Rohit Grover

Posted: 20/12/2011

Was in:

Sharpe Pritchard, Solicitor, Public Sector, London

Now in:

Went about it:

I am now an Associate Director at professional services PR consultancy Spada, who specialise in the legal sector. I think I knew even before I qualified as a lawyer that I did not want to spend the rest of my career in the legal profession – at least practising as a lawyer anyway. So I guess for a period of about 2- 2.5 years prior to qualifying, and for one year post qualifying I was mentally preparing to make the move, but I thought that it would be a good idea to get a couple of years post qualification experience under my belt, basically to earn some money but also to give me a good grounding if I ever wished to come back into the law. So I was mentally preparing for about two to three years and then I literally took the decision – I was working up to it for a few weeks and then said to myself “okay, I am going to hand in my notice now.” I then had three months to work out what I was going to do. Initially it involved a bit of travel. I went to South East Asia for a few months, and upon returning decided to take a City Lit course in freelance journalism – writing has always been a genuine passion for me. Whilst I was doing that course on freelance journalism I got offered a job as a legal reporter at a company called Legalease which publishes Legal Business, In House Lawyer and The Legal 500. I had always thought that I would like to work for the legal directories, so it was a case of “right place, right time”. It was the best thing I ever did – I loved the job and the company.

After 3 years in legal journalism, which were the most fun 3 years I’ve ever had at work, I realised that journalism was not a long term career option for me. Even if I’d have achieved the ultimate and ended up working at a national newspaper, the job of a reporter is pretty one-dimensional and doing that day-in day-out for 30 years was never going to work for me. I had also become fascinated with the world of PR – shaping the news agenda rather than reacting to it just seemed much more substantial to me.

Throughout my time as a legal reporter I had always worked with Spada on quite a regular basis – there are really only 2 or 3 agencies which specialise in this niche and from what I could see Spada was always the best. So I applied, and thankfully got the job!