How aspiring lawyers can succeed with no legal work experience

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Securing legal work experience is no mean feat. It’s also not the end of your legal journey if you don’t have any.

If you’ve been accepted onto a firm’s vacation scheme or a chambers’ mini-pupillage programme, congratulations! If you’re still firing off applications with no luck, take a step back and read this guide, which offers clarity on what you should be including in your applications if you’re short on practical legal experience.  

Do I need legal work experience to be accepted onto a firm’s vacation scheme?

Not all firms will require their future vacation schemers to have legal work experience for you to be accepted onto their scheme. While legal experience demonstrates your commitment to a legal career and provides a solid base to your application and interview, there are also a host of other important factors to include that’ll impress the firm and provide them with a well-rounded picture of yourself. It’s time to start thinking outside the legal box you might have locked yourself in.

Transferable skills

Non-legal work experience

I’m sure you’ve heard the term ‘transferable skills’ thrown around quite a bit. Collating a list of the transferable skills you’ve developed from non-legal experiences, as well as evidence to back these skills up, is crucial to your success.

While not all firms are looking for evidence of legal work experience, they’ll want to see evidence of the core skills that make a good lawyer. These are skills that you’re likely to have picked up over the years in part-time work (eg, retail, bar work or in a supermarket), during your studies and through involvement in extracurricular activities. For example, working a part-time job in a customer service role could develop excellent people and problem-solving skills, which are vital for the client facing work lawyers do.

Use the Key skills for lawyers page for a list of the skills and attributes that are considered essential to your career as a lawyer. 

Picking out these skills is a skill in itself, so it’s important you spend some time reviewing your past experiences to identify the most valuable skills. You might also find that you have plenty of previous experiences that you’d never even considered mentioning in legal applications, so keep track of everything you do that might be of value – it all helps you to become a well-rounded candidate and individual. Some good skills to highlight in your applications include:

• taking initiative;
• demonstrating a can-do attitude;
• excellent teamwork and collaboration;
• sound organisation and time management;
• excellent analytical ability;
• commitment to the role; and
• excellent client interaction and communication.

LCN’s Feature ‘How to demonstrate the key skills for law in applications’ offers examples on how to do this effectively using both legal and non-legal scenarios.

The best thing is that none of these skills are exclusive to legal work experience! Once you’ve identified the transferable skills that are relevant to you, you can provide evidence from other experiences and jobs you’ve had. Remember, recruiters don’t want to just see a list of the skills, like above, they want you to be able to give relevant examples of these skills in practise. Drill into what exactly you did and how you can use it to prove your aptitude in these key areas.

Find out what recruiters at law firms are looking for from future candidates in these Meet the Recruiter interviews.

Extracurricular activities

Getting involved in debating or mooting is also a great way to hone the skills required to become a successful lawyer. You should join your university’s student law society to find out what opportunities are available near you. Debating and mooting are not only great ways to develop your communication, teamwork, organisation and analytical skills, for example, but they’ll also offer you a chance to improve your advocacy skills and gain a better understanding of what it’s like to appear in court.

Other non-law-related extracurricular activities that will impress firms and provide talking points in applications and interviews include joining a sports team, book club or writing for your university’s local paper. Additionally, joining a society committee is an excellent way to develop and demonstrate teamwork and leadership skills.

It’s crucial that you can show why you’re interested in a legal career, while also showing that you have interests outside of your career aspirations – for example, the activities you do in your spare time and ultimately who you are aside from an aspiring lawyer. Activities that are external to the profession are key to helping you do this in an authentic way.

You’re unlikely to be able to paint a picture of the real you just by listing all the legal experience you’ve had over the years, so take the non-legal experiences you do have and use them to your advantage. Don’t forget that law firms don’t want to recruit robots! They want real people. Use your personal interests and extracurricular activities to demonstrate who you are and let your personality shine through.

Trainee Jessica Carr outlines the transferable skills that candidates should highlight in their applications in this LCN Says.

Pro bono

Again, whether this is legal (eg, Citizens Advice) or non-legal (eg, raising funds or volunteering for a charity), the skills developed from pro bono or charity work will be extremely valuable to law firms. When you’re incorporating your volunteering into an application, think about why you chose to volunteer for the particular charity, what it means to you and the skills you can evidence. For example, if you organised a fundraising event or ran a marathon, what were the skills required to plan and successfully execute it?

If you’re looking for pro bono opportunities but not sure where to start, check out our Pro Bono Initiatives page. 

Legal work experience isn’t your most important selling point

To reiterate, not all firms require you to have legal work experience. Instead, they want to see whether you have the right skill set and attitude for a career in law and at their firm. On top of this, many recruiters value evidence that you’re independent and can work to sustain yourself above a couple of days of admin work in a law firm. However, it’s important to note that some (not all) firms recruit trainees solely from their vacation scheme, so bear this in mind when applying for training contracts later in your journey.

Use LawCareers.Net’s Training contract search tool to stay up to date with firm deadlines.

Ultimately, the skills required to become a lawyer can be developed through non-legal work experience and other extracurricular activities. Learning how to sell yourself and speaking articulately about the experience you do have is a much more effective approach than just hoping a list of legal work experience will speak for itself. There’s no need for you to have worked at multiple firms, if any, because at this stage firms are looking for evidence that you have the fundamental skills to become a lawyer – if you can showcase this in your applications and during your interview, it should stand you in good stead.  

Use the Key skills for lawyers page for a list of the skills and attributes that are considered essential to your career as a lawyer.