In our next “All you need is Law” session, we welcomed Elspeth Nuttall, Edinburgh alumna, who completed the accelerated two-year Scots Law LLB in 2017 and Diploma in Professional Legal Practice in 2018. Elspeth currently works with Dentons UK and Middle East LLP, the world’s largest law firm which focusses mainly on commercial and corporate law. Her role is Construction Associate and is based in their Edinburgh office.
Read on for Elspeth’s valuable insights on demystifying what construction law is, and her advice on traineeship applications.
How Elspeth ended up pursuing a career in law
Since school, Elspeth had always been interested in law but she was advised by teachers that perhaps law was for a different kind of personality. To some extent, she could understand that because the cultural image of a lawyer is somebody who is quite loud – perhaps a litigator type approach. On reflection, she thinks her teachers were right in that law might not have been for her straight after school.
Elspeth did her first degree in Spanish at the University of Aberdeen. After graduation, she did a stint working in oil and gas but the industry wasn’t doing so well so she found herself, in her mid-twenties thinking, “What do I want to do?”. So, Elspeth went back to live in Edinburgh and completed the accelerated two-year Scots Law LLB and the Diploma.
She then secured a summer placement with a Scottish firm called Maclay, Murray and Spens, and on completion they offered her a traineeship. During the time it took Elspeth to finish her LLB and Diploma, McClay, Murray and Spens merged with Dentons.
On qualification, Elspeth was set on qualifying into real estate but Dentons didn’t have any opportunities in real estate or construction (her second choice at the time) and Elspeth decided to go and work for another firm for a year. She highlighted that the step between being a trainee and being qualified is quite a big leap. That was in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic and was a very different time to what it is now. People were all working from home which she found quite isolating and began to think, “Is law for me?”. Elspeth went back to work at Dentons as they offered her a job in real estate or construction and she opted for construction.
Demystifying construction law
Elspeth is in the non-contentious Construction team which forms part of the overall projects group and focusses on construction projects before they get contentious i.e. likely to cause disagreement or argument. So, at the start of the project, when everybody is trying to get things up and running, that’s where Elspeth comes in. But, when things start to go wrong and get contentious, as they often do in construction projects, then it’s handled by a different team within their firm – the Contentious Construction team.
Construction law covers everything you can think of to do with building. Your mind might automatically think of this as adding an extension on to a house (though they don’t tend to do any work for individuals at Dentons). However, you might think about putting an extension on a hotel, for example – so Elspeth will do the work associated with that, which would generally be a building contract and then the appointments of what’s called professional consultants i.e. engineers or architects or people to come and do the landscaping. All of them enter into contracts and Elspeth will be the person who prepares and negotiates the contracts. Elspeth is also involved in:
- Construction of student accommodation.
- Energy work such as solar farms; they’re obviously built so they need a building contract or a contract in place.
- Rail is often covered by construction contracts; Elspeth will work quite closely with rail clients.
- Other areas e.g. construction contracts in relation to building and maintaining data centres, freeports and contracts in relation to the construction with underseas cables.
Getting into the world of construction law: hints and tips
Elspeth is fortunate that Dentons has a construction team. As Elspeth trained at Dentons, she was able to get the experience before qualifying. At Dentons, you can do a seat in the non-contentious construction team (does not involve a dispute). They also have a contentious construction team – that’s the litigators; when a project has gone terribly wrong or is about to go wrong.
However, lots of firms don’t have construction as a practice area. If construction is something you’re interested in and especially as you go through your traineeship, you discover that you like transactional work, then you might want to consider construction on qualification, even if you’ve not done it before. Elspeth emphasised they have people joining Dentons, as newly qualified solicitors, who have never done construction before and that’s acceptable because they have transferable skills.
Elspeth is on interview panels for summer placement students and for traineeships. She noted that candidates that stand out more are the ones that have any type of work experience. She advised students to consider getting some form of work experience; it doesn’t matter if it’s law related experience or not. Elspeth gave the example of working in a shoe shop has the same skills you would need for working in a law firm; the customer service skills of being able to handle difficult situations. She also worked in the Careers Service part-time supporting our Employer Team throughout her Graduate LLB and she was also Vice-President and then President of the University of Edinburgh Mooting Society.
A key message was when making job applications to step back and think about the kind of transferable skills you have.
During the session, there were several questions from non-law students:
- If you have a background in the construction industry, Elspeth advised that this would help with various aspects of her role but it wasn’t essential.
- She also advised that engineering students could consider a career in law as having a mathematical brain really helps. There’s a lot of logic in law so certain areas of law might come easier to you.
- There are a lot of networking groups; you can meet engineers, architects and surveyors to find out more about their role and how this fits in with your role as a Construction lawyer.
Traineeship application advice
When you get to the stage of applying for traineeships, think about your own career interests and not those of your peers. Think about:
- Why you went into law?
- What areas interest you?
- Where you see your future going?
- What are your drivers/your motivations?
- What do you need? For example, if you’re somebody who is driven by social justice or you care passionately about the environment or families and children, then you might want to consider different firms rather than the bigger commercial law firms.
- What transferable skills do you have that are applicable to different environments?
Elspeth recommended attending various networking events, where you are likely to meet people where you can ask questions such as, “What’s it like at your firm? What is it that you do?”. Don’t be shy about asking those questions when you meet someone. Lots of lawyers want to help you – they recognise the position that you’re in. The only way that you can make an informed decision about where you want to be and where you’ll be going is by speaking to people to find out what that particular area of law is like.
When you do your traineeship, think carefully about the seats you’re doing and make sure you get a wide range of experience. Lots of people do move about trying different sectors of law until they find the one they’re interested in.
Most enjoyable aspects of Elspeth’s role
- Because it’s so broad, you are never doing the same thing twice.
- Sometimes you can feel very passionate about it – Elspeth is doing a lot of cladding remediation work at the moment as there has been lots of changes in legislation due to the Grenfell Tower fire and developers are now having to go back and sort out the cladding on the properties they previously built.
- Elspeth highlighted how exciting it is to watch the progression of a building being built over time and thinking “that’s my building!”.
- As Dentons is a global firm, Elspeth does a lot of work for projects that are overseas. She has recently been working closely with their Romanian office and she enjoyed getting to know the clients and to see how things are done differently.
Thanks again Elspeth for your great insight.
Elspeth highlighted the importance of having some form of work experience. Have a read of our webpage which provides suggestions on building work experience.
