Who are you and what do you do?
I’m Laura Barnard and I’m a lecturer on the LPC which stands for the Legal Practice Course at BPP law school.
Return to topWhat is The Law?
If I was to boil it down I would say its protecting people’s rights and making sure they get what they bargained for and what they contracted for. It also provides a form of redress if they don’t get what they thought they would.
Return to topWhat attracted you to this career?
I used to be a lawyer, a civil litigator in a city law firm. I hadn’t intended to go into teaching when I was training. I found that working in a law firm, whilst very rewarding at times, I found the hours were often very long and actually it’s quite a solitary job. A lot of the time you’re just drafting, or writing or reading and sifting through documents and analysing how you might run a case, whereas as a teacher it’s far more people interaction. You’re always engaged either with students or your other colleagues. You tend to watch a lot of other lecturers teach and present so you can pick up tips all the time. It’s basically far more engaging and you can use your personality, I always felt I had to stifle it somewhat in a law firm. Mainly, I would say also the quality of life. One thing I couldn’t stand before was, I could never say as a lawyer, yeah, I’ll meet you after work at 6pm, because I literally never knew when I was going to get out of work and you’d get a client ring you up and at the last minute you’d have to stay there all night, draft a document or analyse a case, whereas at least now I know exactly when I’m going to get out and I can plan my life and basically I’ve got a lot more time to do things I enjoy doing.
Return to topWhat does your job involve?
What we basically do at a law school is you prepare students. There are two levels of legal education. The first level is to do a law degree or there’s an alternative to that where you can go to law school for one year and do this thing called a law conversion course, now called the graduate diploma of law. Where I come in is after you’ve done that law degree, or the GDL, then you have to do a year at law school which is called the legal practice course and the role of that is to convert student’s knowledge from a purely academic arena, to shift the emphasis onto a more practical aspect. The year is basically split into two halves, the first half are three compulsory areas which are the three main areas in a commercial law firm. You have litigation, property and business law and practice. My job in that aspect is that I teach litigation on the main course and that would be things like, how you actually run a case, the factors you need to take into account before you sue somebody, is it viable, do they have any money, all the way through to if you win your judgement at the end how can you enforce that against somebody. Up to now, the students have learnt the background about different laws and how they work, but now we’re just putting it into a practical arena so we’re preparing the students so that when they start at the office on the first day in a law firm, no matter which of the key departments they go into they will know roughly the workings of a department, what the job would entail and how to go about any job they are asked to do.
Return to topWhat do you do on a typical day?
A typical day for me, well, I would put it in the context of a typical working week and then split it into days. The year is split into two halves. The first part of the year, you tend to teach the same tutorial 6 times a week and I also teach in the evenings and weekends. Because I’d have 6 classes a week I’d have between one and 2 classes per day to teach. I’d probably get up at 8, cycle into work, natter to my colleagues for the first 10/20 minutes. Monday morning everyone here is knuckling down, you prepare the session that you have to teach the week before, so if you get in on the Monday you have to remind yourself about all the law you need to know. The difficulty is how to get this across. The role of the teacher these days is not to sit there and lecture people parrot fashion. The way students learn is they have lectures and tutorials. The lecture is just myself as a lecturer standing up and giving students an introduction to a subject and it will be for up to about an hour, so I do just stand up, talk and give them an introduction. Then the students have to go away and do some background reading and then they have tutorial which lasts 2 hours on the subject which we lectured so that they can go into much more detail and we can get them to apply the law that they’ve learned. The problem in terms of teaching it is that you don’t just stand there and go “this is this and that is that”. You have to think what questions can I ask them to illicit all the information they need to know, from them, so it’s really centred around interactive learning these days, less me telling and more me saying “what do you think about that, how would you deal with that aspect”. Typical working day I probably teach for 2 to 4 hours and if I’m not teaching I’m preparing for my next class and that’s a two stage process – you have to revise the law and think how to get this across.
Return to topWhat's the difference between a solicitor and a barrister?
Whenever people think of going into the legal industry an historic question people often want to know the answer to is what is the difference between a solicitor and a barrister. Historically the difference was much larger. The solicitor did all the front work with the client and the barrister came in at a much later stage to present that client’s case at court. Nowadays solicitors have the option to do higher rights of audience course basically. It means that you have a course in lots of work experience where you do presentation before the judge and that’s kind of where litigation law is going to go. It’s going to be more like America where you have to basically deal with the client and present your case to court. If you are at university or perhaps even at law school and you are thinking that you’d like to go into litigation then perhaps one area of experience you might like to go into is “mooting”. Mooting is offered by many universities and it’s simply an opportunity where students fight against one another. One acts for the hypothetical claimant and the other for the defendant and it’s often done before a real high court judge. So you will get a high court judge coming in and listening to the arguments made by each side and it’s just really good experience to know if that’s the sort of thing you would like to do when you are in practice, do you like presenting, are you able to articulate your thoughts clearly when under pressure in front of a court room and in front of a judge and other people picking holes in your argument.
