Solicitor
Farrer & Co

Daniella F

00:02 My name’s Daniella F I’m in the corporate department at Farrer & Co and I’m a solicitor. I qualified just over 2 ½ years ago so I’ve been at Farrer’s since then. My job differs on a day to day basis, I do a lot of corporate mergers and acquisitions sort of buying and selling companies acting for both the buyer and the seller.

00:24 I like the team work and I like the client contact, we have a lot of sort of quirky clients at this firm, a lot of them are really nice and good to work with. I also like working in a team with my colleagues, so that’s probably what I enjoy the most.

00:41 I think when I was younger I wanted to be a vet, but then soon realised that the sight of blood and things weren’t, weren’t really going to work for me. I looked at accountancy, which definitely isn’t for me, I don’t know why I looked, I’m not very good at maths.

00:54 We had a few family friends that were lawyers and I always thought their jobs sounded very exciting I was also slightly obsessed with the John Grisham books as a youngster I think that definitely had some sort of influence in my career choice.

01:07 My dad’s a teacher, recently retired and my mother did university later on in life and worked in business and still does work in business.

01:19 There wasn’t really any pressure on me to go to university but I always did want to, not only sort of for the experience but also, for sort of the career wise.

01:30 I grew up and went to school in Leeds and then applied to a couple of places to go to university most of which were actually sort of Northern England, one of them was London, I ended up coming to London, university college London and studied law there.

01:43 At first living in London was quite daunting it’s very different from Leeds and sort of the area I grew up in, much, much bigger but I quickly settled in and sort of emerged myself into the London life and it was, it was a very good university experience.

01:57 I was campus based so, you still had sort of the security in a way of that sort of environment but then, you had the whole of London to explore.

02:08 Getting a training contract’s very difficult there’s a lot of competition, there’s a lot of good people out there that want jobs in law firms, I think that was an obstacle before and will carry on to be an obstacle. I tried to get as much work experience as I could, my mum at the time lived in Spain, so I did a couple of weeks in a Spanish firm, just unpaid work experience, and that’s quite difficult to get because it is competitive and there’s a lot of sort of a rejection element cos I think for a lot of the applications you do you know you won’t get offers from them all.

02:44 I think I’ll stay in law I mean I definitely enjoy my work I get a lot from it, it’s very challenging, very rewarding I should think I’ll well, move up within the firm, maybe look at partnership at some point.

02:58 My partner and I like going to the theatre, we like travelling, meeting up with friends, I’m quite interested in sport I did a lot of ski racing when I was younger I skied for Yorkshire and then went on to ski for Great Britain girls development squad. When I was skiing I did a lot of travelling so skied a lot round Europe and the States, New Zealand, that was quite interesting cos we were always moving around a lot we never stayed in one area for a long time, so you got to see a lot of different things. So that’s probably one of my bigger achievements, although it was quite a long time ago now so. You can’t bring it up so long after so much.

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