Preparing for law school

Jul 23, 2019

Written By Billy Sexton

Your undergraduate years may be coming to an end, but you have another two years studying at law school for the law conversion course (or Graduate Diploma in Law) and the Legal Practice Course (LPC).

These two years are likely to be the most intense of your academic career so far (let’s not beat around the bush here), with students consuming, learning and revising bloomin’ loads of information in a short space of time. So with aspirations to attend law school, what can you be doing now to prepare yourself?

Law school is intensive

Law school isn’t full of soon-to-be trainee lawyers strolling through the GDL and LPC before they amble into the City and collect a tidy wage packet. Just because you got a first or a high 2.1 in your undergraduate studies doesn’t mean that you’ll find the GDL effortless.

It’s intensive and you need to leave some bad undergraduate habits in the past – you should forget the late nights in the library and the last minute essays submissions entirely. You need to treat the GDL like a job, not a course where you can coast through some parts and turn the heat up in others.

All the while, it is important to know when to take some time off. If you feel yourself burning out, it’s better to do five days of great work than seven days of average work.

Use your time effectively – multitask!

The primary reason behind attending law school is to graduate prepared to become a lawyer. So make sure to balance your essay deadlines and studies with applications to vacation schemes and training contracts. You might find yourself prioritising these applications, but if it is a case of sending off a stellar application that leads to you securing a job as a trainee solicitor and sacrificing a few marks… well, we’ll let you decide if that compromise is worth it.

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Do some reading & extracurricular activities

Some preliminary reading on the core areas of law will be very useful. Additionally, you should do some learn to apply legal issues within the wider context of current affairs, also known as commercial awareness. To help you, we have commercial awareness features on AllAboutLaw.co.uk and you should also make use of the Financial Times.

You can also prepare for your law career by undertaking extracurricular activities. Check out what your law society is doing and if you can get involved in any of their offerings, such as mooting. There may even be revision classes for first-years which may be useful to get background knowledge of the core areas of law.

Law school is no breeze, but you can take some preparatory steps to make sure that it’s less of a rollercoaster!

Non-Law Students