It has become common practice for eager-to-please law firms to send their junior lawyers on secondment in-house, hoping that it will cement the client relationship and hand the secondee that all-important commercial experience.

In April, Legal Week's The Verdict survey of senior corporate counsel confirmed this cosy arrangement is pleasing both sides. Nearly a third of respondents said the number of secondees they used had increased during the previous six months, while 67% said it had stayed the same. Just 4% anticipated a drop.

And while the traffic of secondees has traditionally been one way, there are now indications that it could be starting to move in the other direction as well.

Last month, Legal Week reported a pioneering initiative in the US that reverses the traditional secondment model. US banking giant Citigroup has established an initiative, dubbed Citi-Select, that sees it offer training contracts to budding law students and sends them on secondment to a trio of leading US firms for two years after graduation. Firms to take on trainees will include such heavyweights as New York's Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton and Boston-based Bingham McCutchen.

On this side of the Atlantic, in-house trainees are by no means uncommon. Figures obtained by the Law Society show there are at least 130 UK-based companies, including BT, ITV and HSBC, which have in-house trainees with numbers varying from one to as many as seven. And while a UK company is yet to establish a scheme similar to Citi-Select, anecdotal evidence suggests the trend to send in-house trainees to law firms on a so-called reverse secondment could have legs over here.

One such example is BT, which has been training lawyers in-house for a decade and currently has seven trainees.

The telecoms giant recently sent two trainees to one of its panel firms for between four and five months, with one undertaking competition work and the other focusing on intellectual property.

BT's training principal, Linda Bruce-Watt, who coordinates the in-house training programme, says that all the panel firms have expressed a willingness to open their doors and that further reverse secondments are in the pipeline. Furthermore, Bruce-Watt is in talks with one firm about swapping an in-house trainee for a private practice trainee or junior lawyer.

Bruce-Watt comments: "We think it is valuable for trainees to spend time seeing what it is like in private practice."

Meanwhile, at Computer Associates' (CA's) headquarters near Slough, plans are also being drawn up to send one of the company's in-house trainees on a reverse secondment.

The company's European general counsel, Nitin Maru, who joined from Novell nearly two years ago, is familiar with training lawyers in house. During his 10 years at Novell, he took on three trainees, all of whom went on to become senior lawyers with the company.

Maru is in talks with two of his external firms about sending current trainee Caroline Johnson for three-month stints. "We have 20 lawyers spread across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, but she would gain from a stint in private practice. It will sharpen her skills and help her understand when negotiating with lawyers on the other side," he says.

Maru adds that he would like Johnson to gain experience in commercial, property and employment law, the latter being particularly important for companies as legislation continues to place an increasing regulatory burden on business.

Those in private practice appear to have noticed the growing demand among general counsel to send their in-house trainees on reverse secondments. Berwin Leighton Paisner partner Adam Rose, who heads up the firm's business and technology services group, says: "We have seen it happen with greater fluidity. There is a recognition that it is useful for some in-house lawyers to get an all-round view of the business, including what legal advisers get up to."

According to Rose, the type of work undertaken by the secondee will often depend on whether they are still training or have already qualified as a lawyer. He observes that trainees tend to work in contentious areas, whereas qualified lawyers tend to spend time in non-contentious areas in order to gain exposure to a larger number of lawyers carrying out a wider variety of legal work.

While firms often tout secondments as an excellent way for their junior lawyers to gain commercial experience, some say they are not without pitfalls. It is not uncommon to hear of talented young private practice lawyers establishing such a good relationship with the client that they decide to stay put at the end of the seat and not return to the firm that sent them.

Does this apply when the secondment is the other way round? It is, of course, possible that in-house trainees on secondment in private practice might be tempted by the glamour of working for a big City firm or the variety of work on offer.

Maru is not too concerned about this. He says: "If a trainee decides to move into private practice, that is a decision they would probably have made anyway."

Meanwhile, BT has gone some way to immunising itself against this danger by only recruiting its trainees from among existing employees – those working in other parts of the business who possess a law degree or are part-way through the Legal Practice Course and who wish to complete their training.

Bruce-Watt says that when the training programme was open to external candidates, many would train and then leave the company – a frustrating state of affairs given how much time and money is invested in the process. Since recruiting internally, all but one of the trainees has remained with the company after qualifying.

This impressive retention rate might be explained by the fact that trainees recruited from the inside are more committed to the company from the outset, viewing the training more as part of their longer-term career development than as a ticket to another company or firm. As Bruce-Watt notes: "The training contract is used as a personal development tool for people we value."