Phew, what a tough week! Two days of training on Tuesday and Wednesday, followed by a public holiday on Friday. Thursday was also a write-off. It seems that when you're not in the office for two days running, the partners forget that you exist. It's nice to have become a valued member of the team.

Whatever happened to equal opportunity? For the two day training session, which was only for junior associates (or JAs as they call them), the firm flew all the JAs from our partner office into town and put them up in the 5 star hotel across the road from our building.

Admittedly, it would be a little difficult to justify putting the local JAs up in the hotel as well. To solve this inequitable situation, I think the training should have taken place in some obscure location that was equally inconvenient for both offices. At least then everyone could have enjoyed a short mid-week junket.

The term 'all day training' is JA code for 'all meals provided'. They have to rope us in somehow. And the great thing about meals at a corporate law firm is that corporate lawyers are the pickiest people in the world.

Anything less than the very best results in a string of whingeing and complaints. Consequently, we enjoy silver service.

Breakfast consisted of bacon & egg rolls, muffins, fruit, muesli, OJ, tea and coffee. For lunch we were served green curry chicken, fresh rolls, salad, tea, coffee and soft drinks. Oh, and I forgot about the gourmet cakes for morning tea, and the fruit platter for afternoon tea.

I really do love learning!

Tedious melancholy of insidious intent. I dived headlong into a pile of documents and have spent the whole morning helping on a due diligence task.

I spent seven years at university, what with a double degree and honours. I have spent hours thinking about difficult hypothetical legal problems that pose little resemblance to the real world. Somehow, I believed this was preparation for the real world.

One of my tasks today was to go through a pile of 30 documents and check which ones have missing or photocopied signatures. They should have taught a class at law school on perseverance in the face of boredom, it would have proved useful…

That said, things are starting to become challenging now. Without notice, my supervising partner asks me a question (gives me an instruction) that needs to be answered (obeyed) within the hour. A question from a partner generally opens Pandora's box, with the initial question leading to a series of other more difficult questions which in turn led to other doubts, suspicions and uncertainties.

The pain of thinking and hard work is something that I had grown unacquainted with at university *sigh* I shouldn’t have had those two glasses of champagne and scotch on the rocks last night.

I won’t apologise for not writing sooner. Well, ordinarily I would, but I have learnt better. If you do something good, make a point of it; if you make a mistake, explain it away. Or better yet, exclude it from the scope of your due diligence analysis.

The last three weeks seem to have flown by. The first week was very pretty easy going. Three days of training, and then two days of light tasks interspersed with familiarising myself with the stationary cupboard. The novelty of free pens hadn’t yet worn thin.

The second week was also fairly light on. The sub-prime mortgage crisis might have had something to do with this. I’ve heard of new grads working twelve hour days in their second week before, so I guess I should count my lucky stars that the investment banking industry lost all those hundreds of billions.

Start of week three and the work suddenly started rolling in. Two pieces of work hit my desk almost the moment I sat down in my office. Well, office is the wrong word. I sit in a pod with another grad. A pod is basically a half size office with no door.

The great thing about our pod is that we have views out over the harbour and gardens. The downside is that I can hear anyone who coughs on my side of the building. Small price to pay, I guess...

Well, no, pretty damn annoying, actually!

I think the management consultant who invented the ‘open door’ policy never expected people to actually start removing doors from offices. Open communication is one thing, but no peace and quiet is quite another entirely.

So, anyway, two pieces of work hit my desk and by lunch time I have six things due by the next morning. Gulp!

During one of our training sessions, HR went to some lengths to explain to us that “it’s okay to say ‘no’ to work.” With all due respect, I say "Bull Shit to that"!

You heard me!

As a junior lawyer, my clients are the senior associates and partners in my group. You can’t turn clients away unless you have a really good reason. They'll just go to another junior lawyer, and who knows if they'll come back.

Well, it’s not quite like this, but you get the idea. It makes sense to take a lot of work and do it well. A good reputation is hard to build.

