
FIRST YEAR
Starting from your first year, commercial law firms offer various opportunities for students interested in exploring a career as a Solicitor.
These can be called first-year open/insight days, insight evenings, virtual programmes or first-year schemes. These events are hosted by the Graduate Recruitment representatives of the firm and will often require a short application process to attend.
These experiences are designed to provide an insight into the firm’s work culture, practice areas, and what life as a solicitor is like.
SELL
YOUR STRENGTHS
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Use your personal experiences to show what type of person you are. For example:
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If you play a sport, you could detail the resilience that you gained from training and getting better at it.
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Character-developing experiences like these show recruiters how resilient, hardworking, determined, and independent you can be.
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Recruiters want candidates who know how to communicate, have great attention to detail, and can work effectively as part of a team.
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Use personal and professional experiences to sell your strengths in your applications by highlighting what you gained from those experiences.
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Firms want to see candidates who are genuinely interested in the work that they do. Tailoring an application is the process of making each application individual to a firm. A general rule that applies is: that if you can copy and paste an answer to an application question from one firm to another, it is not tailored.
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Ensure that your answers to application questions align with the firms culture and values. It is vital to demonstrate an interest in the firm you are applying to through research.
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You should search the firm’s website for: practice areas and rankings, diversity and inclusion initiatives that resonate with you, recent or historic deals that interest you, training contract structure, training contract intake number, international strategy, clients, culture and values, hours of pro bono work, etc.
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Also look at websites such as ChambersStudent, Legal Cheek, Legal500,TheLawyerPortal, LawCareers.Net, The Commercial Law Academy, The Corporate Law Academy, etc.,
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- Some questions, such as ‘Why are you interested in commercial law?’ or ‘Tell us about a time that you demonstrated resilience’ will be more generally answered, and that is okay.
However, you can still tailor these answers. For ‘why commercial law,’ talk about why commercial law generally, but also detail reasons that you are applying to go into commercial law at that firm in particular; for example, you could talk about firm A specialising in XYZ practice areas that you are interested in.