just
got better.
Other jobs I was assigned to do were things like researching
Japanese outbound real estate investments in the UK. Fascinating! I mean
seriously, I honestly did not know I could be so interested in economics and
land. Like I’m the girl that cried all the way through microeconomics and
barely passed her macroeconomics class. And yet here I was, researching the
economy and forecasts and looking at investment numbers like a walk in the
park. Take that old professors!
The absolute best part of my job though, is being able to
sit into Partner meetings. Molly has been so kind to arrange for all these people
to take me into their meetings with the other side’s attorneys. When I walk
into that room, I try to imagine myself in that position ten to fifteen years
from now. These attorneys are brilliant. Everyone at work thinks that I am
bored, but I’m serious. The other side proposes a change from “and” to “or” and
then the attorney sits there and you can see her brain going a million miles a
minute trying to guess 10 years into the contract and how that could affect any
of the related clauses long term. I imagine it’s like playing chess, but with 6
chess boards and 12 players all trying to win. I can’t wait to be that good one
day. Transactional work definitely seems to be where I am leaning most towards.
And after sitting in on these huge project meetings for things like railways
and residential buildings, I think that this could be a serious contender as an
avenue of my future career. Plus, the way the world works now, real estate is international,
even if it’s on your home land, I guarantee there’s at least one foreign fund
or investor at stake.
I think the funniest thing about being in England is that
the culture here is so different. Where I’m sure the American teams would have
been shouting across the table, the Brits sit across from each other, clearly
frustrated but delivering their lack of compromise with a rather neutral
sentence. I was told that not all legal teams are like this, but I seem hard
pressed to find a more excitable British lawyer. I’ll let you know if I ever do
during my time here. It’s funny, the best I got were very high raised brows and
pure stubbornness and unwillingness to budge on changes. Oooo, there was this
one time where the lawyer delivered a perfectly passive aggressive statement
about how if the other side were more experienced they would understand that
this was a natural liability to take on in this type of transaction work. It took
everything I had not to bust up laughing. I feel like if there were a dancing
pink elephant in the room, these lawyers could keep their poker face on and
never once crack to address the elephant. Looks like I better start working on
that, my personality is to mention the elephant immediately and then move on….I
might be getting tired so maybe this no longer makes sense. I’ll stop off here,
but I do have further flotsam and jetsam of my working days that I’ll get to sharing
with you soon! All I know is I’m loving it here and I can’t wait to see what the
rest of my time will be like.
Sending you all love,
Carolyn
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