I recently met up with someone who asked the usual "tell me about your journey into the law" question which I answered in my usual way; and ended off by saying I was lucky to have landed a training contract in my final year of university.
My journey with law started way back at the tender age of 5 when I decided after an episode of LA Lawyer that law was the right industry for me because the lead actress looked pretty in a suit and had expensive things which was exactly what I wanted for myself. But I didn't stop with my dream; I started to be intentional about taking the right steps to work towards it.
My first step was understanding the process to become a lawyer. Now a lot has changed since I was younger as there's now things like the SQE and legal apprenticeships, but at the time the best route into the law that I knew of was:
Doing humanities based GCSEs
Doing humanities based A levels / IB subjects
Going to a good university that had a high employability rate and do a law degree*
Completing a vacation scheme
Getting a Training Contract
Graduating with at least a 2;1
Completing the LPC
Completing my Training Contract
*You don't actually have to do a law degree by the way, but I'll break down why I intentionally chose to do one.
Based on this, I'd worked out points 1 and 2 by the time I was 13.
For point 3, I figured I'd better get as much exposure to what a law degree was like as possible so I could work out whether I'd want to study it for 3 years or not. When I was in year 9, I found a three-day Birkbeck University introduction to law course for students that my mum too everyday. I learnt about the law of adverse possession and was HOOKED. I started looking for all the online courses I could find, and day by day I affirmed to myself that I was on the right path.
So the next step after that was working out which University I'd attend. For reasons that I won't go into in this blog, I didn't consider Oxbridge as an option for me. So after looking at the league tables first, then the rate of employability and finally the module options, I realised Durham University was the university for me.
Now for the bit that I don't usually tell people. I grew up in South East London which is a very diverse place. But even though the area that I lived in and went to school in was very diverse, I lived a fairly sheltered life as a child. Not sheltered in the sense that I didn't go through anything because I definitely did, but sheltered in the sense that it never occured to me that there was a whole world outside London where people didn't interact with black people on a regular basis.
From my research as a child, I realised pretty quickly that the legal industry was very white, but that didn't put me off my dream. Since I hadn't grown up in an environment like that, I thought it was important to put myself in the whitest, but equally good, environment that I could think of for university so I would be more accustomed to white British culture; Durham.
That ticked off step 3 for me. Now for step 4.
When I joined Durham University, I joined a bunch of people who already had legal internships under their belt and were well on their way to securing first year insight schemes by the end of our second month. I even remember one morning at breakfast where a student asked me if I had gotten to Durham on some kind of social mobility scheme; that really knocked my confidence back and made me feel like I didn't belong. I felt like I was on the back foot because I didn't really know much about the world of law in practice, and I was kicking myself for not having thought about getting practical work experience sooner.
Then came the social mobility heros; Rare recruitment, SEO London, Bright Network and Aspiring Solicitors. Now there are definitely many others, but these are the ones I personally used. They kept me on the straight and narrow with keeping on top of applications and meeting law firms, and actually got me my first legal internship in the Ministry of Justice at the Civil Service which I then used, along with my non-legal work experience, to get a vacation scheme in my second year. I worked hard to balance the work they gave me with university work and my part-time jobs, but I pulled through.
Result!
So if I were to put all of my intentional steps into one place for you, what would they be?
I worked out my learning style early, and had an end goal in mind. This allowed me to pick subjects that (A) played to my strengths but (B) also aligned with what employers wanted to see
I pushed myself out of my comfort zone to give myself greater access to the legal industry
I didn't wallow in sadness when I didn't flip the first vacation scheme; instead I reflected on where I went right and wrong and used that to my advantage