Trainee - Chiara Romano

Investment Banks have the most extraordinary number of jobs within them - it can be completely mind-boggling. Every time we went near one, we found a whole new department or group of people that did something we’d never heard of. This seems to be due to the immense specialisation within banks, where it can be quite possible to sit next to someone but have no idea what they do.

There are a couple of major distinctions worth highlighting. Investment Banking or ‘IBD’ tends to be the department which most people imagine when thinking about an investment bank. They are the ones doing huge M&A deals, putting in incredibly long hours (14 hours plus each day - including weekends, for months at a time - is not uncommon) and schmoozing with business leaders. Work/life balance is not easily found, but on the flipside the work you do will likely be high-profile and give you an enormous breadth of business and finance experience. This means that if you want to leave London or Investment Banking at some point you shouldn’t have a problem, as the skills gained are very transferable. We've met ex-bankers in companies ranging from renewable energy start-ups to large pharmaceuticals.

Capital Markets is where you’ll find the traders, salespeople and research analysts. They’re market-based and are the ones you see on TV shouting down phones and pacing frantically in front of five flickering computer screens. They’re monitoring market activity and reacting immediately to any changes. It’s noisier and a bit more adrenalin-fuelled than IBD. One of the big perks of Capital Markets (other than the actual job), is that the hours tend to reflect those of the market. That means early starts, with most people in the office by 6.30am, but it also means you tend to be out by six in the evening - and there is almost never weekend work. So if you’re an early riser the work/life balance is pretty good, especially compared to IBD. One limiting factor is that you’re in a highly specialised, role usually in a very specific market area, so there’s not much in the way of transferable skills. If you’re an FX institutional salesperson it’s not that easy to move into another product area, and you’re going to be tied to working in London (or another major financial centre).

Beyond these two areas you have a massive range of middle and back office functions. There’s Technology, Operations, Legal, Finance, Marketing and HR for a start. So if banking interests you then it’s definitely worth looking at the breadth of what’s on offer. The other thing that struck us about banks was just how diverse they were. Without doubt, they had the most mixed workforces we saw, with every member of a team often from a different country. While this makes for a really dynamic and interesting work environment, it does mean that when you’re applying for a job, you’re not just up against your peers in this country but across the whole world - so that application form had better stand out!

Who are you and what do you do?

What is a seat?

Basically this training contract is going to be like any other training contract within a law firm from a structure perspective because we are still regulated by the law society. So basically, what that means is we do four six-month seats in different departments. The way the seats are allocated is, you can put in a preference to the training principal and then depending on how many people want this specific seat and what the business needs are, you will get allocated a seat for six months. So far I have done a seat in Commodities and in Emerging Markets, next time I would quite like to do a Commercial seat. So there is a wide variety of different areas you can get into. During the training contract, one of the requirements for the Law Society is that you do a Contentious seat, which would be a Litigation seat. We have a very small litigation department within the legal team, however obviously because of insurance purposes and risk, we do give most of our litigative work to one of the panel law firm. However, if you do the training contract at Barclays Capital, what they will do is send you on a two-week course at a college floor, which is a Litigation course, will consist of one week doing classes and another week in a legal aid centre.

What is Investment Banking?

An investment bank is a bank that is mainly focused on the capital markets and the debt markets. So what an investment bank does it interacts with players on the stock market, like the LSE. On the bond side, Barclays is a bond house so we issue a lot of bonds, which is basically debt. If companies want to raise money for a merger and acquisition or something like that, they will come to us and we will issue notes on the market for them.

What attracted you to this career?

My background is mainly law - I studied law at Edinburgh and then I did my GDL. After my GDL I decided to go into industry a bit so I worked at KPMG for a year and I worked at Morgan Stanley for a year. I took a real liking to banking but at the end I still wanted to go back to law. That was the first year that Barclays Capital actually ran a contract so I applied for it and I am here now. At Morgan Stanley I was working for the wealth management side and I had a lot of interaction with legal, and I found myself wishing I was on the other side of the fence that I could actually dig into the documents and really gain a further understanding of what the documents are and what the different points that are raised actually mean to us. So that is why I started to go back into law and then when the opportunity came along to do the training contract with the bank, I grabbed it.

What is the GDL?

I think it is now also called a CPE which is basically a conversion course; because I studied Scottish Law, I wasn’t qualified for English Law, so I had to transfer my skills.

What does your job involve?

I am a trainee solicitor so I basically support the legal department upstairs who are supporting the trading floor. There are various different legal departments within our general legal department, so what I basically do is I check agreements, I look at term sheets, I deal with traders, I deal with IDD, just basically a wide variety of things.

What do you do on a typical day?

