Maurice Conway
Position
Second seat Trainee
Key Facts
Read Law & Business at University College Dublin
Joined A&O
March 2009
Bucharest!
18 Jun 2010
I found out this week that I will spend the final six months of my training contract abroad in Bucharest! It's great to get the chance to spend more time in corporate as it's my favourite department so far and it isn't half bad getting to live in eastern Europe for a while! My flat mate is moving to Milan and I will have other work friends in Budapest, Rome and Amsterdam so I expect I will spend my weekends checking out the sights and sounds and bars of Europe! I will be living by myself in the firm’s apartment in Bucharest and apparently it gets REALLY cold in the winter so I expect I might be spending a lot of time inside! I’m thinking of taking up guitar (even though I’m pretty tone deaf) so that if I'm trapped indoors with only Romanian TV I'll have something to keep me amused!
“It was a challenging and busy time but it was great to have responsibility for particular areas of the report ”
London life
I am now half way through my time in the corporate department. Working in a big firm, you begin to realise that departments can have very different cultures. The corporate department is very open and friendly and very team-orientated. Recently I have been working on our client’s potential acquisition of a number of global brands. Whenever a company considers whether or not to make a bid for another company, they do what is called due diligence on the target company. This means that the target company gives the potential buyer access to corporate and legal documents so that they can decide whether or not to make an offer for the business. The target company in this case has assets all over the world. I was given responsibility for liaising with counsel in certain Asian and European countries, as well as personally reviewing some of the UK documentation. It was a challenging and busy time but it was great to have responsibility for particular areas of the report and to develop my understanding of how to run the complete due diligence process, which is something I would be required to do as an associate.
On the lighter end of the scale, a client called us the other day a little embarrassed and ticked-off about a recent incident! They had paid a training provider £4000 upfront to provide a one day training course to some staff. The staff members rocked up to an address in London only to find that the office and the company didn’t exist! The fraudster had pocketed the £4000 and disappeared, probably with cheques from a number of other companies! Our client wanted us to look into options to retrieve the cash. This was a difficult one as it’s hard to get back £4000 without spending something similar. They could bring an online money claim for a fee of £100, but enforcement of any judgment received would be difficult if the fraudster was not around. There were also reputational issues for them to consider. I don’t think the client will actually pursue it but it was an interesting bit of work that day and definitely not typical of the work I do every day in M&A!
World Cup
Finally, just in case you were wondering what happens when you have to work during a World Cup, I am pleased to say that all the games are live in the office bar/coffee shop! This makes it difficult to stop in for a quick coffee when Argentina are on the box! How annoying are those vuvuzelas by the way? About as annoying as having to watch Thierry Henry after he kept the Irish team out of the games, but this is probably not the right forum for that chat….!
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