The skills training is delivered in a variety of ways – interactive workshops, self-study or recommended reading. All of these will help you develop your knowledge of the firm and your professional skills. In addition, we have an active panel of internal coaches and mentors who are available to any Business Services professional that is looking for more personalised support to reach their full potential and achieve higher goals. Where there is a business need, we will also support you with professional qualifications on a case-by-case basis.
What we offer
When you join us, we’ll give you all the opportunities you need to grow your career. As well as getting exposure to a huge breadth of work, we’ll enable you to reach your goals with flexible training and development plans. Individually designed, these plans will allow you to gain experience in all areas and help you discover what's best for you and your career.
Business development
Our business development team works alongside our partners and lawyers across our sectors, services and offices to support and develop our relationships with clients, delivering an exceptional service and exploring new avenues through which we can help them meet their business needs. Our brand, marketing and digital team help position us as thought leaders amongst our target markets in the areas we most want to be known for, by creating intuitive and engaging collateral, events and campaigns.
As part of the business development team, you will play a hands-on role in contributing to the firm’s success and helping to achieve its objectives. This could be as one of our business development professionals, coaching partners on relationship building, or building our brand as one of our marketing, design or events professionals.
If you’re a commercially minded individual with a passion for business development and improving the client experience in a professional services environment, you could be just what we’re looking for.
Business finance
The Herbert Smith Freehills finance team works closely with management, practices, partners and Business Services teams to assist in driving its strategy, profitability, cash flow and growth.
Business finance ensures an adequate Financial Control Framework is maintained to safeguard the integrity of the firm's finances and plays a key role in mitigating financial and business risks. The team provides robust financial information internally and externally to enable decision making, effective operations and to help the firm meet its clients' needs and statutory requirements. As a member of the finance team, whether you are in core finance, taxation, treasury or projects, you’ll play a critical role in the firm's success.
Facilities
The facilities team plays a central role in managing our working environment and the services within it, so that practice areas can serve their clients to the best of their ability. That goes beyond just ensuring that professionals have the client-facing and office services and equipment they need. It’s about ensuring that every space around our global network serves its purpose effectively, whether that’s an office, a breakout area or a conference room.
General counsel and risk
General counsel and risk is a multi-disciplinary legal and analytical team. It consists of an internal legal services team, risk and compliance lawyers, internal audit, information security, enterprise risk and new business intake. These disciplines work together globally to ensure that we fulfil all our governance, contractual regulatory and compliance obligations. The general counsel and risk team also advises on the firm's risk profile and risk-based decisions.
The team also supports the executive and governance boards, manages the firm’s insurance matters and has responsibility for implementing the firm's client and matter selection strategy.
It advises our partners and lawyers to ensure that Herbert Smith Freehills remains a highly trusted advisor in a constantly changing world, and works with our Business Services professionals in managing risk on behalf of the firm and enabling high quality strategic and risk-based decisions to be made.
Human resources
Our competitive advantage is our people and our culture. Our HR team works closely with the leaders of the business to recruit exceptional people, nurture their development and guide their career.
As a member of the HR team, you could be working as a business partner assigned to a particular practice group, or in one of our specialist areas, including graduate or lateral recruitment, global mobility or reward. No matter what your position, you’ll play a core role in shaping the future of the firm.
Information technology
Innovative, efficient and effective IT systems are essential to the successful operation of a global law firm like Herbert Smith Freehills. The information technology team keeps our global team of lawyers and Business Services staff connected, whether we're in the office or on the move.
Information technology is responsible for everything information systems-related. That includes:
- technical support: IT helpdesks, asset management (including laptops and mobile devices) and technical training
- infrastructure: networks and systems, servers (real and virtualised), disaster recovery, business continuity and IT security
- innovation and technology: driving the increasingly important adoption of technology in new ways
- development: designing and acquiring business applications.
While the roles within the division may vary, all involve providing the very best services and systems. You may also have the opportunity to work on challenging projects across the firm.
Legal PA services
The role of Legal PA is critical in assisting our people to perform at the highest level. The team provides high-quality support to partners and throughout our practice areas.
Your support will mean our lawyers can concentrate on providing creative, original advice to their clients. Our Legal PA services team also plays a client-facing role as Legal PAs are typically in regular contact with our clients on behalf of lawyers.
Learning and development
Whether you’re an experienced professional or at the beginning of your career, we’ll provide you with a stimulating environment in which to develop.
We offer a wide range of business skills training to all our Business Services professionals here. We continually work to evolve our programme to meet new business demands and to ensure it is accessible to as many people across our offices as possible.
