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Helen Clift

Like many lawyers who have moved to the GLS from private practice, Helen Clift was drawn by the intellectual stimulation of the work.

As a family and medical lawyer at the Official Solicitor’s Department - an operational branch of the Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) - she progresses a broad range of high profile and challenging cases.

“I conduct litigation on behalf of clients who can’t represent themselves, such as minors and people with mental illness or brain injuries,” she says. “My area of work includes care, divorce and injunction proceedings and proceedings relating to medical treatment or welfare decisions for adults who lack capacity."

“The Official Solicitor’s Department is involved in a lot of high profile and frontline work – the assisted suicide case that hit the headlines recently was a case in point. You have to be able to act at short notice. A phone call about a case in the morning could lead you to court with the same case in the afternoon. I sometimes think it’s like having a challenging exam question to answer every day. But the work is very exciting and I enjoy the fact that it’s far less routine than private practice.”

Helen qualified as a solicitor in 1994, having previously decided against becoming a doctor after a year at medical school. She went on to specialise in family law, working at two private practices in Reading and Islington before joining the GLS in August 2003.

“I wasn’t really interested in the business side of private practice,” she recalls. “I applied for my present job after a colleague, who knew I wanted a change, pointed out the advert to me in the Law Society Gazette. It was an interesting mix of family law, which I was already doing, plus the less familiar area of mental health law. The pay was much the same but the variety and scope were far greater.”

When she applied for the job, Helen was struck by the broad-ranging nature of the GLS recruitment process. “Rather than focusing just on the job I applied for, the Selection Board honed in on my ability to identify and deal with a range of problems,” she says. “Being a GLS lawyer is very much about acquiring a range of transferable skills, and I was asked to interpret a Statutory Instrument rather than to expand on my specialist area of law. I found the whole recruitment exercise intellectually stimulating. When they asked if I would be interested in another GLS job if I didn’t get the one I’d applied for, I replied that I would.”

Needless to say, Helen did get the job and intends to remain a GLS lawyer. “I’ve no plans to move elsewhere in Government at present, but the opportunity is there,” she says. “There’s a huge variety of jobs on offer - my predecessors in this Department, for example, have moved on to policy-based and advisory work. I’ve been very impressed by the other GLS lawyers I’ve met, both through this job and on the residential course I attended for new GLS lawyers. They’re helpful, bright and public-spirited, and tend to have a broader outlook than some lawyers in private practice.”