Flex Trainee Alumni: Jordan Littlehales

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October 5 2026

From Flex Trainee to Legal Counsel at Rio Tinto

We are back with another Flex Spotlight. This time, we sat down with Jordan Littlehales, a Flex Legal SQE trainee alumnus who recently qualified into the legal team at global mining giant Rio Tinto.

Jordan opened up on his role as Disputes EMEA and Business Integrity counsel, why stakeholders are just people, and what it's actually like to sit the SQE in a basement in East London.

To kick things off, huge congratulations on qualifying! Rio Tinto brought you in as Legal Counsel. How does it feel to be a year post-qualification?

Can you believe it? I’m proudly from a working class West Mids family, but I do think they think I work on a cruise liner whenever I mention work at Rio. London’s many Australians are much more likely to say "Oh my gosh, that is a massive start. Do you know \__\?" I often don’t know the relative/friend, but it was a fantastic start.

The point to flag is that qualification is just the beginning, you’ve lost the “warm fuzzy feeling” of being a trainee, and it’s now less about your development, more about your contribution.

In a 150 year old business, this is more about good stewardship than making a mark, so that someone else can have the pleasure at year 300.

Jordan, what first attracted you to a career in law?

When I was a kid I really wanted to be (or at least be friends with) Nigella Lawson! When I realised I’d missed the boat on getting into Oxford, I looked for the next best thing in terms of prestige, that was of course Lancaster University’s Law LLM.

What I didn't expect was how well law would suit the way my brain works, however chaotic the situation, you can always find a foothold: what actually happened, where does it sit legally, what are the options.

I think what sealed the deal was my first experience mooting. Like any team, there were ups and downs, but like all of the teams I’ve been on, we eventually succeeded working together!

Tell us a bit about your current role as Legal Counsel. What does a typical week look like?3

One half sits in Disputes (EMEA): triaging and taking ownership of new matters; joining a matter late in an AI-assisted eDiscovery stage, learning from our firm; or assisting settlement, where it becomes even more about translating the dispute into commercial terms and supporting the business in identifying the right way forward.

The other half is Business Integrity; advising our commercial colleagues on ABC, AML and sanctions risk from small statements of work to multi-year projects. This has also been a very busy year for compliance professionals everywhere, with plenty of extensions of corporate liability to keep our colleagues abreast of.

It's not in many roles you get to see both the beginning and the potentially bitter middle of a project, across both, it’s whether people feel they can trust you that matters.

How did you find your break into the industry, the Flex Legal selection process, and landing your role at Rio Tinto?

My break into the industry actually came through a friend leaving a paralegal role, the boss at the time was incredibly passionate about getting socially mobile people into law. It was a steep learning curve, but attention-to-detail was drilled into me, as well as plenty of knowledge about the still-to-be transposed GDPR and ill-fated metaverse. Towards the end of the paralegal contract, my boss recommended I look into Flex Legal.

The Flex assessment center was quite rigorous! But the Flex Legal team put my development first from day one. I knew I wanted a role that was more global and strategic; Flex Legal listened and put forward the right clients.

I did an interview with one client and we just didn't click (he asked me a battle of the forms style question - I’m much better at these now). But then I went into the Rio Tinto interview, and we really hit it off!

You mention a lot of stakeholder management. How do you approach advising senior professionals in such a massive company?

The thing people forget is that stakeholders are just people who get hungry, tired, stressed, and now need to speak to a(nother) lawyer. So ideally you want to get them from point A to B as quickly as possible, without inventing problems to solve.

Humility is also key - most of the people we work with are specialists, and their work is literally groundbreaking, they know more about a specific ore, or a specific site with conditions that don't exist anywhere else on earth. Your expertise is maybe 20% of the equation.

I’m very type A, so most things I do are painstakingly mapped out, pulled apart and put back together, but the feedback that always sticks with me is about the ways I’ve made people feel. I think this gives us some comfort around AI - it will be able to produce a technically defensible answer on demand, but what's left for us is the part that actually matters: whether people felt heard and able to challenge, and that they came away with confidence in your judgment as a person and a lawyer.

The SQE exams are notoriously tough. How did you find the qualification journey personally and professionally?

Revision-wise Hell! It was brutal! I try not to think about it too much.

That said, like any rough patch, you’ve lost the minute you’ve accepted defeat; if you’re studying now, remember that you can pass with a good margin and to keep your head up - and maybe step away from your desk occasionally, especially as the exams get closer.

Also like any rough patch, you can get through it with good people - of course my amazing team at Rio Tinto and especially Ellen Lake for the thorough development; but also “coming home” to the great network at Flex Legal - not only are they a good-humoured, genuinely passionate bunch who care about helping you succeed, they have seen the SQE journey a thousand (that may be a slight exaggeration!) times over, and you’re connected to the previous cohorts where there are plenty of notes and revision tips - much better than the very negative Reddit.

My one tip which I didn’t take for SQE2 specifically, but would have been useful throughout, is to chill TF out - if you have been a trainee or paralegalled, you have probably been asked to research and explain something, clean up a contract or have a crack at drafting, attend a meeting and come back with at least a semblance of what it was about, or synthesise lots of materials into some kind of ‘plan’.

Now just imagine they’re all happening in different areas of expertise, within 5 hours, in a basement in East London and after signing an NDA; like I said it was hell, but as is tellingly but falsely attributed to Winston Churchill: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Would you recommend the Flex Legal Trainee scheme to other aspiring lawyers, and to businesses?

100%. But honestly, I’d recommend it to businesses even more specifically.

If you are an organisation that doesn’t want a run-of-the-mill trainee, someone with a different perspective and a genuine grafter, you want Flex Legal. The trainees on this scheme will know about customer service, likely having worked in hospitality to top up their university budgets, and their approach to law isn’t coloured by a near-relative or primary school teacher.

If that wasn’t enough, Flex Legal will support you fully in bringing in a trainee without the time and budget associated with a standalone trainee scheme.

Additional Resources:

Hire now - want to take on some top quality interim legal professionals like Jordan? Check out our ‘hire’ page today to find the paralegals and lawyers you need to ease your team’s workload.
How we’ve supported Emerald Publishing with interim lawyers - perhaps Jordan’s experiences have got you wondering what interim legal resourcing could do for your team? Take a look at this case study, where we break down how we supported Emerald Publishing with interim lawyers.
Apply to be a Flex Lawyer - interested in what the world of interim lawyer work could look like for you? Well look no further! Click here to learn more and perhaps even apply.