Early careers

Your training contract with us lasts for two years. Corporate, Finance and Dispute Resolution form the core of our services to clients, so you’ll spend time in each of these practice groups. Here’s what you can expect from each one. 

Corporate  

You’ll learn about public and private M&A, how to set up joint ventures – often across a number of jurisdictions – and how to structure and advise on securities. Your clients will be international businesses, private equity houses, financial services and investment funds, as well as private and state-owned Chinese enterprises. 

Dispute Resolution  

Your time with this team will cover risk management, litigation, arbitration, mediation and other forms of alternative dispute resolution and negotiation. Freshfields is the leading arbitration practice in Asia. Our client work includes advising on high-profile China-related arbitration, the largest Asia treaty arbitration and the largest Asia dispute resolution.  

Finance  

You’ll learn about bank lending, debt capital markets, restructuring and structured finance.  

You can also choose to spend three months working in one of these areas: 

• Antitrust, Competition and Trade. 
• Financial Services Regulatory. 
• Intellectual Property / Information Technology.  

Antitrust, Competition and Trade 

This practice will introduce you to how mergers are structured to meet the requirements of competition authorities in any number of jurisdictions. Your work could include advising on cartel investigations and learning about commercial agreements, restrictive practices, compliance programmes, state aid, public procurement and international trade. You could also become a member of a team working on antitrust litigation. This could be a team of antitrust lawyers, or a multi-jurisdictional group offering antitrust advice as part of a bigger transaction or a worldwide investigation.  

Financial Services Regulatory 

You’ll learn how to provide integrated advice on deal-structuring and execution, acquisition financing and fund structuring, including the tax, competition and regulatory aspects. In this practice you’ll gain experience acting for private equity, infrastructure, pension and sovereign wealth funds, as well as alternative capital providers. You’ll be part of a multi-jurisdictional team advising financial institutions on the impact of fintech and the broader digitisation of financial services. 

Intellectual Property and Information Technology (IP/IT) 

Our team in Hong Kong covers both contentious and non-contentious work. You’ll advise on all aspects of IP in corporate transactions. Your work may also cover privacy and data protection, internet and e-commerce and touch on patent litigation, trademarks, copyright, unfair competition and telecoms regulatory work.  

Our lawyers are involved in some of the world’s most complex but rewarding mandates. They advise clients on all types of competition, regulatory and trade law issues, many of which are cross-border or global.