Return to topWhat are the speicialisms within your industry?
Property lawyers, corporate lawyers, tax lawyers, pensions lawyers, employment lawyers, litigators advising in disputes, intellectual property, private client lawyers who advise on wealth management and trust, within litigation you’ve got general commercial litigation – anything that goes wrong in general commerce or finance litigation more to do with insolvency and a further niche which is arbitration.
Return to topWhat are the different legal departments like?
After you’ve done your training contract you need to choose an area to specialise in. There are a few things that people ought to bear in mind. Firstly, if it’s a strong economic climate the money generator in a law firm is often the corporate department. The thing is that the corporate department basically is the department that gets involved in the buying and selling companies which happens all the time. The hours in the corporate department often tend to be really quite long if it’s a busy time of year. If it’s a quite time in the industry then it’s going to be quite hard for you to get a job as a corporate lawyer, so the time when you are likely to be able to get a job is when it’s going to be busy. You have to appreciate that it’s probably going to entail quite long hours and quite hard work. That might also apply to the litigation department which is also freestanding in a way. So let’s say you’ve bought a company and you’ve found out it’s a dud and you want to sue because you’ve bought a flop basically, litigation doesn’t necessarily stem off the back of work from the corporate department so litigation can also be quite busy and if you’re on a case especially in the run up to a trial, your hours can get to be very long, especially if somebody’s up against a deadline in which they can bring a case, because there’s certain time periods within which you can sue. So if your client is up against a tight time deadline then your hours in litigation can also be quite long but per se your hours a probably going to be slightly less in a litigation department. If you are really after shorter hours then the point you should bear in mind is that you’ve got what we call corporate support departments that work in conjunction with the corporate department and they assist them on a big deal. If you are buying or selling a company you could have the employment department come in and they could advise on whether the employment contracts can be changed or let’s say you are planning to make redundancy moves, they basically will advise on ancillary issues on a deal that will relate to employment law and the same applies to IP issues, tax, pensions. These are all departments that stem off the corporate department and they help the corporate department to get their specialist area of the deal done. If you went into one of those departments, although you are likely to have crunch points where your hours may be quite stressful, on the whole if you go into a corporate support department your hours are going to be a lot more reasonable. Finally, a lot of my friends are in the property industry and that seems to be a much friendlier, reasonably-houred department often than other areas within a law firm. The second point I would make is that you need to always think ahead and if you are deciding which area you want to qualify into, what this is saying is this is your career path from then on; that is the line you’re going to go down. So you need to think, well, do I want to go and work abroad. This is the mistake I made because I was quite interested in the more academic side of contracts so I went into litigation but a thought I hadn’t factored into my mind then was the fact that all of my knowledge from that point is centred around the English legal system and if I wanted to go and work abroad it’s actually very restrictive because my knowledge is on how you sue somebody in England, all the laws you need to apply. Whereas if you become let’s say a finance or corporate lawyer or a finance litigator you can go and work in an off-shore tax haven like Grand Cayman, British Virgin Islands – as a corporate lawyer you can go pretty much anywhere. So you do need to think “where do I see myself in 10 years time, do I want to work abroad” because that would be a factor. A lot of people might think they are going to stay in a city law firm for the next 10 years but the reality is there is quite a high turnover rate and lot of people start in a city law firm and many people after 6 years decide they want to go and work in a slightly smaller law firm, or to work actually in the industry, so you could work for a business but you could be an in-house company lawyer. I liked litigation but it hasn’t offered much flexibility in terms of what I can do going forward so because most companies hope they’re not going to get sued on a full-time basis it’s difficult to go and work in-house as a litigator but if you look at the back of The Lawyer or the Legal Week you’ll see that there’s loads of jobs to go and work for example at Barclays Bank as a corporate lawyer or whatever it might be.
Return to topWhat different types of Law firm are there?
You get the big city law firms of which there are about 10, what’s called the Magic Circle. They the really big international law firms that have got offices primarily in areas like London and the States but also now in emerging markets, Asia, Australia New Zealand. So you have the really huge firms that have very large international presence and have maybe 30 or 40 offices each. Then you’ve got the mid-tier law firms which probably have maybe one, two or three overseas offices and maybe 4 or 5 branches in the UK. Then you get the purely national offices which have maybe 20 different branches or going down even further, really small law firms with maybe 3 or 4 people working in a small practice in a high street and they would do things like advising on matrimonial issues.
