April 30th, 2010Law Work Experience Is Crucial To Aspiring Lawyers
Anyone wanting to get a training contract is well advised to get some legal work experience along the way. By getting some legal work experience they can see the difference between practising a particular area of law and studying it.
It may be that students have more than one favourite subject when they are studying, for example they may like criminal law and commercial law. However, when the students begin looking at the firms they might want to apply to for a training contract they may well be surprised to learn that firms usually practise only one of these and not both.
Therefore, they decide to make applications to both groups of firm. They may, however, be taking a risk if they do not also have some practical experience of the different areas of law.
The risk is that when they start a training contract with a law firm that only then do they discover that they do not like the practical application of that type of law in the same way they liked it as a study option.
This highlights the importance for students to get some practical experience with different types of firms.
If we take the person from the example above, they should ideally have undertaken a couple of law placements with a commercial firm and a specialist criminal law firm. If they had done so it would have allowed them to have made a much better informed decision about where to make their training contract applications to, thereby reducing the chances of them making a costly mistake.
Legal work experience exists in various forms from formal summer vacation schemes to more informal work shadowing or voluntary work.
It is important to research what the work experience opportunities are in the area you are studying and the area you will be living in during the holidays if different to where you will spend study time.
Once you have done the research you should then put together a plan of who you are going to apply to, and when. This will help ensure you get experience in the areas you are most interested in but also to ensure you get a broad range of experience to inform your decisions down the line.
To discover more on law work experience visit: http://www.traineesolicitorsurgery.co.uk. You will also discover more help on how to obtain a law training contract.