Congrats on the new job! I do have a law question for you: what was your favourite/least favourite seat as a trainee and why?
Ooh interesting. Right so at Links I sat in
Structured finance (specialist bonds and securitizations)
Projects (infrastructure construction and financing)
Intellectual Property and Technology, Media and Telecommunications
Secondment to the fund I worked at for a while
Obviously my secondment was my favorite as I stayed there rather than qualified back at Links (I left at normal times! The work was interesting enough! The people were amazing! For Christmas Claridges stopped by and brought us mince pies and we had the holiday party at the Natural History Museum!). So putting that aside and looking at the three seats I actually did at Links...
SFG was excellent training, my best principal, and a lot of responsibility for a first seater which was fabulous. On the other hand, it's super process-y as they close a deal every 3 or so weeks and can get very same-y. Also completely no work life balance (real story, know someone who was asked to reschedule his surgery around a closing).
Projects was wild -- the work on the construction side is super interesting and inherently cool, the work on the financing side is slightly more interesting than normal financing (which is to say, not very interesting). The culture in the team is crazy, great young associates, completely uninterested partners. My principal was a dick but we got on (I'm also a dick). A group where you can absolutely be destroyed hours-wise (I didn't leave the office for like, the entire month of July 2018 lol).
I sat within the IP bit of IPTMT but still helped out with the occasional TMT stuff. This is the group I most considered qualifying into. I really loved the team (had an amazing time on the ski trip), the work has more potential to be intellectually interesting (the dept is like 30% advisory 70% transactional so of course plenty of doc review and DD). Hours can still be v difficult though (my 7 month pregnant principal sleeping on the floor for 30mins between 4:00 - 4:30am while the other side turned the doc was a highlight). I really liked this group, I still miss them, but I knew law wasn't for me and even though I liked this best, I didn't like it enough to stay.
So that's my seats! As a general rule, I would say be wary of doing deal-based seats too early in your TC -- it's really easy to get pigeon-holed into transactional seats and not get the type of advisory experience you might want (whereas generally less competition for transactional seats). I would recommend doing a mix of both advisory and transactional, but start w advisory if you can.
Happy to chat more if you'd like! Also on the off chance there's any Links people here (lol) feel free to reblog with / send through your experiences.
