After studying at Warwick University, I took a temp admin job at Warwickshire Fire and Rescue while doing my LPC. That’s how I became aware of a training contract that was advertised within Warwickshire County Council. I started my training contract in 2011 and upon qualifying, moved into a temporary position before securing a solicitor position in the Corporate and Commercial team. In 2017 I became a Senior Solicitor and Team Leader for the Corporate and Commercial team.
I advise on a variety of areas in my current role, including procurement, state aid, complex development projects, information governance, contractual disputes and company law. The Corporate and Commercial team are split into two teams of five - I manage one team, while another team leader manages the other. However we all do the same areas of work and I have oversight and supervision responsibilities for all 10 lawyers in the team.
The wider legal service has separate teams for each of the areas that we advise on – corporate and commercial, employment, planning and litigation, property, adults and education, and childcare.
We’re a traded service within the County Council, meaning that other parts of the County Council pay for the time spent on work for them through their budgets. As well as serving the County Council, we have external clients, for example Warwick District Council, the Warwickshire Police and Crime Commissioner, Warwickshire Police, local schools, and other local government and public sector clients. We work for them on a time recording basis in the same way that we do for the County Council but it means that we are able to provide more cost effective services for the County Council because we’re also providing an income stream. We have also set up an ‘Alternative Business Structure’ that enables us to deliver our legal services more widely to similar clients.
A local authority legal career is very varied and complex. Local authorities often look for innovative ways to do things, because of cuts to budget and legislative rules governing how they can operate. Our role as lawyers is to help them achieve this. We’re helping taxpayers not shareholders.
I am proud of a recent complex case relating to an individual who had published confidential information which had the potential to affect how Council services were delivered. We took immediate action to secure the removal of the information and went through lengthy injunction proceedings to prevent it being published again. The individual appealed in the Court of Appeal and was unsuccessful, then attempted to take it to the Supreme Court but was refused permission.
This was an important confidentiality case about the public good. It was complicated and involved issues that had not been tested before but its outcome could have had a huge impact on the people of Warwickshire, if we had not acted so quickly and taken the action we did.
Throughout a local authority career you get opportunities to do things that make a mark in your local area. For example, on the procurement side, one task I had as a newly qualified lawyer was to transfer out four leisure centres from Warwick District Council, in order for them to be run by a private operator. I put a considerable amount of work into supporting the District Council on the procurement of the operator to deliver those services. Having the new operator in place made a real difference to how the leisure centres were operated and what makes this kind of work rewarding is that you can really see the end result for your community.
In local government you have to be prepared to do anything! We’ve recruited a lot of lawyers from private practice and they bring good commercial skills but are often surprised at how many different areas we cover in local government.
The flip side of this is that local government practice offers lots of opportunities to try different areas of practice. You don’t get bored…
You also need to have a certain mindset and an ability to look at the bigger picture. Your client is the council as a whole, not the individual officer you’re dealing with. You need to be able to give constructive advice and actively manage risks. Unlike private practice, you don’t move on once the advice is given: you are part of the team and share the accountability. At the same time this gives you a greater sense of reward.
Local government practice is not necessarily something all law students think about but it’s valuable in that it prevents you becoming pigeonholed early. Forging a legal career can be difficult when you’re new to it and don’t really know what’s out there. In local government, people move around and broaden their skills through real ‘hands on’ training.
Trainees with us do four seats but in my team a seat would cover all the areas I mentioned above. In private practice you would tend to have more narrowly defined areas. A lot of trainees come to us with, say, an interest in employment, but then discover they’re really interested in something else that they’re exposed to as a result of their training period. In that respect, local government provides so many opportunities for junior lawyers starting out their legal careers.