Return to topWhat are the best bits about your job?
What I really like about this job is that once you are in the classroom is entirely up to you as to how you run the class. So you’ve got certain difficulties. You have 2 hours for each tutorial and you’ve got a certain amount of information you have to get across and that’s notwithstanding the fact that you might have students with varying abilities, you get some needy ones, some very geeky ones, some cocky ones and shy ones and in amongst that two hours you’ve got to get that information across whilst managing the expectations of all those different sorts people. That in itself presents a really enjoyable challenge because you can interact with these people and I’m not a necessarily formal person so I like the fact that I can use my personality to try and engender some interest in a subject whereas I felt often I had to stifle that as a lawyer. This company in particular is a fantastic place to work because it does offer a huge amount of flexibility so if you’re not teaching until, let’s say, midday you can come in at 11 and you can leave at 7, or if you want to leave early you can come in at 8 and leave at 4. You always have a day a week where you can work from home so if you’ve got a lot of reading to do so you can lie in bed with a cup of tea and read it in bed, which is great. If you’re intellectually curious person, you like reading, then it’s a great job. I feel like I’m being paid to be at university. I love reading and I love learning and so to be a teacher not only do you have to learn it but you have to know it inside out. A large amount of your time is just keeping abreast of legal developments and topical issues in the press so I personal find that really interesting so I’m being paid to do something that I really enjoy.
Return to topWhat are the worst bits about your job?
Without a shadow of a doubt the worst job if you ask any teacher is marking. So the first half of the year you will have about 200 papers to mark and this is the same thing day in day out. Once you’ve marked them the first time, 30% of all papers have to be second marked for consistency. So, any paper that’s a fail, or a borderline of key grades like distinctions and commendations all those papers have to be second marked, which means after that the first marker and the second marker have to sit down and have to go through every single difference of mark together and decide what they agree on. After that you have to put all the marks into the system and given we’ve got 1000’s of students there’s quite a lot of admin that goes on under the fun of teaching, so that’s pretty boring. The other issue is definitely the risk of boring through repetition. If you teach the same subject 6 times, it can get pretty wearing by Friday evening especially if the last class you happen to teach is the graveyard from – 4-6 on a Friday night when everyone is thinking they’d far rather be at the pub. But in a way that’s where the challenge of the job comes in and actually, I say repetition, but you can teach the same subject to 6 entirely different groups and it’s literally like teaching a different subject each time because different students understand or don’t understand different things so you have to use entirely different teaching techniques even if it’s for the same subject according to the type of class you’re teaching. It also can be pretty exhausting. A big downside is that you can never have a bad day at the office when you’re teaching. I’m sure, even as a lawyer I can be exhausted or perhaps I’ve had a very large night the day before and you can go in and just lay low a little and think, well, I’ll do more reading today or I’ll just not have as much client contact whereas when you’re a teacher you’re literally having to stand up every day so you need a lot of energy, you can’t afford to feel tired.
Return to topWhat has been your greatest achievement?
In terms of teaching, one of the greatest challenges you face, especially in a company like this where a lot of the city law firms sponsor their students to come here – the students aren’t paying for this course themselves, their law firms are – so a lot of students see the LPC as a necessary evil, something they have to do before they start work. They kind of liked their law degrees as it was quite academic whereas a lot of students actually find LPC quite a struggle because it’s a lot of transition from pure academia to applying your knowledge in practical scenarios and actually even if they’re very bright and have historically done very well, a lot of them struggle with it, or they’re just simply bored at the prospect and are impatient to get to work. So if you teach a group like that who are pretty cocky and think they know a lot, and underneath that you’re thinking, well you know a lot academically but you’re not necessarily very good at applying that, so to try and motivate these people, let’s say at 4pm on a Friday evening can be pretty challenging when they’re sitting there saying, “I know it all, I can’t be bothered” and actually it’s really rewarding if you can turn a class of people like that around and get them so that they are really looking forward to coming in and have a real laugh.
Return to topAny regrets?
