Inside Fund Management: A Trainee Perspective

When Accutrainee was founded more than a decade ago, this kind of training was far from mainstream.

At the time, training contracts were limited in number and largely concentrated in private practice. In house legal teams were growing quickly, but very few were set up to train solicitors in a structured, compliant way. There was a clear disconnect between where legal work was happening and where lawyers were allowed to qualify.

Accutrainee was created to address that gap.

The thinking was straightforward. If in house teams were doing high quality legal work, and if they were willing to invest in junior lawyers, then there needed to be a proper framework to allow people to train there. Not informally. Not as an afterthought. But with structure, supervision, and a clear focus on development. Susan Cooper founded Accutrainee to do exactly that, at a time when in house training contracts were still rare and poorly understood. Since then, Accutrainee has become a recognised authority in the early stages of solicitor training, particularly in relation to qualifying in-house and supporting pathways to qualification.

At the time, that was a genuinely different approach. It challenged the idea that there was only one correct way to train, even though the market itself was already moving in a different direction.