What should I look for when choosing a law school?

If you are planning to become a solicitor or barrister and are thinking about the law conversion course (GDL), Legal Practice Course (LPC), Bar course or even the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE), you may feel spoilt for choice when it comes to deciding where to study. With so many law schools vying for your attention, how do you choose?  

This article sets out some advice and guidance on things to consider when selecting a law school.

Quality and expertise

It goes without saying that you will want to know that you are signing up to a high-quality course from a law school that is well respected within the legal community for the solicitors and barristers that it turns out. So before you enrol with a law school, find out whether the law school you’re interested in has an established reputation for excellence.

There are some objective measurements that you can use to establish this, including the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) scores. Look at the provider’s TEF ranking to see whether it has obtained the highest award – TEF Gold.A TEF Gold ranking means that the provider has been recognised nationally for its excellence in teaching across a wide range of measures, meaning that you can be satisfied that you will be well taught. You can also check whether the provider has won any prestigious national awards. A provider that has done so is clearly set apart from other institutions.

At a personal level, one of the best ways to find out whether you will be satisfied with the quality of a law school’s offering is to attend an open day and meet the staff who will teach you. The welcome that you receive and the level of expertise demonstrated by the staff you meet will be good indicators of whether you can expect the kind of personalised learning experience that is most likely to help you succeed.

Attending an open day will also allow you to find out where you will be taught and to view the teaching facilities on offer. Look for a law school that has specialist teaching spaces including court rooms or mooting rooms for experiential learning purposes.  You can also explore the library and learning resources available as well as the availability of any IT equipment you will need to support your learning.

Teaching methods

Before signing up to any course, make sure that you know how you will be taught and that these teaching methods will suit your needs. With the introduction of an element of online assessment in the SQE, teaching methods will become an increasingly important issue for law students to consider, particularly as some new providers will offer courses that are entirely online.

At this point, it is important to bust a myth: it is categorically not the case that online learning is solely the province of new providers in the legal education sector. Most established university law schools have been delivering online teaching for many years. Their ability to do this in a highly successful and responsive manner has been demonstrated in the wholesale shift to digital delivery that has taken place across the entire higher educational sector as a result of covid-19: a delivery which also been supported by significant IT resources.

Joy Davies, principal lecturer at Nottingham Law School, Nottingham Trent University (NLS) has direct experience of putting her face-to-face litigation courses for practitioners entirely online at very short notice because of covid-19. This was no mean feat as these courses involved the students participating in mock court hearings. Davies stated: “We redesigned our experiential learning courses for live, online delivery. The students are not studying in the traditional online sense of being alone. They undertake live group work and this delivery enables them to develop their ideas and to work together in a safe environment with others.”

This high-quality online NLS delivery is coupled with sophisticated data analysis that enables tutors to understand the engagement, progress and attainment of their individual students, so supporting them on a personalised learning journey.

Be careful not to limit yourself when choosing a solely online provider, as you may miss out on valuable face-to-face tuition as part of a blended offering.

Employability, the student experience and the teaching law firm

It is worth closely examining the student experience and employability support that will be on offer at the institution you’re interested in. For most law students, getting a job after your studies will be a significant factor when choosing a law school. If this is the position you are in, then you will want to select an institution that will help you to succeed in making your career ambitions a reality.

Find out at the outset whether you will have access to dedicated careers specialists and a personal tutor for the duration of your course. Both these support networks are important in helping you to shape your career plans in a way that is entirely personalised to you and your career ambitions.

These networks matter because many law students find themselves between a rock and a hard place when it comes to showing a commitment to the profession: not only is it difficult to obtain work experience, but often students cannot get work experience without already having some on their CV.

The best law schools will provide you with opportunities to put theory into practice beyond the curriculum, and so help you to enhance your practical skills, knowledge and confidence before you join the profession. 

Knowing the range of extra-curricular opportunities a law school has on offer should therefore be a factor in your decision making. Taking on a committee role within a mooting club, law society or even a sports team, is a good way to develop your own leadership and teamwork skills and may also give you an opportunity to network with legal practitioners. This kind of participation will help to build your confidence as well as your CV.  

Far more important for building your CV, however, will be getting access to proper legal work experience. If you can achieve this alongside your studies, it will prove invaluable. This is where law schools that have their own, on campus, teaching law firm or legal advice centre can give you a critical advantage. Undertaking real life cases in this environment will provide insight into the realities of what it means to be a legal professional, by requiring you to push yourself beyond your comfort zone. Crucially, it will help to develop your resilience in facing new challenges with the support of supervising solicitors in a safe environment.  

Opportunities to work in a teaching law firm will become an increasingly important factor for students following the introduction of the SQE, as this kind of work experience can count towards your Qualifying Work Experience for admission as a solicitor.

It is also worth checking whether a law school has embedded any employability initiatives within its courses, so that they form part of the curriculum. The advantage of this embedded approach is that it allows you to develop your confidence and self-awareness as you study. It also helps you to develop the skills, knowledge and competencies you need for the workplace, and will support you to become ‘graduate ready’ by the end of your course.

But the institutions which truly empower students to develop the skills needed for the workplace will have strong links with both the legal sector and legal practitioners. They will offer you opportunities to network with employers at law fairs and will have established mentoring schemes, employer led employability events, and will provide opportunities for you to participate in employer projects or to undertake work shadowing and marshalling with a member of the judiciary. The best of these institutions will extend their offering even further, by providing a regulated law firm environment, such as NLS’s teaching law firm, the NLS Legal Advice Centre. In addition to the benefits of legal work experience, you will find that the close relationships such a law firm has with the local practitioner community can widen the opportunities available to you.

Academic credibility

And if after all this you are still struggling to choose a law school, then take a careful look at – for want of a better term – the ‘academic integrity’ of the law schools on offer. 

Ultimately, you go to law school to know and understand the law: this is what makes you a good, employable lawyer. In order to understand the law, however, it is vital not only to know what the law is, but also why it is the way it is (and even why it ought not to be this way).

As any practising lawyer will tell you, any case which is appealed to the higher courts is almost always balanced on a knife-edge in terms of legal argument; almost by definition it could go either way. It is only those with a full appreciation of the legal arguments involved who can devise and deploy those arguments effectively in real life.

You will therefore greatly benefit from studying at a law school where the lecturers actively engage in, and contribute to, debates that are taking place in legal circles and in wider society as to the direction of the law.

There is another point too. Learning is a life-long project. There is no bus-terminus where you get off and can say, ‘now I am wise’. This is as true for law school students as it is for their lecturers and their future managing partners: we all struggle to understand better and know more. Sharpening your critical faculties by taking a rigorous and questioning approach to your learning will pay dividends as you move beyond the academy and into the professional world.

Professor Paula Moffatt is the director of external engagement and Melanie King is external engagement manager at Nottingham Law School.