As a leading European law firm, Noerr offers you the best conditions for your career. You will work in a collaborative atmosphere with the best in your field, benefit from a wide range of development measures, have ample opportunity to network internationally, and very quickly assume responsibility for adding value to what we do. Whether or not you have prior experience, we encourage you to join us.
Fundamentally, career development at Noerr looks like this:
As an associate or senior associate, you will be involved in case work from your first day and belong to a team led by a partner who will be responsible for you. Our Starting@Noerr induction programme will make sure that you get to know all the relevant practical aspects of your work during your first six months, under the supervision of a tutor individually assigned to you: people, tasks, methods, "dos" and "don'ts" – in short, all you need to "get there" quickly and start making a constructive contribution.
Annual appraisal interviews, based on a structured catalogue of assessment criteria, will make sure that your partner and you discuss explicitly where you are and, therefore, what development can be regarded as feasible, desirable or already achieved. One feature of Noerr's approach is that the training of our associates and senior associates is also a matter for our partners and is not merely left to external trainers and educational institutions. This means that partners will play a substantial role in your further training measures. Look here to find out more about the wide range of training measures that will promote your development corresponding to your career status.
If you start as an associate, you can normally expect after two years to be appointed senior associate and included on the firm's letterhead. From your third year, you will usually complete your 3-4-month secondment, probably with one of our international partner law firms or one of our clients. After a further three years, you are likely to be promoted to associated partner or counsel. As an associated partner, you will share responsibility for the firm's success and increasingly manage your own cases, as well as internal teams. Promotion to counsel is of interest to proven specialists in their field who do not (yet) wish to follow the path leading to partner status, usually for personal reasons. Finally, nomination as equity partner or senior counsel follows in your eighth year. This requires an outstanding reputation both inside and outside the firm, based on a well-founded business case and successful positioning in the marketplace with a corresponding client base.
All of these steps will not only be transparent for you; you can also openly discuss which ones you find most appealing. At certain stages in your own and your family's lives, the position of counsel may be of interest to you. Even so, this will not oblige you to rule out completely the possibility of becoming an associated partner. Rather, you may wish to put it off for just 2-3 years. Feel free to talk to us about it.