I’ve come into this job from a legal background and in order to become a lawyer there was a common misconception when I went into this 9 years ago, that it was better if you’d done a law degree. Certainly if I went back again I would have done another degree like economics or something that I was interested in first. Because there’s the availability of a law conversion course now which is simply a one year replacement for a law degree, it means that I could have done something at university which would have broadened my horizons more perhaps a bit more perhaps before specialising down into law. Another thing I really regret is not having taken the opportunity to work abroad until now, I think certainly as you get older and you’re looking to settle down a bit more to develop your career there’s less opportunity in law to start working/moving abroad, whereas many law firms especially when young lawyers are training, many law firms offer their trainees the opportunity to go and work in one of their foreign offices. I actually did my training in a law firm who had one office in London and looking back I think perhaps it would have been a good thing to have chosen a firm with many international offices because you can actually spend up to a year of your training contract working in a foreign country whether it be in Asia, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, wherever. There are two other things I think I would have done differently. I think, certainly when you start as a lawyer and you’re training, there’s a tendency to assume that everyone else actually knows a lot more about it than you and you’re sometimes afraid to ask for help. Whereas half the time, the way it works in a law firm is you’ve got a partner who says, “Right, no I don’t know about this particular area, you, trainee can you go off and do some research on that area” and often you’re a bit reticent for asking for help or guidance so if I was to do it again I would have much less reticence about saying “I don’t know about this area, I can tell you what I do know” and realising that’s no bad thing, I can just go and look up stuff I don’t know and also I think I would have tried to control my own hours a bit more. If you’re an amicable person, if someone asks you to do something, you’re tendency is to say, “yeah, no problem” not thinking you’ve got loads of work, so developing the ability to say “no” is a very valuable skill and one that is ok to use.
Return to topWhat is the pay like and are there any perks?
As a lawyer, your pay is pretty good and you know that it’s going to go up every year, especially with the developments in the legal market; even trainees are now getting paid exceedingly well. To get into a job as a law lecturer, you will have been a lawyer first and so the transition you make from a lawyer to a teacher is never going to be a transition that you make for money so it goes without saying that the salary you get as a lecturer doesn’t even begin to approximate what you get paid as a lawyer. It’s probably half, even less than half, so you don’t go into it for the money. You go into it because of the other perks you can get. I can honestly say I have never felt so relaxed and happy in my life since I made the transition from lawyer to teacher. For example, you can work from home a day a week so actually if you’re living by yourself and you’ve got builders coming and there’s no one at home to let them in it’s quite useful because you can say, yeah I’ll work from home on Monday and they can come and look at this or whatever. Also you’ve got the flexibility to think, I’m not teaching until 1 on Monday I’m going to work flex on Monday so I’m going to come in at 11 after having a long weekend in France and I’ll leave at 7. The fixed hours mean that you always arrange to meet people and you know you can get out of work at time. Mainly, it’s the fact that although the job itself is a lot less stressful, it’s really seriously fun. I don’t think there’s a day that goes past in this job where I don’t laugh to the bottom of my stomach, either because of my students who can be challenging and funny but also because the people that you work with here, they’re all lawyers, they’re all bright, most have come from the city and they’re all people who wanted more perspective in their lives, better hours and so they’re bright people who haven’t got so much stress, it’s a really chilled out working environment. Because we come from different departments, who have a whole sphere of people with different knowledge that you can ask questions of. We talk to each other about different areas of law and have a really good banter in the office. You asked me about the money and I batted that away because it isn’t great money. As a lawyer you would have pretty good pension contributions, 5 or 6%, so the employer will match 6% of your salary per month and put that in your pension’s pot, dental plan. I can say safely that I have none of those perks here whatsoever so money’s not great. But there are loads of other perks and if you need more money there is always the possibility of working overtime which is pretty well paid – you can work on the evening mode, weekends, you can invigilate or examine also evenings and weekends which is also pretty well paid.
Return to topHow long is a working day and do you have to work out of hours?
It’s pretty much up to you. If you were coming into this career, even if you came in from a legal point of view, so you’d been a lawyer before, the first year you work as a teacher your hours are always going to be slightly longer than 9 – 5. That’s not because they make you stay here but if you’re going to stand up and lecture to 1000 people you need to make sure you don’t look like a blithering idiot so you need to know the law inside out. On top of that you need to think, how I am going to teach this, what are the key points that I need to get across, and you need to think, well, I’ve actually got to secure their interest here so what stories from practice can I put in, how can I give them the bigger practice. That takes quite a considerable amount of time if you haven’t taught the session before. So first year, if you were teaching first thing on Monday morning you would probably spend from midday on Sunday thinking how you were going to run Monday’s class. After you’ve been here for a year and you’ve taught it once, your working hours are literally 9 to 5 and in-between the times you’re not teaching it, because you’ve already prepped the majority of it from the previous year, it’s not stressful at all and you’ve got latitude to just talk to others and enjoy yourself. However, when you start of as a teacher, certainly in this law school, in your first year you will only teach tutorials, so that’s just 2 hours, 6 times a week lets say. The more you stay here and the way your career would progress is that you’d start taking on a lot more lecturing and that is where you do stand up and you talk at people for an hour and that takes a lot more preparation. If you want to interest students it’s not just talking at them, it’s thinking – what do they need to know, what’s going to make them interested in the subject? So you start reading around the press and start thinking about topical stories so if I’m teaching them about pensions I would be telling them about what’s caused this strike at Grangemount which means their uncle in Scotland can’t get any diesel for the next two weeks. But mainly 9 – 5.
