Parliament may be prorogued, but the business world keeps turning and this week there are several news stories that aspiring lawyers should be keeping up with. Spending a couple of minutes researching each of these stories will result in a broader knowledge of the industry and should lead to some questions about where the law – and your future employers – might fit in.

Applications for the CILEX Foundation’s scholarship and bursary programme are due to close on Friday 29 July. 

It’s the new year; new year’s resolutions are being flippantly passed around in quick conversations with colleagues, friends and family alike.

What’s the biggest red flag for aspiring lawyers? Not reading LawCareers.Net’s weekly commercial news round-ups!

We’ve put everything that we know, and that you need to know, about commercial awareness into our brand new commercial awareness section on LCN. Use it as a starting point to work out what this valuable skill really means and how you can develop it. But before you do that, find out which commercial stories have been shaping the legal world this week.

The SRA will not act to help LPC students at London Metropolitan University while the institution challenges the potential revocation of its 'highly trusted sponsor' status by the UK Border Agency.

The Junior Lawyers Division of the Law Society is running elections for positions on both the executive committee and the national committee.

The University of Exeter’s student law society – Bracton Law Society (BLS) – is to be disbanded after an investigation by the university and the students’ guild into the racist WhatsApp messages that were publicly released in March.

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer is now accepting applications for two upcoming events that are designed to help students learn more about life as a lawyer in a commercial firm, as well as entries to a competition with Olympics tickets as the prize.

Staff at the magistrates’ court are set to begin a nine-day strike from the 10th to the 18th of September, adding to existing disruption in the UK’s criminal justice system. 

The Bar Council is this week celebrating a decade of its flagship social mobility initiative, Bar Placement Week, as well as launching a related online campaign, entitled ‘I am the Bar’.

The Bar Standards Board has published its framework for the development of education and training in response to the Legal Education and Training Review.

Just as the solicitors' profession has a 'magic circle' of law firms, so too does London's commercial Bar. 

The Solicitors Qualifying Exam has been granted final approval by the Legal Services Board, confirming that the new route to qualifying as a solicitor will be introduced in September 2021.

A new study, published by the Department for Education, found that of the occupations most exposed to AI, solicitors ranked 12th on the list when considering exposure to all AI applications and second for exposure to large language modelling.

The University of Law will offer the Bar Practice Course and BPC LLM at Newcastle University from September 2022 as part of its ongoing legal education partnership with the university. 

People who attended state schools are still underrepresented in the legal profession, with criminal firms employing the highest proportion of state-educated solicitors and corporate firms the lowest, research by the Solicitors Regulation Authority reveals.

With MPs embarked on a marathon, five-day debate about Theresa May’s Brexit deal with the EU ahead of a crucial vote on Tuesday on whether to accept the terms or not, the issue of Brexit is dominating the business sections more than ever.