What it Takes to Kick-Start a Legal Career – Going Beyond the Finances with Bindman

We hear all too often about mounting student debt and how just the evident student debt bubble seems to be growing at a rate that suggests that it’ll forever be a problem from which our society will need nothing short of a financial miracle to recover. While this is indeed a major concern, when it comes to some fields of study such as law, it’s only a fraction of what is required to finally enter the field as a professional and be able to legitimately refer to yourself as a solicitor.

It goes beyond the finances, with pupillages and training contracts making for a major obstacle to have to get over en route to qualifying as a solicitor. This is when you’re required to enter a period of recognised training as a means through which to put what you learned at school into context, in a real legal environment. The core of what you’re required to learn about and consolidate your knowledge on covers the different departments which make up a law firm, including non-contentious as well as contentious practice areas. Basically you need to get trained by an in-field expert so that you can hopefully pass the PSC (Professional Skills Course).

Doing so would demonstrate that you have gained adequate experience in professional standards, advocacy, financial and business skills, communication skills and professional standards.

Naturally, major developmental opportunities are at stake, which means you’ll need to work with a law firm that’s the best fit for you. LawCareers.Net provides a very useful training contract search feature, so it’d serve you well to look towards this platform to kick-start your search.

Make no mistake about it — there’s a lot of competition among graduates looking to get selected for law training contracts, so you’ll have to put in that little bit of extra effort to get noticed so that you can stand out from the crowd.

Boasting 30 years of experience in legal practices, expert company, Bindman Solicitors, has put together a useful set of guidelines on how to go about beating the competition to the podium and landing yourself what is a vital training contract.

1. Pick firms based on the original reasons why you wanted to get into the legal field, which means you should be selective and not just cast your net wide for the sake of getting picked up.
2. If you’re ever to have any hope of making it in the legal field, you have to demonstrate your ability to operate within strict criteria, so make sure you meet the criteria set forth by the firm you’re applying to.
3. Gather up as much experience as you can and demonstrate that you are a true worker. This can be done by getting a holiday job answering calls at a law firm or shadowing a willing solicitor — that’s what it takes to stand out.
4. Distinguish yourself by putting a little bit of your own personality into your work — it ultimately counts as an advantage over the conveyor belt of text-book graduates who are all capable of doing the exact same thing in the exact same way.