My Global Internship Experience with Gowling WLG in London

The Gowling WLG Intellectual Property Moot, held in partnership with the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS), is Singapore's first ad only IP Moot Competition. From this year onwards, all finalists will have the additional opportunity of interning with IPOS, on top of being awarded internships with Gowling WLG and attractive cash prizes.

As Gowling moot is the only local moot that offers a global internship experience, we have contacted the 2 previous Gowling moot winners, Ryan Kwan (2018) and Arjit Pandey (2019), who will be sharing about their global internship experience at the London Gowling Office.

Ryan Kwan

Interning with Gowling WLG’s London office was by far the best internship experience I have had. Two points come to mind in describing the internship.

Firstly, the Intellectual Property team that I interned with were extremely friendly and helpful in getting me settled into London. I was under the mentorship of Sean Gilles and Jonathan Flower, who were both very kind to ensure that my needs in and out of the office were met and went to great lengths to afford me exposure to a breadth of cases and files.

Secondly, the internship gave me insights into life in a London law firm. In my time with the London office, I experienced the daily rush to the tube, the historical views of the Tower of London and the workings of the Royal Courts of Justice. I also had the opportunity to attend the morning meetings where the IP team shared pointers on new developments on the law as well as practical experience gained from cases.

My time with the London office was over too soon but I hope to meet and work with the team again in some capacity in the future. I would also like to thank Gordon Harris and the whole IP team for making this experience a thoroughly enriching and memorable one for me.

Arjit Pandey

My internship in the London office of Gowling WLG in July 2019 was particularly valuable because it endowed on me the extremely rare opportunity to intern in an overseas jurisdiction relatively early on in Law School. I was tagged to the EU Trade and Competition Law department, implying that my exposure was not limited to simply Intellectual Property Law. What made the internship particularly thrilling was that all of this was taking place against the backdrop of an imminent Brexit and Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister. As such, besides the live cases that were being worked on, I also found myself experiencing the effects of commercial uncertainty first-hand. Being in the thick of things, I was able to better appreciate why the process to conclude the exit from the EU is such a time-consuming process and it was an incredible experience.

Besides the work itself, I was also given the opportunity, on multiple occasions, to go to court to transcribe and make notes. This allowed me to witness first-hand the way Queen’s Counsel make technical arguments palatable before the Court. Thus, it was the mix of the range of work, witnessing the impact of headlines on that work, and the exposure to court cases that made this internship experience invaluable.

Click here to find out more about the Gowling moot, and here for the registration link.