Job Satisfaction at Johnson Winter Slattery

Part of core team managing a large commercial dispute, drafting, considering, meeting with counsel.

As a graduate at JWS your graduate day-to-day responsibilities include legal research, drafting advice, performing due diligence or discovery tasks and general matter management work.

My daily responsibilities differ but I'm being given work I know I can handle. Some of the tasks are a bit menial to complete but overall it hasn't been anything overtly challenging yet.

I assist on a variety of matters; my title or official team does not limit what I can work on. There are no 'rotations', which means from the get-go I have been assisting on client matters in areas such as ASX compliance, property, dispute resolution, litigation and more.

I'm involved predominantly in assisting with ongoing commercial disputes, and advising clients with respect to competition and consumer law issues. My tasks often include conducting legal research, assisting with preparing correspondence and advices, attending court hearings, document review and related administrative tasks.

Overall I enjoy my work but sometimes it can be a little quiet (which is not uncommon for transactional work). As our firm is small, I feel that sometimes I am asked to do tasks that are at a graduate level but also provide tasks that are beyond my capabilities/should be for someone at a more senior level. I have to fill all of these roles, which can be both challenging and exciting but sometimes dull and repetitive depending on the task.

Working in disputes resolution. Day-to-day responsibilities vary based on the matters. Often drafting emails and letters, drafting documents (ie. deeds, contracts), preparing briefs, document review.

As a first year associate, I am still finding out what my role entails. It is heavily dependent on the work I am doing. Some days I can be conducting research and identifying cases that assist or strengthen a claim we are proposing to make in a dispute. Other days I can be tasked with proof-reading documents such as expert evidence reports or affidavits. Other days I can be tasked with finalizing documents by formatting them, including footnotes and cross references etc. As JWS has a flat structure, the teams I do work for and the work itself varies each day.

As I am not tied to a particular practice, my day-to-day can look drastically different from each other.

Document review and drafting