Return to topIs there much in the way of travel?
Not in this job, no.
Return to topDo you have to be based anywhere in particular?
This is probably not a job you can do in the regions. It is a job that you don’t have to be in the office all the time for. Teaching is literally the tip of the iceberg. To even get into the classroom you need to have done a significant amount of preparation first, both refreshing yourself with the law and thinking how to teach it. Now, theoretically you could do that absolutely anywhere. So there is scope, let’s say you are a mother and you’ve just had children so you could think, I’ll look after my kids all day and I’m going to go and teach in the evenings. So you wouldn’t have to be in London all day. We tend to train students who are going to work in the big city law firms. We have got 2 in London Holborn and Waterloo, and then we have Leeds and Manchester so you can see that the law schools are sited in big cities where they have big law firms.
Return to topWhat is the working environment like?
The great thing about this working environment is if you look at the majority of staff are between 30 and 40, pretty young. It’s quite nice to have a few people older than that to give a bit of balance but definitely really young, in terms of outlook and definitely more woman, probably a third men, probably because this is the sort of job where you have to be a lawyer first you do take a big salary cut from going from a lawyer to a teacher and the people that are more likely to make that decision are mothers who need to spend a bit more time at home looking after their children because it does offer such flexible working hours so we definitely have more women than men amongst the staff. That itself reflects on the office atmosphere – there’s always cakes and biscuits, always people around to have a good chat to. There are two fronts to this job, there’s the staff room which is like being back stage at the theatre and then you’ve got actually being in class. When we’re in class we have to wear suits, but you just have to be smartly dress – there’s always more latitude to do that as a girl than as a man. When you’re in the staff room it doesn’t matter what you wear. Every Friday you can dress down so you can literally rock up in your jeans, t-shirts and flip-flops and no-one bats an eyelid. It’s very fun and in order to be a teacher you’ve got to be laid back and be able to take the rough with the smooth but you also tend to be energetic and quite passionate about what you do so the people you work with are fun people and it’s a fun environment.
Return to topHow did you get into your job?
The great thing about this working environment is if you look at the majority of staff are between 30 and 40, pretty young. It’s quite nice to have a few people older than that to give a bit of balance but definitely really young, in terms of outlook and definitely more woman, probably a third men, probably because this is the sort of job where you have to be a lawyer first you do take a big salary cut from going from a lawyer to a teacher and the people that are more likely to make that decision are mothers who need to spend a bit more time at home looking after their children because it does offer such flexible working hours so we definitely have more women than men amongst the staff. That itself reflects on the office atmosphere – there’s always cakes and biscuits, always people around to have a good chat to. There are two fronts to this job, there’s the staff room which is like being back stage at the theatre and then you’ve got actually being in class. When we’re in class we have to wear suits, but you just have to be smartly dress – there’s always more latitude to do that as a girl than as a man. When you’re in the staff room it doesn’t matter what you wear. Every Friday you can dress down so you can literally rock up in your jeans, t-shirts and flip-flops and no-one bats an eyelid. It’s very fun and in order to be a teacher you’ve got to be laid back and be able to take the rough with the smooth but you also tend to be energetic and quite passionate about what you do so the people you work with are fun people and it’s a fun environment.
Return to topWhat's the application process like?
