A law firm with offices in London, Bristol and Reading that offers a two-year training contract with SQE preparation.
Osborne Clarke is an international law firm that gives legal advice to businesses. Its lawyers help companies buy and sell other companies, protect their ideas and data, settle disputes, follow regulations and hire people. Its main sectors are energy and utilities, financial services, life sciences and healthcare, real estate and infrastructure, retail and consumer, technology, media and communications, and transport and automotive. Clients named by Wikipedia include The Pokemon Company, Dell, Tripadvisor and Eurostar's St Pancras project.
The firm began in Bristol in 1748, when Jeremiah Osborne started practising law there. From 1833 it worked closely with the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel on the Great Western Railway. The modern firm was formed in 1969 by a merger of the Osborne and Clarke firms, and it opened a London office in 1987. Reading followed in 1998, then Silicon Valley (2000) and Cologne (2001). Wikipedia lists 25 offices, over 1,220 lawyers and about 2,440 staff, with its head office in London.
The pages we read do not set out a formal mission statement or list of values. What they do emphasise is people: the training page says 'The OC difference lies with our people' and groups its message under the heading 'Individuals matter', with good corporate citizenship, diversity and inclusion and individual wellbeing. These are the firm's own words. It won the Best Corporate Culture award at the 2019 Managing Partners' Forum awards and was The Lawyer's Firm of the Year in 2015, according to Wikipedia.
In the UK the firm works from London, Bristol and Reading, and each office has its own flavour. London covers areas such as mergers and acquisitions, capital markets, financial institutions, real estate, technology and international arbitration. Bristol covers corporate, commercial and litigation work, plus pensions, tax and residential development. Reading focuses on technology, private equity and US companies entering the UK. There is also an in-house legal technology team called OC Solutions, and trainees can do a seat there.
Trainees do two years of placements, called seats, with at least one each in transactional, disputes and regulatory work, and they can complete up to four. SQE preparation (the exams to qualify as a solicitor) is taught with BPP, alongside a pre-joining programme called Ready for Success. The firm says trainees get a development manager, a supervisor, a mentor and a peer network, join its social-responsibility and diversity committees from day one, and can ask for secondments to clients or overseas. It says it does not expect five days a week in the office and offers part-time training; these are its own claims. Pay is 57,000 pounds in year one and 59,000 pounds in year two (as at 2026). Applications for September 2029 starts open 1 October 2026 and close 15 January 2027. The listing we read was for STEM graduates, so check which degrees are accepted. The firm also publishes an apprentice yearbook for 2026, and its site links to insight and vacation schemes, but we found no details of them.
Website: www.osborneclarke.com
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