I put it to you: a case for Citizens Advice

Reading time: eight minutes

There’s a version of legal training that takes place entirely within the comfortable architecture of the law, mooting in polished chambers, scrutinising precedent in well-stocked libraries, networking at Bar society dinners. And then there’s the version that takes place on a Thursday morning in a waiting room in Lancaster, where someone can’t pay their rent or someone else is trying to understand their rights after years in a complicated situation.

By the time I walked into North Lancashire Citizens Advice Bureau I’d read a great deal of law which, while interesting, hadn’t yet been particularly useful to anyone. I can say without hesitation that it has taught me more about the practice of law than many formal experiences combined. If you’re a law student, or an early-career solicitor or barrister who hasn’t yet spent time at the frontline of advice work, I’d like to submit, for your consideration, that you’re missing something irreplaceable.

Check LawCareers.Net’s pro bono initiatives page to find out more about the range of experiences on offer.

The access to justice crisis isn’t an abstract concern

We speak about access to justice in seminars. We write about it in essays. We nod gravely when senior practitioners invoke it at lectures. But it isn’t abstract. It’s a client who hasn’t been paid by their employer for months and has never heard of the employment advisory body ACAS. It’s someone who has lived in a property for decades, whose name isn’t on the title, who doesn’t know what their rights are and can’t afford to find out.

Awareness, from a distance, produces a particular kind of paralysis. Proximity produces something more useful: understanding of how those barriers present in a human being sitting across a desk from you and what it takes to help them navigate a system that wasn’t designed with them in mind. The client who can’t afford a solicitor isn’t an abstract policy problem. They’re a Thursday morning appointment and they need an answer today. The Bach Commission on Access to Justice (2017) estimated that approximately 1.5 million people per year have an unmet legal need. There’s no deferral to next term's module here. No extension request. Citizens Advice sits in that gap, not as a substitute for proper legal representation, but as the thing that makes the next step possible for people who didn’t know there was one.

What frontline advice work actually teaches you

The skills developed through Citizens Advice work aren’t soft or supplementary skills. They’re core professional competencies.

Reading a client

Before any substantive advice can be given, you must understand the person in front of you. Appointments regularly present in ways that require more than legal knowledge, a client whose circumstances are shaped by an underlying health condition, whose distress is affecting how they communicate, who needs a different pace and structure to feel safe enough to share the full picture. Adapting, restructuring the conversation and ensuring clarity without pressure, isn’t a social nicety. It’s a professional necessity. Barristers and solicitors who can’t read a client before they can read a contract are at a significant disadvantage.

Explaining the law clearly and knowing your limits

Another aspect of the work that legal education rarely replicates is learning to explain law to people who don’t speak it and to do so within clear limits. At Citizens Advice, there’s no room for jargon. When someone asks whether they can be removed from a home they’ve lived in for years, they need to understand their answer. When a client wants to know whether leaving an employer who has failed to pay them affects their entitlement to wages already earned, the answer needs to be real. But advisers don’t give legal advice – and, full disclosure, I’ve never wanted to give legal advice more than in the moments I’m categorically not permitted to – but the more time you spend there, the more you understand why that isn’t a technicality but a principle.

What we can do is provide information, explain rights and signpost to appropriate support, whether that’s a solicitor, ACAS, a housing charity or the court service itself. That boundary, far from being frustrating, demands a particular kind of precision. You need to know your material well enough to walk right up to the line, explain what the law says in plain and accurate terms and stop exactly where advice begins. Learning to do that well is, quietly, one of the more transferable skills the role develops.

Working across the breadth of law

Citizens Advice doesn’t care whether you spent three months unpicking the neighbour principle in Donoghue v Stevenson or whether you came down on the side of Lord Atkin or Lord Denning. It has a mandatory reconsideration and a section 21 notice and it needs you to get on with it. In nine months, I haven’t once been asked about the ‘nemo dat’ rule. I’ve been asked about Universal Credit 27 times. In a day, I can handle queries touching on employment or family law, welfare benefits, consumer rights, and immigration. The practical breadth is genuinely remarkable.

For aspiring barristers, this exposure across practice areas provides a foundation that narrow work experience can’t replicate. For solicitors, it builds social literacy about the kinds of legal problems that ordinary people face, which, for many lawyers, will ultimately form the client base they go on to serve.

Check out our Practice Area Profiles to hear firsthand about life working in different practice areas.

Managing complexity

Several of the most demanding cases I worked on weren’t legally complex but humanly complex. A client at risk of losing their housing, carrying significant debt and with children depending on them might need a benefits check, a housing assessment, a debt referral and careful attention to their emotional state, all within a single appointment. The ability to hold that complexity, manage competing priorities under pressure and still deliver useful, accurate information is precisely what practice demands.