To become a lawyer, each law firm has a different process. You definitely have to draft a CV and each law firm perhaps might have their own application form in addition to your CV and that’s questions like, “What interests you about law?” “What skills do you think you have that might make you a good lawyer?” which are really difficult questions to answer because you don’t really know what it involves in practice. When you a drafting your CV then you should be trying to think about certain points on there that might make you stand out from other candidates like, have you worked on any vacation schemes or have you done any other sort of work experience. That’s the formal application process; you have a CV and probably a specialised application form for each law firm and a covering letter. The emphasis has certainly changed from when I got into law and I think a huge emphasis is now placed on students applying to university to do things like summer vacation schemes. These would be 6 weeks of your summer holiday where you went into a law firm and within those 6 weeks you would probably be shifted around 3 different departments and you would sit with a trainee in a law department and you’d help them either work on the deal in the corporate department, do some research for a litigation case, review leases in the property department. What that does is two things: it gives the student a much better idea of what that job might entail in practice which is a good thing because you’re not applying blind; and the second thing and probably a bigger aspect is it gets your foot in the door. If you’re known to certain people in a law firm and they know what sort of person you’re like, how you handle pressure, are you fun to be with, then that can certainly sway the decision in terms of whether they should recruit you or not and I would say that more and more each year you have to do a vacation scheme now almost to get a job. To make the transition from a lawyer to a teacher, again you send a CV and a covering letter. I know that in my application to BPP in addition to my CV I had to put in a specialised application form which are questions like “Why do you want to do teaching?” “Why are you leaving practice?” “What is it about this job that interests you?” Once you’ve sent them those two documents they’re going to look at it and will have quite a few applicants and on the basis of your responses they may or may not decide to call you in for an interview. To be a teacher your interview is a two-stage process. You have to actually be interviewed and then also you’d have to give half of a class. So they’d say, “Pick up topic you’ve done in practice and I’d like you to prepare the first 20 or 30 mins of a tutorial that you might give on this subject.” So the assumption is that the students have done some background reading and have got a bit of knowledge in the area and the interviewers would like to see how you would teach. What they will be looking for there is not a parrot fashion lecture because it’s not a lecture; the way you have to teach is all through questioning. What you’re trying to do is bring out the student’s knowledge; you’re trying to get them to answer their own questions. Depending how well you do you might get it, you might not. If you get the job, the thing a lot of people might be concerned about if they’re making the transition from lawyer to law lecturer, is that they’re a lawyer and don’t have any teaching experience so might be thinking about doing the PGCE which is the normal way you would go into teacher training. The PGCE is a one year teacher training course and that’s if you want to go and teach in a school. In a college like this, because the emphasis is on your practical knowledge, you actually can get the job here even if you have no teaching experience but what they do do, is there is a specialised training department within the law school that will spend the first one or two weeks teaching you how to teach and then literally throughout the continuation of your time here you will get observed very frequently by another experienced teacher coming in observing how you teach, saying what can be improved, giving you tips. You can also go and watch other tutors teach, watch people give lectures and not even just confined to your own subject you can literally go and watch tutors teach a whole melange of different subjects because the idea is it’s not necessarily the content but the skills that they use to engender students interest, to challenge students. It’s literally continual training on the job and if you’re ever stuck, because it’s an environment that’s not a very stressful one, then people have more time on their hands than they would in a law firm and because each team can range from 3 to 25 people depending on which subject they teach, you can say, how did you explain that point? The key thing to bear in mind is that people have different learning styles so some people need to see something, other people just want to listen and others have to read, so when you teach you have to appreciate you are going to teach people with all those different learning styles so you have to develop techniques to enhance the interests of each of those different types of people.
Return to topWhat are the key skills required for your job?
To be a teacher you have got to be a people person. Day in day out you’re standing there, whether in the front of a lecture theatre with 300 people there, 5 times a week or you could be in a smaller group session, a tutorial and it’s you standing in front of 20 people so either way you don’t want to be a shy person. But you also don’t need to be a loud person. You need to be passionate about the subject because to be a good teacher you need to know the subject inside out, and then that’s the step taken as read. The thing you need to think about is how you relate to different types of people, so people that need to see stuff, read stuff when they learn or learn through hearing. You need to be empathetic because you might have a class of such mixed ability where you’ve got half the class who are not necessarily arrogant but they really feel like they know their stuff and they want that to be known which is great as a teacher. But if you’ve got those people in a class and you’ve also got another half of the class who while they might know their stuff they lack the confidence to get that across and they might be reticent about answering any questions. Because of the way you teach here is very interactive, you need to make sure the quieter people participate, so if you’re a very loud people always going “What do you think!” then you’d have people cowering away at the back. So you need to be able to relate to all different types of people and that’s literally at any one time. You need to manage the people that shout out all the time without necessarily putting them down, you need to say, look I’m really interested in what you’re saying but I need to know it from these people and see if they understand it as well. So you need to be a good people manager, you need to be empathetic to people who are perhaps more shy. You need to be articulate as well, it’s one thing knowing the law inside out but it’s another thing thinking, do I want to sit here for two hours and yak away and go into the minutia or am I trying to encourage them and generate some interest in this area if they went into practice. So as a teacher on this course what you’re trying to hammer home is not the academic side but the practical side. You need to be able to relate what they’re actually learning to how it will translate into practice. If they know it now it will make their first day in the office much easier. Above all you need to have lots of energy. It’s literally not a job where you can crawl in and say you’ve had such a big weekend and are tired. You have to be at the front of the class, and half the time they’ve got so much to learn and they have got so many different subjects and half the time they’re thinking, “my brain is fur-lined, I’m so tired, can’t do anymore” so you’ve got to be able to say, even if it’s the 6th time you’ve taught it that week, come on, this is fun! Finally, this is a course that’s been approved by the Law Society so in order for a student to have gone from their law degree to the LPC to do their training contract when you start working in a law firm, there is a certain amount of information that we have to almost by requirement of the Law Society get across to them. The challenge as a teacher is that you’ve got a series of 2-hour tutorials and you’ve got to teach the whole course in that time so each two hours you know you have got a specific amount of information you need to get across but there is real conflict because what you’re trying to do is encourage interaction from students, trying to get them interested. If they start going off at tangents you’re thinking about how much more stuff you need to cover with them in the session, so you’re trying to generate interest, encourage the shy people, rein in the overexcited students so you can cover everything else so above all you need to be able to manage your time because there is a lot of pressure on it.
