Key skills
Commercial awareness Commercial awareness boils down to understanding individuals’ or businesses’ motives for acting in the way that they do. If you can’t understand your clients’ motivations, goals and constraints, your advice on how they should act will be worthless. Further, the place you’ll practise law is a business, whether that’s a multinational corporation or a high-street firm. Your role within it will have a direct relationship to it achieving its goals. How to demonstrate: Experience in the working world will come in handy here, as you’re likely to have worked for a company of some sort and experienced how it functions from the inside. Talk about real-life business scenarios in which you’ve been involved, no matter how junior or peripheral you were. Demonstrate that you’ve followed commercial and business stories in the press over a protracted period and can comment on why a business or sector is expanding/contracting/changing. Don’t forget that aspiring lawyers aren’t expected to be economic experts, but they should have a firm grasp on the business world and the ability to view situations from different angles. Chances are, you’ll already have many of the above skills and the tough part may be coming up with evidence to support your claims. Most of the examples we’ve given are drawn from the academic and extracurricular field. However, the richest pickings may well come from the work experience you’ve encountered. So, determine your goal (finding a career in law); take a body of material (you and your life); analyse it against a set of criteria (the skills employers seek); and present your findings clearly and economically (make an application). Break down your experiences and activities and look for the nuggets of achievement and insight that demonstrate you’ve developed these key skills.
stopped it from working; or discuss your organisation of a football league, including fixtures, results, pitch allocation and player registration. These are just two examples – plenty of activities require organisation and attention to detail, from managing the till behind a bar to taking a stock check. Communication Legal work is all about conveying advice. You must prove that you can listen to others and effectively communicate your thoughts and opinions. Expressing yourself articulately to clients and colleagues is all part of the job. How to demonstrate: We all communicate, all the time, so you shouldn’t be short of examples; however, look for those where your communication skills made a material difference to a situation. These might include running a campaign (eg, student elections) involving written and oral communication, examples of journalism in which you present complicated ideas simply, or debating and mooting. And don’t forget that a concise and clearly expressed application form is the best evidence of your communication skills. Teamwork and leadership In the law, teams are everything – while there’s much solo work to be done, even the lone wolves (eg, top barristers) perform within the context of a team in which everyone contributes. You must be committed to working this way and, again, you’ve probably done more of this than you think – teamwork is how society functions. How to demonstrate: Remember that we’re talking about teamwork and leadership; show where you’ve taken initiative and led a group, but also show where you’ve bowed to the will of others. Sports teams are the obvious examples, but any communal activity where different tasks contribute towards a shared goal can be used: orchestras and bands, clubs, university societies, projects or debating.
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THE LAWCAREERS.NET HANDBOOK
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