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After years at university, you’re now, allegedly, ready to be a lawyer. But what does this really mean? Staring down this dizzying pivot from being a student to an almost trainee can seem somewhat surreal. Through this blog I hope to put your mind at ease about this pivot and in doing so, perhaps relax myself!

I’m now just a matter of days from starting my traineeship, but I can’t pretend it has snuck up on me. I’ve been working towards this through my four-year law degree and another year on the postgraduate Diploma in Professional Legal Practice (DPLP) – the Scots system granting me two additional years to process my fate. Still, the idea that I’ll soon be signing emails off as ‘John MacKenzie, trainee solicitor’ is a lot to get my head around. 

A degree of confusion

When you tell people that you have studied law, there’s an expectation that you now possess a tremendous amount of knowledge and because you’ve done the time and passed the exams, surely you 'know the law'? However, by the time you finish your law degree, you’ve hopefully realised that studying law isn’t nearly the same as practice. Studying law is like spending years learning the rules to one game, only to find everyone in practice is playing something else entirely. 

In the Scottish route to qualification, the DPLP (similar to the Legal Practice Course for England) brings things closer to reality, with coursework focused largely on the practical application of the law. Even so, studying for the DPLP still keeps you very much in a bubble – a gentle simulation, not the real thing.

At the threshold

Having polished off my time at university, I feel no grand sense of 'job done'. Rather, now standing at the edge of the abyss of professional life, there’s the awareness of work to come. If you’d like a slightly pretentious dramatisation, I’d say “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”

I’ve just recently received my seat allocation – I’ll be in corporate. Now knowing which practice area I’ll find myself in, I can already picture my first day: sitting at a borrowed desk, logging into a borrowed laptop and trying not to look too lost. There’s an obvious limbo here. No longer a student – no more lectures, exams or panicked seminar prep – yet not a lawyer either. A liminal creature of the legal mire.

With any upcoming role, there’s simultaneous excitement and a dose of trepidation – trusted enough to be included, but not quite enough to be left unsupervised just yet.

Now I don’t mean to make any of this sound too dour. In truth, I’m very much looking forward to starting my training and I hope you are too. While any transition like this will feel a bit disconcerting, I’m genuinely thrilled to finally get on with it!

Work in progress

Do I know the law? Not in any encyclopaedic sense. I’ve likely forgotten more case names and concepts than I ever properly remembered. That said, after five years, I believe I know how to approach a problem, how to ask questions, how to read a judgment (and when to stop reading) and how to write clearly. You can be the judge of that last one. 

Perhaps most importantly, I know that you and I need not know everything. I also have the indispensable “it depends” to fall back on.

Traineeships, so I’m told, aren’t designed to test how much law you can memorise, but instead how you think, learn and adapt. The law itself – statutes, cases, procedures – can be looked up. The real challenge is in developing judgment, communication, confidence, a healthy level of patience with whatever IT systems you're having to deal with and hopefully a healthy caffeine intake. 

It’s perfectly normal to feel underprepared for something like this. The point, I think, is that you don’t need to be ready before the job starts – that’s why you’re a trainee. You’re still a work in progress, but then so is every lawyer I’ve ever met. The difference is, for the time being, you have a badge that says you're supposed to be learning and that‘s plenty.