Flexing your master card

It is a reassuring facet of sitting in a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room to see certificates on the wall detailing double-digit lists of post-nominal letters. “Don’t worry,” the accreditation says, “I am an expert at what I do; I have been rigorously tested, and I have passed. You can trust me with your health.”

In some industries, postgraduate education can be a prerequisite or a fast track to more senior positions. In the legal industry, by contrast, there is a perception that doing a master’s degree in law is a waste of time and that completing a PhD is positively injurious to your chances of qualifying as a solicitor.

Unnecessary qualifications

There are, perhaps, justifiable reasons for this idea. For a start, solicitors are already among the most examined professionals, and there is an element of postgraduate education prescribed by the qualification process in the form of the Legal Practice Course (LPC). The degree–LPC–training contract route is a six-year commitment without factoring in more study, although in a sector that generally recruits graduates two years in advance, there is often the possibility of squeezing in additional qualifications.

A further concern is that in some areas of the law, the venn diagram depicting the law in books and the law in practice has only a small area of overlap. Even where the knowledge acquired is germane to practice, academia does not teach you how to make this information useful to a client who may not even care what the black letter law says.

Finally, prospective employers might be concerned that postgraduate education has been undertaken as a way to avoid getting a ‘real’ job and developing the commercial skills attendant on doing so.

Beneficial skills

But in an industry that takes as standard ‘exemplary academics’, it is a bizarre aberration to discount the value of any education taken above bachelor’s degree level, not least because, as any master’s graduate will tell you, postgrad study is decidedly more intellectually demanding than an LLB. Beyond being a display of academic prowess, an LLM can help develop an array of skills that will prove beneficial to life in practice: independent research, an ability to synthesise and analyse facts in depth, creativity in dealing with legal problems and a chance to gain a comprehensive knowledge of an area of law. There may also be the opportunity to study other countries’ legal systems, or, for those who can afford it, the chance to undertake study abroad; both would be useful for those looking to train at a firm with an international outlook.

For graduates on tighter budgets, or those who want to develop their commercial acumen, many universities offer part-time courses, available in the evenings, at weekends or by distance learning. Alternatively, some institutions allow students to ‘top up’ their LPC by completing a dissertation. Demonstrating extra commitment to studying law in this way should impress recruiters (and a cynic might suggest that it would make good practice for the hours required once your career starts).

It is no secret that the market for training contracts is desperately competitive. An LLM might not be a panacea to an otherwise deficient application, but it can be the icing on the cake – which is always infinitely preferable to the snail in the ginger beer. And even if a postgrad qualification doesn’t get you in front of a partner, it can give you something to talk about once you are.

Of course, it would be foolhardy to take on any postgraduate study without a genuine interest in the subject matter; however, anyone seriously considering a career in law should have the requisite level of interest in the subject to take on further study.

Rightly or wrongly, a master’s degree might be overlooked when it comes to training contract applications. Nevertheless, for aspirant lawyers with a genuine desire to find out more about a specific area of law, there is a great deal of benefit to staying in education. After all, the post-nominals on your business card will tell clients, “I am an expert at what I do; I have been rigorously tested, and I have passed. You can trust me with your legal problems.” SJ