Yesterday was my first day at work. I intended to write something yesterday, but I ended up having drinks with some of the other grads and then meeting another friend for pizza. I figure I have to make the most of it before the hard work sets in.

I was eager to make a good impression on my first day, so I woke up early and was in the city by 8.20am, this was surely some kind of record. Before heading to reception, I called one of my friends who did the clerkship with me last summer to see if she was already in the building. She was still on the train, 5 minutes away, we agreed meet at the quaint little coffee shop around the corner before heading upstairs.

Coffee in hand, we stepped into the reception at around 8.59am, just in the nick of time, and were pointed in the direction of a small mahogany conference room. I was pleased to discover that we were not the last ones to arrive. There are seven of us starting as grads this week, which is a relatively small number. But, I guess this kind of makes sense when you consider that there are two different intake times during the year and that many of the people who get offers go travelling overseas, decide to become bankers or consultants or spend a year being judge’s associate before coming on board.

To start the day of training, the firm chairman and the managing partner came to speak to us. They spoke at length about firm culture, gave a couple of amusing anecdotes and tried to distil for us some of the lessons they had learnt about the qualities that go towards making a good lawyer and a successful legal career. Both men were incredibly interesting to listen to and very charismatic. Considering that these are both men who bill out to clients at umpteen hundred dollars an hour, their taking time to speak with us was the ultimate blandishment, the perfect gesture of good will and an unforgettable welcome to the firm.

We then had an ice breaking session, which turned out to be a kind of speed networking. We were broken into pairs, given examples of questions we should ask and then given five minutes to learn about our partner and report back to the group. It was fun because being babied by HR made me feel like I was back in year six. Although, had I eaten a slightly different breakfast, I could have found it pretty patronising. Does HR not think that we learnt any social skills since primary school?

After that, we discussed career path expectations, the qualities that successful lawyers possess and, most importantly, they handed out booklets that contained, among other things, the details of our starting salary. It would, of course, be rude to talk numbers … but, let’s just say, the starting salary has gone up handsomely on last year’s figure. Apparently, the pay rise is something to do with particularly strong competition in the market for junior lawyers. I didn’t ask too many questions.

Good news! I mentioned to the HR consultant running our induction that I still didn’t know which group I was starting in. The consultant responded with a well polished look of surprise and pulled out a list. I am going to be working in Mergers and Acquisitions. I am so excited, this is exactly where I wanted to be and I couldn’t be happier. Two of the other graduates are also starting in M&A with me, which should be good because it means we can work together and help each other out when we have no clue what we are doing.

Each of us has been allocated a supervising partner, a buddy and a secretary. All of the buddies are relatively junior lawyers who will hopefully be able to answer even our most stupid questions and thereby help to ease us into the firm. Around midday, our buddies took us out for a long lunch, which was a very nice touch. The restaurant was beautiful and, just to indicate how expensive it was, it was one of those ridiculous restaurants that has a minimum order of $50 per person. I normally balk at paying $5 for lunch, but perhaps that says more about me than about this restaurant. There was an element of doubt about who would be paying for the lunch. But I wasn’t all that worried, the Junior Associates were ordering up big, so I followed suit. One of the Junior Associates put the bill on her shiny black corporate credit card. I’m so excited becuase I will be getting one of these shiny black pieces of plastic within the next couple of weeks. I can use it to pay for taxis, corporate lunches and other partner approved paraphernalia.

The gossip begins! After work, a couple of us went down the road for some drinks. We were reminiscing about the good old times and one of the grads told us that last year he saw one of the very senior partners, who was drunk at one of the Christmas parties, walk up to one of the summer clerks and say, “you mean nothing to me!” It’s almost so disgraceful that it’s funny! Points for honesty, I guess.

The training finishes on Wednesday. I am a little apprehensive about being thrown in the deep end on Thursday. I excelled at law school but, the reality is, I don’t know the first thing about being a real lawyer. How hard could it be?