Return to topWhat's your top tip for breaking into your industry?
You have to take as read your academic achievements. There’s two tiers of law – city law firms – you’re not going to get your foot in the door unless you’ve got straight A academic achievement and at least a 2.1 at university. However, that doesn’t mean to say you can’t get into law full stop; there’s also the smaller tier law firms and high street law firms who have a slightly less rigorous academic requirement, so depending on how well you’ve done at school, if you’ve done really well you might think you’re going to apply to a city law firm. You’ve just got to appreciate that they’re going to be getting 1000’s of CVs in for the same job so everyone is going to have A’s so you need to think what is going to distinguish your CV from everyone else’s. Top tip is, try to make sure you’ve got hobbies or interests that are going to set you aside from other candidates. Think about what it is you’re going to be doing on the job. A lot of work as a lawyer is dealing with clients so anything that shows you are a good people person, perhaps having done debating or mooting, having done work experience in the same area, that would be my number one top tip, do some work experience. Top tip to be a teacher, you have to show you’re passionate about two things, the subject you’re going to teach and that you’re able to explain yourself quite clearly, but above all that you’re a people person and you’re not going to shout people down and you’re able to deal with both the stronger and quieter students.
Return to topWhat's the career progress and how quickly can you move up the career ladder?
As a lawyer that’s a really easy question to answer. You go in as a trainee; you have two years which is a mandatory period in which you have to get experience in 3 or 4 of the key departments in any law firm. After that your salary will go up literally every year, some firms offer bonuses as well. It’s not like accountancy or banking where your job title changes each year, you go in as a lawyer, start off as a trainee and literally the next thing you are looking for would be partner, and then when you got to partner it would be the difference between a salaried partner and an equity partner so you could have 10 or 15 years in between where you’re not changing the role of your job but the way it’s defined in law historically is the number of your post qualification years. If you are applying from one job to go to another job you’d say “My PQE (post qualification experience) is 6 years” and so they’d know from that how senior you were at a law firm, so your job title doesn’t change. In a law firm your salary does go up quite significantly every year and you might get bonuses. As a teacher, this isn’t a career/job in the hard sense of the word when you’re going in it with the expectation of really progressing up the ladder and making more money. To be a teacher you’ve got to be really passionate about your job because it’s not really well paid but there are so many other perks. In terms of your career progression as a teacher when you start off you are just doing tutorials and your role would be an LPC lecturer. If you’re really interested in developing your teaching skills you can apply for these learning and teaching certificates which basically means you can go from being a normal lecturer to senior lecturer to a professor in time but that doesn’t carry really much more money, you’re talking about small increments but it does carry I suppose much more responsibility and more job satisfaction to go with it. The other thing that you can do is take on the leadership of a subject like litigation or business law, or you could run modes, you could be responsible for the entire evening or weekend course and there are 100’s of people on that. There are positions of responsibility you could take on. Ultimately you’ve got the head of the law school, and in fact the CEO of BPP used to be a barrister, our current head of the law school was one of the lecturers here so there are managerial roles you can go into but you’ve got to look at it – there’s probably 3 or 4 managerial roles and they’re happily ensconced and a lot of lecturers so that’s not necessarily a natural progression you’re going to make.
Return to topWhere do you see the industry going?
