The importance of legal work experience

Pursuing a career in law is not only a huge investment, but a competitive career. It is therefore extremely important to gain some work experience before taking the plunge into pursuing law.

There are different areas of law that may be of interest to you, and there is a huge variety of work in the legal industry that people can choose from. It is important to try and obtain work experience in the sectors that you think may be of interest to you to see whether, in practice, they are as interesting as they sound, and whether they suit you as well as you think.

Many firms offer Vac Schemes, which is where you can apply to go and do a couple of weeks (normally) in a firm and get a flavour for the types of work that they do. Quite often, those that are successful in obtaining these quite often go on to obtaining training contracts at the same firm further down the line.

The legal profession can loosely be categorised into solicitors and barristers. It is important to get experience in both of these, so that you can be sure that the one you choose to do, is really for you. It will also help when explaining to interviewers why you’re ‘sold’ on becoming either a solicitor or barrister