Vacation Placements

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer is one of a handful of leading international law firms, with offices across the world.

We are offering 60 placements on our vacation schemes in 2012. Our vacation scheme gives you a good idea of what life is like as an international commercial lawyer, and what life would be like at Freshfields. It's fun as well as hard work. But we make sure you hear enough, do enough, and meet enough of us to decide if you'd like to join us as a trainee solicitor.

We run three, two week vacation schemes in Summer each year, with a salary of £275 per week (net of tax).

You'll join one of our eight practice groups and we'll allocate a qualified lawyer to look after you. During the two weeks you will:

• Undertake a research task (given to you by a partner) 
• Plan and execute a group project (with fellow students) 
• Take part in a one-day mock transaction (with fellow students)

There's an opportunity to spend a week abroad
The schemes take place in our London office. But some of you will also spend a third week in one of our overseas offices. In 2011, students visited Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Madrid, New York and Washington. If you do this, you'll get more insight into how international our work is and how we work together on cross-border deals.

After hours
In the evenings, we organise some social events for you to meet and talk to trainees away from the workplace.

Who can apply, why and when
There are rules as to when students can come on one of our schemes. You have to wait until your penultimate year of your undergraduate degree to apply. We take both law and non-law students on our schemes. The application window for our 2012 schemes is from 1 October 2011 to 9 January 2012. Since we offer places as we go along, the sooner you apply, the better.

Apply online for a place on our vacation scheme or for a training contract.

Just fill in the form (the form is the same for the vacation scheme and a training contract) and submit it to us.

We'll then send you an email and ask you to take an online verbal reasoning test. The test should take you about 20 minutes.

If we don't hear from you within 7 days, we'll assume you don't want to continue with your application. You can take a practice test before you complete the real thing. Find out more about the verbal reasoning test.

If you have a disability, which makes taking the test difficult, contact the Trainee Recruitment team on +44 (0) 207 785 5554.