I was also coming to the end of my third maternity leave and whilst I wasn’t willing to compromise on the quality of work or my career, I wanted a role which allowed me the flexibility to balance being a mum and a lawyer.

I joined the EG’s Leeds office for a year before transferring to Manchester. Both offices have a lovely, welcoming feel and there’s always people around to ask questions or grab a coffee with. My work involves both litigation and advisory, working with a number of government departments on everything from day-to-day HR advice to cross cutting Civil Service policy issues. The EG includes specialist hubs in TUPE, industrial relations and national security as well as various expert groups, and if you’re particularly interested in an area of employment law, you will be encouraged to develop specialisms alongside the wider spectrum of employment law.

I work three days a week. Although occasionally urgent matters need picking up outside of my usual hours, my non-working days are well protected and I have the flexibility to finish early/ start late when needed to work things around home.

I would say my favourite thing about working in the GLD is the people (who are genuinely very nice), but I suspect everyone is going to say that, so I’ll go for the quality of work. Usually when you join the EG your case load is tribunal focused, but there is scope to become involved in really interesting, challenging projects once you’re settled in, sometimes at the cutting edge of employment law. GLD offers opportunities you are unlikely to get in the private sector and I love the fact that I am constantly learning and developing as a lawyer.

On qualifying I worked in the Home Office Private Law Litigation Team working on some of the first claims brought under the newly enacted Human Rights Act. During this period, I was also deployed to HM Treasury to assist in the department’s response to the Penrose Inquiry into Equitable Life. After several, very rewarding, years in private law litigation, I had an opportunity to move to an advisory role at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) doing completely different work: advising on treasure, the Royal Household and films! I am now back in the litigation division, returning first to the Ministry of Justice Private Law and Inquests Team in which I continued to work on complex human rights litigation as well as high profile inquests. Currently, I am in the Covid-19 Inquiry Division and the Recognised Legal Representative for HM Treasury, and DCMS.

I love, and am deeply appreciative of, the variety of, and access to, such meaningful and challenging work that GLD offers. The opportunities are seemingly endless: one day you can be working on your caseload, the next you are walking across St James Park to work with clients in Whitehall or, as I also did, travelling round the country providing legal support to military service personnel. I also value the privilege of working so closely with talented and dedicated operational and policy clients. I genuinely think it would be difficult to find more varied, significant and rewarding work.

I have worked in this team for eight years after working in the DEFRA/DfE team for five years. Prior to joining GLD I worked for a local authority after qualifying in private practice. Before training as a lawyer, I worked in the motor industry for over twenty years.

As a commercial lawyer in GLD I especially enjoy the variety of work we undertake. Our bread and butter is procurement law and contracts but we also deal with intellectual property, disputes, data protection, construction law, TUPE, company law, property law, insolvency, subsidy control, information law, and just about anything else which might crop up in the Government’s dealings with suppliers, customers and regulators. We deal with everything from massive multi-million-pound contracts in projects which can last years, to discrete queries on how members of the public gain access to wills.

I was aged nearly 50 when I joined Commercial Law Group and was given the opportunity to build a new and rewarding career. The breadth of work means there is something for every type of lawyer in Commercial Law Group, whatever their background and experience, and many opportunities to work in different government departments, gaining new skills and insights into how government works.

I’m currently a senior advisory lawyer in the Climate Change and Net Zero Legal Team, advising the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) on international climate change matters. I get involved in climate change aspects of new trade deals, I advise on international climate finance projects, and most recently I have started advising UK negotiators at international climate change conferences (known as COPs) under the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and the Paris Agreement

Working at GLD gives me the opportunity to be involved in fascinating and really important legal issues – the climate crisis is one of the biggest challenges we face, and it is a privilege to be able to work on the UK’s efforts towards addressing it.

I matrix manage a number of colleagues who have a mixed variety of roles from PA services, finance, recruitment, analysis and other business management functions.

Working in the COO group means that you get to work across multiple teams like Finance, Communications, Digital & Data, Knowledge & Innovation, Bona Vacantia etc – learning from colleagues with different skills, helping us to understand and ‘see the bigger picture’.

My favourite thing about working in the COO group is the people, the team, albeit big, is really friendly, exceptionally skilled and really helpful.