London Careers
Current London Opportunities
Current Opportunities
For details of our current Legal and Business Services opportunities in London, please click here.
Please continue reading for details of our London graduate recruitment opportunities.
Graduate Recruitment
Get to know Milbank
Milbank is a premier international law firm handling high-profile, complex cases and business transactions through 11 offices worldwide.
The firm is made up of small teams of exceptional lawyers, with big responsibilities. Challenges arrive quickly because clients bring us their toughest and first-in-class deals and issues, confident that Milbank will apply not just legal knowledge, but also judgement. This is why professional development and training, including the firm’s ground-breaking Milbank@Harvard programme, is a key priority.
In London, we offer a range of services across various practice areas, many of which are ranked in Band 1 in Chambers & Partners. These include: Banking and Leveraged Finance, Corporate, Competition, Islamic Finance, Litigation & Arbitration, Project Finance, Restructuring, Structured Finance and Securitisations, Tax and Transportation and Space.
The firm has over 1000 lawyers working in 11 offices across Asia, Europe, Latin America and the United States.
Our Graduate Recruitment Partner Committee in London consists of:
Our London Graduate Recruitment Brochure
How to apply
Submission Link
We are proud to be using Rare Recruitment's Contextual Recruitment System (CRS) which allows us to consider your achievements in the context in which they were gained. We understand that not every candidate’s achievements look the same on paper — and we want to recruit the best people, from every background.
- Applications will open on 3 September 2026 for our 2026 open days and 2027 vacation schemes
Click here for a list of FAQs.
If you have any further questions regarding the recruiting process, please don’t hesitate to contact Isabel Elsey, Senior Recruitment Manager, Ciara O’Reilly, Senior Graduate Recruitment Advisor, or Macey Rothon, Recruitment Assistant at LNRecruiting@milbank.com.
Vacation Schemes
Vacation Schemes 2027
We will be running our first Vacation Scheme from Monday 22 March to Friday 2 April 2027. Our second Vacation Scheme will run from Monday 5 April to Friday 16 April 2027.
The vacation scheme's duration is two weeks, so attendees will have the opportunity to sit in two different practice areas on the Traditional Track and spend the full two weeks in Leveraged Finance on the Leveraged Finance Track.
There will be a variety of training and development sessions to help equip you with the skills you will need as a junior lawyer. You will also be invited to attend a number of social events held throughout the scheme to help you network and build relationships at the firm.
Open Days
Open Days 2026
Join us at our London office for one of our 2026 Open Days and gain an insight into Milbank, our culture, and the opportunities available to aspiring lawyers. You will have the chance to hear from our lawyers and graduate recruitment team, learn more about our vacation scheme programmes and training contract, and discover what a career at Milbank could look like for you.
Leveraged Finance (LevFin) Track Open Day
Wednesday 21 October 2026
Our LevFin Open Day is designed exclusively for university students who are studying a Finance LLM and want to gain an insight into our Leveraged Finance training contract.
Traditional Track Open Day
Thursday 22 October 2026
Our Open Day is exclusively for university students who are currently eligible for our Vacation Schemes and want to gain an insight into a career at Milbank. It is open to students in the second year of their undergraduate degree or above, including graduates and those who have already completed their SQE.
Milbank 2027 Summer Program
Summer Associate Application
We will be accepting applications for our 2027 2L Summer Program from 11 January 2026 to 28 February 2026. J.D. applicants interested in applying to our London office may complete an online application form here: London Careers.
The Summer Associate position is based within our Corporate Finance and Securities team, led by Apostolos Gkoutzinis.
Trainees
What it takes
Our trainees work in small teams and are given responsibility from day one. Working directly with associates and partners, our trainees are an integral part of the team in every seat. The benefit of our select intake is that our trainees receive exposure to high quality work as well as first class training and supervision throughout their training contracts.
We’re looking for candidates who not only have strong academics, but who also possess excellent interpersonal and problem-solving skills. Candidates will need to be ambitious, intellectually curious and have a genuine interest in our practice areas. You should also have (or be predicted to have) a 2.1 or above in any degree discipline.
Our Training Contract
Trainees will typically be expected to undertake seats across our Corporate, Finance and Litigation practices. In addition, we offer comprehensive training to help develop your technical and practice-group specific knowledge, in addition to training on key communication, career management and presentation skills.
All students who attend one of our vacation schemes will automatically be considered for a training contract. We typically recruit all of our trainees from our spring and summer vacation schemes.
Leveraged Finance (LevFin) Training Contract Track
We also offer a Leveraged Finance Training Contract track in addition to the Traditional Training Contract of 4 seats. This programme is exclusively reserved for those who have a clear and committed interest in Leveraged Finance. Having completed your vacation scheme at Milbank and after securing a training contract with us, you will spend 12–18 months sitting in our Leveraged Finance team in London, followed by at least one seat in another practice area with your goal to qualify into the Leveraged Finance group. You will benefit from all the training and development opportunities offered to our Milbank trainees on our regular trainee programme — whilst working closely with our Leveraged Finance lawyers on the most exciting financing matters in the world.
