who_we_are
Derek Hegarty
- B.Comm.
- M.Econ.Sc.
- Dip. Emp
I joined Arthur Cox as a trainee solicitor in 2006 having spent much of the previous ten years pursuing a career as a professional rugby player both here in Ireland and in the UK. So after trading in my gum shield for a shirt and tie I began my new life in the Capital Markets department feeling as anxious at the prospect of working in a firm like Arthur Cox as I had before any big game. Discovering that one of the partners I’d be assisting on my first job was Tom Courtney, the man who wrote the seminal Irish text on Company Law and who only a few months earlier had corrected my FE1 Company Law paper did not exactly put me at ease!
However, people here are used to anxious trainees and within a short time I’d relaxed into my new job and was working side by side with my former examiner and the rest of the team. They kept an eye out for me, made sure I was given things to do and took the time to show me how it should be done.
This type of environment gave me the feeling that I was once again operating as part of a team and this was invaluable in helping me to settle in and complete my move from the pitch to the office.
During my Capital Markets rotation I learned about things like securitisation and corporate finance and I also became aware of things like the standard of work required in a firm of Arthur Cox’s calibre. By the time I left the office in October 2006 for the Law Society’s PPCI course I had surprised myself at how quickly I had settled into my new role and my new life.
I spent the next six months as a full time student at Blackhall Place along with the twenty five other Arthur Cox trainees from my intake and over four hundred trainees from other firms around the country. Despite there being a fair amount of work to be done the course was a lot of fun and was a great way to learn a bit more about life as a solicitor and to get to know some future colleagues outside of the office.
I returned to the office following PPCI and completed rotations in the Mergers and Acquisitions, Commercial Property and Employment Law departments. The work I did in these departments varied from trawling through mountains of paper as part of due diligence exercises, to participating in a high profile employment law case before the Supreme Court. I worked hard during these rotations as I tried to get to grips with a new area of law every four months but I learned a huge amount during this time and I worked with some of the top lawyers in the country on a number of really interesting and topical transactions, one of which I got a particular kick out of following in the media for a number of months.
During this period I was nominated as the trainee delegate for my intake. This meant that I met regularly with the Director of the Trainee Programme to communicate feedback to and from the trainees on how the training programme was progressing and how it could be improved. I also decided at this time to use the educational bursary I’d been allocated to take up a place on a Postgraduate Diploma course in Employment Law at UCD. So the eleven month in-office period following PPCI was a particularly busy time for me. However, when I reported to the Law Society for the PPCII course in April of this year I did so with a much better idea of the areas of law that interested me most and of the type of lawyer I wanted to become.
As PPCII began not even the prospect of the lectures, tutorials, assignment writing and exams which lay ahead could dampen my enthusiasm for this temporary return to student life. The three months that I spent as a PPCII student really were amongst the most enjoyable of the last few years and even though it all finishes with a set of difficult exams the awareness amongst people on the course that this may well be the last they get to call themselves a full time student creates a unique, fun environment.
With the PPCII exams behind us eleven other Arthur Cox trainees and I travelled to Zambia to volunteer at a charity mission for a few weeks before returning to the office and to the real world. The trip was an incredible experience and we managed to gain a valuable piece of perspective before we began our final few months as trainees.
I am currently back in the office working in a busy Insolvency department for my final rotation and as the training programme nears the end for me and the prospect of qualifying as a solicitor looms closer I’ve started to think of the career which lies ahead and about the one which I left behind.
I think of how different work is for me now compared to how it was during the ten years I spent playing sport and I wonder how I have settled in so quickly and how it is that I don’t miss my old life more.
Perhaps it is down to the fact that despite the suits, the office and the nine-to-five, working here feels in many ways like I am still part of a professional sports team. Arthur Cox is populated by people who are amongst the very best in the world at what they do, training is regarded as the foundation for success and whilst getting the right result is paramount and work is scrutinised, analysed and consistently delivered to elite standards in high pressure situations, improvements are always sought and an ethos of encouragement and development permeates the entire firm.
So whatever the reason is I’ve settled in better than I could have hoped and although the period of the training programme has for me been all about new challenges and new people, new situations and a completely different lifestyle I can look back on two and a half demanding, difficult, productive and thoroughly enjoyable years and look forward to a new career knowing that I could not be better prepared for whatever lies ahead.