The argument for chambers and firms

At this point it feels relevant to acknowledge that I’m a second-year law student, and there’s every chance people reading this are from all areas of law and far more qualified to speak on this. I appreciate the incongruity but I’m pressing on regardless.

When chambers and firms consider applicants, they aren’t only assessing academic achievement and formal legal experience. They’re assessing character, judgement and capacity to serve clients. Citizens Advice work is a demonstrably rigorous test of all three.

What Citizens Advice asks of you is different from what a law degree asks of you. Sitting with a distressed client or working through an unfamiliar area of law are conditions that develop judgement in a way that academic work alone can’t. Sustaining that commitment over months, rather than a single week of work experience, compounds the effect considerably.

My wider legal experience spans work experience at a magistrates' court and in a solicitors' firm, barrister shadowing, mini-pupillages and judicial marshalling, each valuable and offering something distinct. But Citizens Advice taught me something more fundamental: how to be useful to someone who has nowhere else to go. That, in the end, is what the legal profession is for.

The people who keep it running

Something that doesn’t appear on any training checklist but which shapes the experience profoundly, is the quality of the people who work and volunteer at Citizens Advice.

The people I’ve worked alongside have chosen, repeatedly, to spend their time sitting with strangers in difficult circumstances and help them find a way through. Mary, a former teacher, greets every client at reception with warmth that visibly settles people before their appointment has even begun. Dave, a former pub landlord, speaks fluent Polish, something I didn’t know until the moment it became very useful that someone did. That is, in a sentence, what Citizens Advice is like. Gulley, the advice supervisor, always has the answers. I don’t know how he has the answers but I’m yet to ask him a question he couldn’t answer. I find this both reassuring and slightly unnerving.

A multitude of advisers have been there long enough to have encountered every possible query at least twice and approach each new one with the same unhurried attention. People who’ve lived broadly and chosen, somewhere along the way, to put that to use. What they share isn’t a professional background in law, most don’t have one, but a genuine commitment to the person sitting across from them.

That environment is instructive in itself watching an experienced adviser handle a distressed client, is a masterclass in client-facing work that no academic setting can replicate. The first appointment I ever shadowed began as a benefits query and became a conversation about land law. Although I understood the concept of beneficial ownership academically, I understood it properly the first time I watched someone realise they don’t have a claim to a home they’d lived in for 30 years and needed to work out how best to leave quickly and safely. Watching Gary work through it was an early lesson in how rarely a case is what it first appears to be. Answer the presenting question well, make the client feel genuinely listened to and at the end of the session ask if there’s anything else you can help with today. Often, they pause for a moment, as though deciding, and then mention, almost in passing, something that has been sitting with them since before they walked through the door.

And it’s hard to separate that lesson from the place itself. Dawn has never once let me arrive without asking how I am and meaning it. On a grey Lancaster morning, that isn’t a small thing. The office will smell like coffee and there will be biscuits in the kitchen. I wouldn’t say the biscuits are the reason I kept coming back, I wouldn’t say they aren’t, either. The commitment in that building isn’t occasional. It turns up every week without fail.

How to get involved

If it’s not already clear, in the spirit of the red hand rule, let me be transparent:  I’m an unapologetic advocate for this experience. Not only because it’s professionally valuable, though it is, but because it’s the kind of work that reminds you why you wanted to study law in the first place, and the people you will meet, colleagues and clients alike, make showing up every single week meaningful.

Getting involved is straightforward. Citizens Advice operates through a network across England and Wales, most accepting volunteer applications on a rolling basis through citizensadvice.org.uk. The training alone is immensely valuable, it covers areas most law degrees mention once and never return to, which is fine until someone sits in front of you needing an answer. Roles vary, from reception and client-facing support to casework and specialist advice, so there’s an entry point regardless of your experience level. It feels, initially, like being thrown in at the deep end, though I should clarify that the deep end comes with Dave already knowing the answer, a full team at the side of the pool ready to throw you a life ring, Dawn cheering you on from reception and biscuits in the kitchen regardless of how it goes. There will be a moment where you realise you’re doing it, actually doing it, and nobody has had to intervene. That moment is worth a great deal.

The time commitment is roughly one half-day per week, which over a year becomes a genuinely substantial body of experience. Check whether your law school already has links with a local bureau or search directly at citizensadvice.org.uk. It’s worth your time and the experience will not look the same on every CV, but it’ll mean something on all of them. The access to justice crisis isn’t waiting for the profession to theorise its way to a solution. It’s a Thursday morning appointment, and it needs someone to show up.

Hope Moir is a second-year LLB student at Lancaster University, aspiring barrister and a volunteer adviser at Citizens Advice in North Lancashire.