There is a lot of email and a lot of phone and a lot of drafting. Basically there is no one day which is the same, you come in and things just get thrown at you, it is very exciting because you never know what is going to happen. So one day I might be on the trading floor for half a day, some other days I will spend the whole day at my desk, it varies a lot.

Who do you liaise with on a daily basis?

It really varies - it can go up to MD level or I will just speak to another graduate or analyst who is on the desk, and there is no set structure, I pretty much speak to everybody in the business.

Describe the process of your work?

One of the transactions that trainees mainly deal with is if confidentiality agreements have to be put in place. What usually happens is a trader will call you up and say, ‘I want to disclose this structure to a client but I don’t want the client to be able to use it or maybe tell somebody else about it, what should I do?’ You say, ‘We need to put a confidentiality agreement in place, here is our standard form, please send it to the client.’ The client will read it and usually mark it up in his own favour, the mark up comes back to us, we then get on the phone to the client and say we can accept this mark point but we cannot concede on this other point. Then it is just basically negotiation between you and the client. Once that is sorted out you give the trader a call and you tell them it is all done, they can disclose the information.

How is the Legal Department structred?

Basically we are one large legal department - there are about 240 lawyers or something like that, and they are split into various coverage areas. For example, my first seat was Commodities where we supported the commodity trading floor; now I am in Emerging Markets so I am supporting the Central Eastern European desks and the Middle Eastern desk, so we kind of align ourselves with the business model.

Interviewer: And will you then specialise in a particular area where you end up on a certain desk?

This is one of the bonus points of working for Barclays Capital - their coverage model. On qualification you don’t just qualify into one single area, what they are looking for is for all of their lawyers have transferable skill sets. So you might be supporting two or three different business areas so that you can get moved around to wherever you need to be - where the business is busiest basically.

Why did you choose to be an in-house lawyer?

Having worked in big companies like KPMG and Morgan Stanley, I was very conscious of the fact that I wanted to keep on the commercial side because that is where my interest lies, rather than just looking at different legal developments, I actually wanted to be able to apply them to the real world, or that is how I see it, so yes it was definitely a conscious decision. At the time that I finished my CPE, there was not opportunity to go in-house with the bank, so once this opportunity came up I definitely took it. If you go in-house, you basically have one client, which is Barclays Capital. What it enables you to do is get to grips with what Barclays Capital does, what the requirements are and what the needs are for the business, so you get a much more commercial, hands-on experience. Whereas if you are in a law firm, you might have ten, twenty, thirty different clients, but really you only ever see their point of view for one particular transaction - you don’t get the breadth or the depth of knowledge for that particular department, and that is why working in-house is right for me. Obviously because we are in-house we cannot deal with all the documents, because we just don’t have the expertise or the time or the resources to go through a 30- page facility agreement. So the way that it works is that we have panel law firms - which tend to be Magic Circle law firms - whom we instruct to draft large documents or to go through very large drafts. We basically instruct them, they mark it up and come back with their comments to us and then us as the in-house lawyer we liaise between the client and the business and then feed back what the business says to our panel law firm, who will then insert it into the agreement. Obviously the law department is very diverse and you are going to be working with some of the best lawyers on the market – we’ve got senior associates, ex-partners from Clifford Chance, Allen and Overy, White and Kay, from Herbert Smith, from everywhere - so you are definitely not going to miss out on anything by joining a Barclays Capital legal team.

What are the best bits about your job?

I think it is the interaction - there is a lot of interaction with the business, it is very exciting, you just really feel like being part of a team. You have one client that is the bank, there is no such thing as looking at one part of the transaction over and over again, there is a whole load of variety, you get to know the traders very well. They explain how things actually work, it is really good.

What are the worst bits about your job?

Obviously you are a trainee so it’s not all glamorous - you do get some stuff that is repetitive - but it’s a lot less than some of my friends in law firms have to do.

What has been your greatest achievement?

Well I just finished my Commodities seat - at the beginning I obviously knew nothing about Commodities, but by the end of my seat, I was basically running with queries on particular documents. Obviously this was with supervision but they were basically my babies - so I had a lot of responsibility and it was really good.

Any regrets?

Never be afraid to ask questions, everybody has been there and even though you might think you are being really silly, it does really help you a lot to ask the questions at the outset. And everybody is really wanting you to succeed - they take the time and sit down with you and talk about it – so don’t be afraid to ask questions.

What is the pay like and are there any perks?

It is definitely a competitive rate of pay, it is comparable if not better than Magic Circle firms. And the perks are, you go for a lot of drinks and you don’t have really long working hours.

How long is a working day and do you have to work out of hours?

