As part of a spotlight series* featuring former Ƶ student campus ambassadors, we spoke with Charley-Travis Brennan, solicitor in the Banking & Finance team at Irwin Mitchell, to hear about his journey from law degree to legal career and pick up the advice he’s gathered during this experience.
My introduction to law was a bit of a fluke. On the day of choosing my A level subjects, English language was fully subscribed so I had to pick something else. I chose law with the intention of dropping it as soon as a place became available on the English language course. Once I started studying law, however, I realised that it was something that I really enjoyed and I even managed to do a couple of legal placements while at sixth form.
After a bit of research, I realised how competitive a career in law was. Looking at my grades at that point, I decided to do sports education at Nottingham Trent University in order to become a PE teacher as I didn’t believe I was capable of becoming a solicitor.
After a year of studying sports education, I made the decision to change to a law degree staying at my non-Russell Group university. I committed myself to working as hard as I possibly could to obtain a training contract. In my final year of university, I was successful in doing so.
I didn’t know about Ƶ until I was on a vacation scheme during my second year of university. I recognised at that point how much it was used and that I didn’t know how to operate it effectively.
I was in finance litigation and I had to research many different legal points and I had absolutely no idea how to do it. Suffice to say, I did not secure a training contract at that point. I realised then how important knowing how to research the law is.
I saw a job advert to work with Ƶ as a student associate and knew it would be a great learning opportunity. The role taught me how to navigate the Ƶ platform, including how to use the wide range of resources such as Halsbury's, which helped so much in terms of understanding legal concepts and supplemented my learning during my degree.
In my professional capacity, I work in the Banking & Finance team so there isn’t a whole lot of legal research involved, as the legal work mainly involves commercial agreements. Throughout my training contract however, in seats like employment and restructuring and insolvency, I would regularly use Ƶ to help with practical guidance as well as research.
I was fortunate that I felt very well supported throughout my law degree at Nottingham Trent University and the employability team were second to none in preparing you for the world of work. Yet, when I completed a vacation scheme in my second year of university, I was not offered a training contract as I did not know how to research the law.
This is why I applied for the job at Ƶ as I realised that if I could teach others how to research the law, I would be competent at conducting research myself. When I was offered another vacation scheme in my final year of university, I was able to use the skills that I had learnt in order to convert this into a training contract.
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Yes, it does. We have access to Lexis+ AI as well as other AI systems. Working as a banking and finance lawyer, there isn’t a lot of ‘law’ which means the need for research is fairly limited at times, although questions do come up now and then.
I can definitely see that soon enough the technology will develop and become more important for finding clauses or wording from precedents to assist with drafting documents.
My advice for others is to embrace it, because it’s coming and it will make the legal profession more and more efficient. It’s something that I am also having to get to grips with as I had never even used ChatGPT and would always favour googling something, as that is how I have always worked!
I am still a bit cautious of AI being totally accurate at times as we are providing legal advice that requires certainty. So, if you do use AI, make sure you are fact-checking the links and making sure it is relaying accurate information.
I also saw a couple of firms, as part of their assessment centre process, were asking “If you want to find something, what prompts would you give to an AI in order to get the answer?” and obviously they're marking applicants on that.
So, they clearly see that being able to accurately enter correct AI prompts to get the information you need is going to develop into a key skill of a solicitor. It's certainly changing very quickly and becoming more and more important.
The average age of a qualified solicitor in England and Wales is 30 years old, so you do not need to rush or put unnecessary pressure on yourself to get a solicitor training contract straight out of university.
If you do want to give yourself the best chance, you need to be proactive. Seek out opportunities and speak with your university about mentoring, legal work experience, non-legal work experience, virtual work experience. Get involved with societies, committees and apply for positions of responsibility. Go to open evenings, insight days, law fairs, events that firms are hosting in order to have things to write about in your applications.
If you leave university with a degree and nothing else, the harsh reality is that your application is not going to stand out. A lot of people won’t start doing extra-curricular activities until after their degree and at that point, you have a lot less time than you did as a student, so it becomes harder.
The best time to start was yesterday, and the next best time is today, so start cracking on with all those little things to give yourself the best chance. But don't put too much pressure on yourself because when you eventually get the training contract offer or the job offer that you've been wanting, you won't care how long it's taken, you'll just be happy that you've got there.
*This series shines a spotlight on former Ƶ student associates, who worked as law school campus ambassadors part-time during their studies, providing peer support and training. Now, with some real-world experience behind them, they’re sharing their journeys, insights and experiences to encourage aspiring lawyers.
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