4 tips for starting your career as a qualified law graduate

4 tips for starting your career as a qualified law graduate
One of academia’s platinum level qualifications, a law degree is a gateway to a huge variety of job opportunities. Your analytical mindset, conscientious nature and enviable intelligence are all assets to any potential employer. With your LPC (Legal Practice Course) in hand, consider the following advice as you prepare to take the first exciting steps along your career path.

1. Stay commercially aware

Keep in the game by staying abreast of the law. Legal recruiters seek employees with at least one eye on current legal developments. Stay up to date with global, national and local affairs, maintaining a keen interest on legislation that looks to affect law firms and their clients. Subscribe to newsletters, email bulletins and legal journals to keep a finger on the pulse of the ever-changing governing laws. Research your potential employers, their clients and the legal shifts in the market that may impact their business. Stay informed and stay legal ready.

2. Intensify your focus

What area of law do you want to specialise in? There are a staggeringly wide range of possibilities. Hopefully, during your degree you zeroed in on what aspects of the law interested and inspired you. Now is the time to narrow your eyes once again. From contract law, probate, trusts, equity, planning, criminal and everything in between, every single industry needs legal representation.

3. Research positions

What do you actually want to do in the law? Become a self-employed barrister and work in chambers? Specialise as a solicitor within a larger firm’s legal team? Be part of the Government Legal Service (GLS) or the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS)?

Become a legal executive, conveyancer, paralegal or company secretary? Brush up on the expectations of different career trajectories and narrow down your search criteria.

4. Consider a career outside of the law

For someone who’s spent the past few years studying law, this might sound heretical. But it’s a simple fact that not every graduate with a degree in the subject will go on to be the next Judge John Deed. The scope for employment of a qualified law graduate is vast, and takes in all manner of sectors and career options. From finance and accountancy to Human Resources and Project Management, a law degree is a starting point to myriad job opportunities and industries. You don’t have to feel tied down to the academic discipline you studied at university. And you have no obligation to do anything other than the profession that you feel is right for you.

And if you’d like a little professional guidance deciding what’s right, get in touch for some free advice. We’d love to help you along your way.

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