I tend to come in at quarter past eight to eight thirty and leave about seven o'clock  - which is really good compared to some of the hours in the Magic Circle law firms - and I haven't worked a single weekend yet. I think the latest I have worked is eight thirty, so nothing too bad.

Is there much in the way of travel?

We don’t travel because we have different legal firms across the globe. So what you do get is a lot of interaction with various different countries - for example now that I’m in Emerging Markets I have a lot of interaction with the Middle East - but I don’t actually physically get to travel.

Do you have to be based anywhere in particular?

I would say that given that we only have a legal department in London, for the UK you have to come into London. Or you can go to Singapore or Hong Kong or New York - but definitely in a big city.

What is the working environment like?

The working environment is very relaxed - it is business casual, but you are still expected to come dressed for business, so in a suit or shirt.

There is an even spread between the boys and girls, and there is quite a lot of young people, also there is a lot of experience on the floor. Everybody from director level down to the trainees is just very, very friendly and very approachable. There is no hierarchy where you cannot go and ask the director a question.

Do you need a law degree?

No, you just have to basically get a good degree. You can do a conversion course, we have out of the six trainees upstairs, two of them have not done law as such but they have done a conversion course afterwards. Basically you either do a law degree and then do your LPC which is the Legal Practice Course, or you do any type of different degree and you do a year which is called the GDL or CPE, which is the basically the basics of law. And then you still have to do the LPC, and Barclays will repay you your LPC fees. Then you apply for a training contract. One of the benefits of applying to Barclays Capital is that you don’t have to apply two years in advance, they recruit the year before, so if you wanted to start in 2009, you would apply in 2008.

What's the application process like?

There is a very simple online form. Afterwards you have to take a verbal reasoning test and a statistics test so do not be afraid to sit those tests, they do take into account that you are a lawyer and not meant to be a mathematical genius, don’t let that put you off. After that there is a very quick phone interview with HR and then there is an assessment centre, which basically consists of various activities, group exercises, individual interviews as well as case studies.

What are the key skills required for your job?

I think you have to like working with people and fairly good at explaining things, because the majority of your work will be to go down to front office and say: ‘We need to protect ourselves because of the following reasons, this is why we need to get this document signed’; they then have to go to the client and explain it. Alternatively if they would like you to go to the client and explain it directly, you have to be able to break it down and give clear reasoning as to why you need certain things.

What's your top tip for breaking into your industry?

Just be enthusiastic - if you are really interested in the subject matter and you are really like working with people this is the ideal environment, so if you let that shine through in the assessment centre, you shouldn’t have a problem.

What's the career progress and how quickly can you move up the career ladder?

The career structure is not as clearly defined as in a law firm. Basically you come in, you do a training contact for two years, and after that it is very much based on your merit. If you put in the hours and you work hard then nobody is in your way to rise through the ranks quickly. Whereas if you are not really that interested, then you won’t, which is very gratifying because it means that if you really put in the hours you will get ahead. I think it is a lot more structured in a law firm, also, in terms of our salary rising - whereas at Barclays it is much more of a case of, you work hard and you are rewarded for it.

How does the role change over time?

As a trainee you are obviously constantly supervised because there is a certain amount of risk involved. As you go higher up the career ladder you will take on projects and run with them, and maybe have people that you are supervising.

Is there scope for movement during or after this career?

What they are teaching you at the moment is not just law, it is also how to deal with a very fast, rapid environment such as a bank. So, there would be nothing in your way of joining the front office if that was what you wanted to do. Or even going back to law firms and joining them as an associate, because you definitely have the skills to do that.

What are the industry resources that someone interested in joining must know about?

I would definitely say if you were going to come into Barclays Capital you should have a firm grasp on what is going on in the financial markets and also what the latest legal developments are - so maybe read up on The Lawyer, just use common sense, read the newspapers, read the FT, just the usual.

Where do you see the industry going?

Definitely at the moment, with the credit crunch in most of Europe and the US, Emerging Markets is going very strong, as are Commodities, so definitely keep an eye out for that.

Interviewer: Can you explain Emerging Markets and Commodities?

In Emerging Markets we are basically in Russia, Kazakhstan, the Middle East and Central Eastern Europe, which are basically all emerging markets, so they are not necessarily that sophisticated. So there is much more opportunity for us as a bank to come in and propose different solutions to investors, new products, and it is a very rapidly growing area. Commodities is going very strong, simply because the actual stock markets aren’t doing so well so gold has shot up, oil has shot up - and it is a very exciting place to be at the moment.

If you weren't in this career, what would you be doing?

I quite like banking, so I would probably have stayed within the banking sector - but to be honest, this is exactly what I wanted to do.