The following is a guest post by Amy Harris, a writer for Law Training – which helps students from around the world find the right law courses in the UK. She enjoys assisting students and graduates with their education and job search.
Ways to Ensure Success
A career in the legal world is often lucrative and sometimes fulfilling, but getting there is rarely easy. In order to have a career in law, you first need to get through the rigorous, competitive and lengthy training process. Once the essays are over, like most other prestigious careers, you have to stand out from the crowd.
Whilst your overall level of success will essentially be down to how much affinity you have for the subject and how hard you work, there are also steps you can take to improve your chances of getting the best legal education – and securing yourself a training contract at the end.
Choose your Course Wisely
You can choose to study law in a number of different ways, but the most common path for students who choose a law career early in life is the LLB or Bachelor of Law. Not all law degrees are made equal and not all universities will impress future training providers or employers. To a large extent, this problem will be solved by institutional entry requirements.
The most prestigious law schools in the country have an extraordinarily high bar for entrance, so without top grades at A level (or a 1st class degree if you are undertaking post-graduate training) you won’t be offered a place. The trick is to research the universities or learning providers you are interested in and seek out an offer from the best one you can.
Prepare Yourself
Law is an extremely involved, intellectually stimulating and challenging subject at all levels and that’s why it attracts the brightest students. Before starting your training course, it would help you immensely if you read up on the subject and also on the course syllabus. Law involves a different kind of learning to other subjects, and there is a wealth of literature on the subject of learning legal rules which would help to prepare you before you begin.
Start Thinking about Experience
Towards the end of your course, you will need to start looking into gaining a training contract, if you wish to be either a solicitor or a barrister. Most students aim for this when they start down the path of legal training which makes for a very competitive area indeed. In fact, there are fewer training contracts available each year than there are law graduates, so making yourself appealing from the start of your legal training is a must.
Look into all kinds of voluntary and practice experience. Try to get a part time job working in a law firm, join all of the clubs and societies and basically do anything and everything you can to make your CV stand out from those of your rivals at as early a stage as possible.
Work Towards an End Goal
The end goal of your legal training is to get a training contract with a law firm. Without one, you will not be able to practice in law as a solicitor or a barrister. If you wish to take another type of course to qualify as a Legal Secretary or in another legal profession, then the requirements will be different. But the traditional route is by training contract, so before you even accept an offer of a place at any law education provider, identify what you need to achieve there in order to get your contract and never veer from that path.
