The Law - Top Tips

Careers in Law can be very different depending on the type you practice and the size of the firm you join. Solicitors tend to be the first port of call for legal matters whether personal or corporate and they liaise with clients to try and resolve their problems or provide a legal framework for something they want to achieve.

Barristers are called in by solicitors for their expertise in a particular area of the law or to argue a case in court. That said, the distinction between the two is narrowing slightly due to the increasing scope for solicitors to conduct their own litigation.

Like many of the professions, law offers a great deal of flexibility in terms of where you practice so you don’t have to be in the centre of a large city to have a successful career. You can practice in large firms servicing business, within the businesses themselves as an in-house lawyer or at a high street practice overseeing the matters of private individuals.

It’s worth bearing in mind that the type of firm and specialty of law you practice will have a huge impact on what your daily life is like. A private equity solicitor in a magic circle firm is going to be spending a lot more time in the office than a high street solicitor. Commercial barristers were one of the biggest shocks to us. We hadn’t quite grasped just how individual the job is and the huge hours it demands. A 6 day working week appears very standard.

Law is well known as a lucrative industry and many firms seem to have coped with the credit crunch well. As a guide, if you’re a solicitor in a top 50 city firm then on your first rotation expect a salary in the £35-40,000 range. Newly qualified's will be in the sixties and three year post qualified can be anywhere from £80-110K. Salaries in the smaller high-street firms are quite a bit lower. Barristers are self-employed so their income can vary hugely but the industry stars could give David Beckham a run for his money.

The inside scoop on getting into Law

Top Tips for Graduate Jobs in Law video.

It is very competitive. One top tip I would have is to identify the firms that you would potentially like to work for and try to get a foot in the door through a summer scheme. A lot of the major city firms in London will do a great deal of employment on the back of those summer schemes and it’s an excellent way of the firm being able to find out a little bit about you and equally probably more importantly for you to have an idea and a concept of what that firm is like in terms of its atmosphere, it’s approach and it’s culture. Enthusiasm, dogged determination. One of my top tips whilst doing a pupillage is to remember how important the clerks are because they control your career and if you get on the wrong side of them then you could be destined to spend the rest of your life working for very little in some God forsaken court in the middle of nowhere so it’s very important to remember how important they are. You’ve got to get the basics, you’ve got to get the grades, it’s a pretty challenging and competitive environment and you’ve got to work and study pretty hard. What we also see increasingly these days is people who have got genuine interests outside their studies and it’s always interesting to see people who come through who might be a concert pianists or judo champion and that’s always quite fun to see. It’s good to see an extra dimension to people. When filling out an application form I would say really research the firm. It’s a really difficult thing because they all look similar on the outside but they are very different and they want you to let them know that you’ve figured out that they’re different from the person next door. So try and research the firm, look on the website, Legal Week and things like that because they do report on all of the firms. It’s not necessarily anything really heavy, you don’t have to read about a massive deal they’ve just done but there are things that set firms apart from other ones. For example, we do six seats during our training contracts, most other firms do four. Now, if you said that’s something you liked that would show you’d gone to the effort of researching our firm and finding out why you liked it, why it’s different so that’s one definite big tip. Generally it’s the way the application is phrased that makes you stand out from other applicants and so we would expect there to be something in there, some spark that differentiates you from someone else. It doesn’t assist to have done 10 mini-pupillages or 10 pieces of work experience in solicitors firms. It’s much more important that you show that you’re actually driven by something, whether it’s legal or otherwise which makes us think, here’s someone who’s interesting, here’s someone who’s shown dedication in one other aspect of their lives, who’s likely to show the same dedication their work at the bar.