DLA Piper explains how it has developed an award-winning early careers strategy.
Young workers represent the future, and DLA Piper’s early careers strategy plays a critical role in supporting young people to develop the knowledge, skills, and behaviours required to be successful in the future workplace.
It begins at school through our social mobility programme, Head Start, for students aged 17-20, providing 3-5 years of mentoring, work experience, financial assistance, and employability skills training.
The early careers programmes, including internships, apprenticeships and graduate programmes, are internationally aligned across 10 locations (UK, Ireland, Dubai, and Hong Kong). The firm also recruits early careers talent into a further 30 locations across 21 countries, and these countries predominantly run programmes locally.
Across the international firm, DLA Piper recruits over 1,000 early careers hires annually.
Overall, the firm has developed a strategically aligned experience in a complex sector, which delivers exceptional results making it the clear winner of ISE’s Most Successful Early Careers Strategy 2024.
Strategic goals
DLA Piper's early careers strategy aims to:
- Deliver a high quality diverse junior talent pipeline, enabling the firm to achieve its vision of being the leading global business law firm.
- Balance international alignment and local nuance, enabling early careers activity to be fit for purpose within each country.
- Create strategic talent programmes, developing future/scarce skills.
- Enable a successful transition from education to employment: Equip early careers hires before, during and after the programme with the knowledge, skills and behaviours required for workplace success, now and in the future.
- Create meaningful change within the legal industry, through widening access to the profession and levelling the playing field. The firm wants to ensure that a young person’s background does not determine the type of job they go into or their career success. It ensures that through its student recruitment efforts, everyone joining the early careers programmes has an equal opportunity to succeed and thrive.
- Educate and inspire students to pursue a career in law.
DLA’s Piper’s early careers strategy
DLA Piper’s strategic management of early careers is complex, requiring a balance between international alignment and local nuance.
DLA Piper's award-winning programmes are managed and implemented by its early careers team which collaborates with colleagues across HR who have responsibility for early careers activity as part of a broader remit. The early careers team acts as a specialist centre of excellence and best practice.
In 2023, the firm refreshed its strategy, with a focus on alignment. Aligning early careers in a law firm is not as simple as in other sectors, due to the regulated way in which graduates train to become lawyers.
There are more than 25 regulatory bodies, so simplistic alignment (e.g. programme structure and duration) is not practical. Instead, the firm strives for alignment in the early careers experience, which requires bold, creative, and strategic thinking.
The firm has an internationally aligned process for forecasting early careers hiring across all its international locations. This enables the firm's senior leaders to have visibility of early careers around hiring and associated spend, as well as enabling identification of opportunities to align activity, create efficiencies and share best practice.
Senior leaders endorse and sponsor the early careers activity. They understand the importance of attracting, recruiting and developing the best available talent for the firm’s future. There are also business sponsors/committees in each country who the firm collaborates with on all aspects of delivery. Partners and fee earners are involved in the selection process and campus attraction activities.
Early careers programmes overview
DLA Piper runs discovery days, aimed at aspiring lawyers, and a Summer Internship,
designed to give students a realistic insight into life at the firm. These programmes are open to students from all degree disciplines, and act as pipeline programmes for the firm's International Training Programme.
Solicitor apprenticeship
- Duration: 6 years
- Structure: four, 12-month rotations followed by four, 6-month rotations
- Merge with International Training Programme from Year 5 opportunities enabling parity of opportunity, and access to international and client secondment opportunities
- End destination: Newly Qualified Solicitor
Project manager apprenticeship
- Duration: 3 years and 4 months
- Structure: Two, 12-month rotations and one, 16-month rotation
- Rotation opportunities in legal project management, legal technology and the legal delivery centre teams
- End destination: Qualified Project Manager
International training programme
- Duration: 2 years
- Structure: four, 6-month rotations
- Client and international secondment opportunities from Rotation 2 onwards – 55% trainees who completed their programme in 2024 completed a secondment.
- End destination: Newly Qualified Solicitor
International training programme development pathway
Pre-joining engagement activity:
- Buddy programme
- Office-specific networking events
- 6 months pre-joining Festive Fun Day
- 2 months pre-joining Summer Fun Day
- Student brand ambassador opportunities
- Participation in university events
- Travel to attend all events is funded to ensure no barriers to access
Pre-joining skills development opportunities:
- Fully funded, postgraduate study
- Access to justice scholarship programme
- Client secondment opportunities
- Internal paralegal roles
- Monthly keeping in touch knowledge and skills building calls
Approach to recruitment
DLA Piper is continually evolving its approach to early careers. For example:
- In 2024, the firm introduced:
- Discovery days across several international locations including Australia, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Hong Kong, and Dubai and the UK.
- A new summer internship in its Singapore office as well as a new Furas Internship in its Dubai office in support of the UAE government's Emiratisation goals.
- In early 2025, DLA Piper launched two virtual job simulations and introduced a new events series called 'Law, unlocked' for first-year students.
- It collaborates with schools, universities and other organisations to educate and inspire students.
- The firm has been a gold sponsor of the 93% Club's Social Mobility Factory event for the last two years.
- It provides students with detailed guidance about use of generative AI tools in the recruitment process on its early careers website.
- It works with City Century, a City of London Law Society initiative that connects the diverse talent with 50 law firms in the capital. It is one of six law firms invited to form part of City Century's Strategic Delivery Group.
Measures of success
DLA Piper's measure of success includes creating parity of opportunities and outcomes for solicitor apprentices and trainees. For example, from Year 5 of the solicitor apprenticeship, apprentices merge with the trainees and have access to international/client secondments.
The team also reviews year-on-year evidence of diversifying the pathways into law – from September 2025, it will have one solicitor apprentice for every six trainees.
Retention data upon programme completion is also considered - the firm retained 10% more trainees in its 2023 qualification process, compared to the previous intake.
As a Sustainable Recruitment Alliance signatory, DLA Piper embeds sustainability into early careers operations - it was the first law firm to eliminate the distribution of campus merchandise in 2017 and carbon literacy training is embedded into its internship and training programmes.
Read about how DLA Piper is building sustainable early careers recruitment