Let’s say they’re doing a law degree now, they’ve probably got another two years of their law degree left and then they’ve got a two year period in which they have to do their training contract. In that training contract they’ve got to do work experience in each of the 3 main areas, property, litigation, corporate law, so unlike other jobs where perhaps you can think, this is what’s hot in the industry at the moment, I’m going to read up on this, as a lawyer applying for a job you’ve got to appreciate you might be applying 2 years before your training contract starts and even after the end of your training contract two years later you might have to go for a job where there are jobs are available so you might not have the full spectrum of choice available to you. What I’m saying is that there is probably time delay of about 3 or 4 years before you’re getting your proper law job so it’s not like you can look for industry hot spots now. But the thing you can bear in mind is after you’ve done your training contract and you’ve got a degree of general experience, that is when you’ve got to make your choice as to which particular area you’re going to go into, corporate, pensions, tax, property, employment, loads of different areas. That might be the time to see where jobs are available and great way to find that out are key magazines in the legal industry – Legal Week, Lawyer – and in the back of magazines like that half the magazine is dedicated to jobs and you’ve got large recruitment consultants or actually you’ve got individual firms themselves who literally set out all the jobs available. It will take you 2 minutes to skim the back of that and think, is there a common theme here? Are there more jobs, for example if you look at the back of The Lawyer at the moment, because of the credit crunch there are a lot of people looking for finance litigation lawyers, insolvency lawyers, whereas corporate lawyers who dealt with private equity funds and management buy outs before, there are fewer of those jobs available because there’s no money with which to do big deals with private equity. So it’s when you make your decision after your training contract that you want to start really looking at the legal press, perhaps 6 months before you qualify to start thinking where are the hot spots, where are their jobs available.
Return to topIs there scope for movement during or after this career?
There are probably 3 places that you could go after having been a lawyer and then gone into teaching. You could always go back to being a lawyer. The long you’ve taught the less interested you might be but it is a possible move to make and obviously a quite remunerative one and the irony is that in order to teach you need to know the law inside out and you need to explain it very clearly so the probability is you’d be a far better lawyer if you went into practice because half the time the clients you deal with, they’re not clients, they’re business men and you need to be able to explain your legal advice, how it impacts on them and what they might want to do about it. That’s exactly what you’ve been doing as a teacher, so you could go back to law, it’s much better paid and you’d probably be a better lawyer for it. A lot of people however have gone into teaching purely because they don’t want the stress and they don’t want the long hours working in the city so that’s probably not a common choice that people will make. A more common path would be law lecturers going into training. This is a job that’s usually available in large city law firms. Every city law firm, especially big ones, might have 50 to 60 trainees coming in each year. If you take on a training rule you are basically the manager who assumes the responsibility for the areas in which they’re trained, and ensure you can either deliver it yourself or you can get the appropriate people in. So you can train the junior people within a law firm but also a large amount of being a lawyer is generating business and certainly as a partner you have to do more in the way of pitching to clients, showing you know about an industry and securing clients from that industry. A lot of the ways people do that are through presentations in Power Point and as a teacher that’s exactly what you do do, it’s quite technological these days, there’s a lot of skills you pick up in basically how to get messages across to people. Another thing you could do would be working with the partners in how they make their pitches to clients perhaps. A third job that you might go into after being a teacher is to become a professional support lawyer so for example, there are about one or two professional support lawyers in each department if you’re in a big city law firm and what these people do is make sure they’re abreast of all the latest development in law because the law does change each year. So they will be people who work in a law firm and they’re literally reading all the time about the legal press and any revisions of the statutes or cases and they work in conjunction with the practicing lawyers in each department to ensure that the people actually advising the clients and doing the deals are aware of any changes to the law. Also they draft things like precedents so if you’re buying a company or a business you’ll have a precedent that’s drafted so it means you don’t have to start drafting the acquisition document from scratch and the professional support lawyers, because they tend to know more about the law will update or draft new precedents in each department as well. So both of those jobs will be a lot more well paid than being a teacher but it would mean going back into a large corporate environment again, so more formal, so it’s up to you.
Return to topWhat are the industry resources that someone interested in joining must know about?
If you’re looking for jobs then the places you would have gone to look are The Lawyer and Legal Week. Magazines can sometimes be quite gossipy, who’s done what deals and which partner’s moved from firm X to firm Y. If you’re looking for legal updates to make sure you are aware of what changes to the law there have been, in each department in a law firm you will have things called practitioner texts which are big hard-bound volumes about the key bits of law you need to know in that area and although historically all the updates were done on loose-leaf paper inserts nowadays most of the legal updates are done on the internet so you can subscribe online to various legal journals like Practical Law for Companies and each day you tell them the areas you are interested in and they will send you emails with any legal updates that have happened in the areas you have told them about so there are ways and means of keeping up to date.
Return to topIf you weren't in this career, what would you be doing?
Well, I’ve already taken the very large career move of, ok, I’m going from a job I trained 8 years for and which was very well paid to a much less well paid one, so I’ve already made the lifestyle choice. I’ve got a pretty cushy life at the moment, I really enjoy what I do, I’ve got enough money to get by. If I didn’t have to earn any money at all then I would go and hone my skiing and boarding and be a ski-instructor in the Alps or Canada, train up in sailing or wakeboarding, I’d just like to be outdoors in the sun or sea or snow, anywhere like that.
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