Lockdown Reflections - Training and Qualifying in a Pandemic

One year on from lockdown we have asked a number of staff to reflect on the challenges and opportunities of the last year. In our second article, Lauren Mizen, a solicitor in our Immigration team, provides her perspective on training and qualifying during lockdown.

I started my traineeship at Drummond Miller LLP in February 2019 so I went into my second year of training in February 2020, a month before the first coronavirus lockdown began. I have since moved teams and qualified as a Solicitor and I now work in the Immigration team.

I would say that for me personally, I have enjoyed working from home for the most part.  I have been staying with family members for the whole of the last year so I have not spent large chunks of time on my own.  I am really thankful for that because I know that many others did not have that luxury and will have had a very different lockdown experience as a result.

In the first few months of lockdown, I made the decision to go into the office once a week to complete administrative tasks which could only be done in the office. This helped the team working from home as I could scan papers onto the system for lodging/perusing/sending on to experts. My workload increased as a result but I enjoyed being busy as it was a good distraction from the strangeness of coronavirus lockdown life. I also got experience of some new tasks which I maybe wouldn’t have had the experience of had I continued in the normal day-to-day work of a trainee e.g. writing more complex letters of instruction and calling every client in a class action as part of a settlement process.

I moved departments in August 2020 to the Immigration team. I had spent the first six months of my traineeship in the Immigration team so thankfully, although it was strange to switch teams when working from home, I knew most of the people in the team already.  This made the transition easier for me.  The team patiently answered all my calls with multiple questions (and they still do!) and although we have been at a distance, I have learned so much through conversations and virtual meetings with other team members.  The disadvantage is not being able to eavesdrop on conversations other solicitors in the team are having whilst in the office and learning through osmosis that way.

The key thing which has helped me through this time as a trainee has been being able to communicate with the Partners in my team and my other team members. Sometimes this was just through team video calls and other times it was through regular emails from the management letting us know how the firm was getting on. I am very much a people person so having these interactions was really important for me to feel like I wasn’t working alone at home.

Although it has been an adjustment, there are undoubtedly a number of benefits to working remotely. For example, I have been able to easily log in and listen to some of our immigration appeals, without having to justify the travel & time through to Glasgow to attend the court in person. I have also enjoyed being able to make the most of our flexible working policy too so I can get some fresh air and exercise during the daylight hours – particularly through the winter.

In February 2021 I qualified as a solicitor. For various reasons it took me longer than I had anticipated getting my practicing certificate (NB. Check that you fill in the right form!) but I was finally admitted in early April.  Getting signatures for the forms was a logistical headache given we aren’t all in the office at the same time but I got there in the end!