Osborne Clarke welcomes 11 interns from #10,000 Black Interns programme

Published by

Peter Davison

International law firm Osborne Clarke's legal and business services teams have welcomed 11 interns across its three UK locations, including Bristol and Reading, as part of its six-week #10000 Black Interns (10KBI) Programme.

The firm's Bristol office will host six interns with two legal interns joining the corporate team, and three interns in the IT and Osborne Clarke Solutions teams, while HR will also host an intern.

In London there will be two legal interns, one in real estate and the financial institutions group as well as a sales and marketing team intern.

In Reading the firm welcomes two legal interns, with one in corporate and the other in banking.

Each intern will have dedicated buddies to help support their learning journey, while junior and senior mentors have also been selected to inspire the interns and provide guidance for how to develop their careers.

The mentors will maintain their relationship with each of the interns and plan monthly catch-up meetings throughout the programme and afterwards.

Bola Gibson, head of inclusion and corporate responsibility, said: "We hope that this programme really inspires the participants and means that we can make some progress in growing the representation of black people in Osborne Clarke and other professional services businesses."

Zoe Reid, graduate recruitment manager at Osborne Clarke, said: "This programme presents such a great opportunity to help our firm develop and broaden the talent pool we recruit from.

"We're offering our legal interns that are in year three of their university courses the opportunity to undertake the assessment process and apply for a training contract with the firm."

"We are also providing all our legal and non-legal interns with recruitment and employability training, and our legal interns will spend a week gaining experience in the in house team of one of our clients," said Bola.

10KBI seeks to offer 2,000 internships each year for five consecutive years. The programme has partnered with firms from 24 different sectors to deliver paid work experience.

Pictured: The interns hosted by Osborne Clarke’s Bristol office include Haneefa Ayeni, Ashanti Okor, Nicole Poku, David Onoja, John Ujah.

Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country. An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts. Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.