If you relish the prospect of training with the very best — on challenging, high-profile work in global jurisdictions, while in a supportive environment dedicated to bringing out the best in lawyers — you will prosper on the Leveraged Finance Track programme. This program also offers an excellent opportunity for you to build upon and develop your broader career skills as a Leveraged Finance legal expert across many industry sectors.
Let's Meet
Event Dates
In 2026, we will be visiting the following universities across the UK:
- University College London
- London School of Economics
- University of Durham
- University of Warwick
- University of Cambridge
At these events our representatives will be available to answer any questions you have about our vacation scheme and training contract opportunities, and to provide you with a greater insight into the working culture at Milbank.
We have campus ambassadors at the following universities. Please reach out to them for more information on our opportunities:
- King’s College London
- Lancaster University
- London School of Economics
- Queen Mary, University of London
- University College London (UCL)
- University of Birmingham
- University of Bristol
- University of Cambridge
- University of Durham
- University of Edinburgh
- University of Exeter
- University of Leicester
- University of Nottingham
- University of Oxford
- University of Warwick
Pay & Benefits
Our Pay & Benefits
We offer one of the most competitive trainee salaries in the London market, in addition to an array of helpful benefits. Trainees currently receive a starting salary of £70,000 rising to £75,000 in their second year (this is reviewed annually). Trainees who are yet to complete the SQE will have their course fees paid in full and will also receive an annual maintenance grant of up to £20,000 per year. Starting salaries as an Associate at Milbank are USD $235,000.00.
A comprehensive range of benefits including 23 days of PTO, private medical insurance, life insurance, permanent health insurance, dental plan and a season ticket loan will be confirmed when candidates receive their formal offer.
Day in the Life
Day in the Life
7:15 a.m.: I wake up and walk to the gym (my gym is, conveniently, between my flat and the office). I listen to the latest FT News Briefing podcast on my walk (the podcasts are only 10 minutes long and quite interesting — would recommend).
9:20 a.m.: I get into the office, grab some breakfast and most importantly a coffee! I will usually have checked my emails on my phone by this time and know what needs urgent (or not so urgent) attention. Once at my desk, I filter through and reply to any new emails and make a note of everything I need to deal with on a given day (and over the next couple of days) — who doesn’t love a nice list of things they need to do that they can then (hopefully) tick off as the day progresses? If more things come up that I need to work on/address, I add them to my list throughout the day so I don’t accidentally forget anything.
10 a.m.: We often have training sessions/team meetings at this time, so I walk downstairs to one of our meeting rooms and catch up with my colleagues. If there are any topics that have particularly grabbed my attention from the team meeting, I make a note of them to research them further or to catch up on them with someone else from my team.
11 a.m.: I’m back at my desk after our team meeting. I catch up with my supervisor as we are working on a deal together at the moment — we discuss what needs to be done and I crack on with my work for the day! I’m liaising with our clients to gather certain missing corporate information which will need to be sent to a notary in Luxembourg. The work undertaken by the Financial Restructuring team is very multi-jurisdictional, so you are always working with legal counsel from different countries. It’s exciting as you get to see how legal systems work across different jurisdictions.
12:00 p.m.: I go to the atrium and grab lunch with my friends (the other trainees).
1:30 p.m.: I join a client call with my colleagues as we are discussing the next steps in the restructuring process of the deal that we’re working on. Closing is coming up at the end of the week so we need to get things finalised, especially as we hold the pen on a number of documents (and so need to manage the signing process). I take some notes on the call for my personal understanding as I learn the most when I write things down.
2:30 p.m.: I catch up with one of my colleagues on another deal that I’m working on — I’m helping with the transactional/document management side of that deal. As I’ve only started helping out on this deal recently, I ask him a couple of questions that I have on the overall structure of the deal and the latest updates — I love knowing what the bigger picture of anything I’m working on is as it helps give colour to what I’m contributing towards in my work.
3:30 p.m.: I grab a quick coffee with one of my colleagues from my previous seat — now that we’re in the office it’s so nice to catch up with people in person!
4:00 p.m.: I return to my desk and work on a pro bono project that I have been involved in over the last couple of months — I am currently drafting board resolutions that will be used by the company. The firm is very good at encouraging pro bono work and I have been enjoying helping out on a couple of different pro bono matters since joining Milbank last year.
5:00 p.m.: We have another call — this time with the client’s financial advisers. After the call, I quickly catch up with our deal team (there are four of us working on this deal — myself, my supervisor, a senior associate and a partner). We discuss our next steps.
6:00 p.m.: I send out a couple of emails and prepare a draft invoice email for a deal I’m working on — we send these out every two weeks. I forward my draft to my supervisor so she can take a look at it before we share it with the partner on the deal.
6:30 p.m.: We have team dinner & drinks today so I leave the office with my colleagues to grab something to eat!
