Do you need work experience to study Law at Cambridge?
Brian Sloan is a College Lecturer, Director of Studies, and Fellow in Law at Robinson College. Here, Brian explores the benefits you might get from work experience, and what role they might have in your application process.
Prospective applicants often ask me whether they need to do relevant work experience (for example in a solicitors’ firm or barristers’ chambers) before they apply to read Law at Cambridge.
The short answer is ‘no, you don’t’.
However, as the question raises important issues about what my colleagues and I are looking for in applications and what the nature and purpose of a Law degree is, it’s worth developing my answer a bit.
It’s certainly important (for your own sake as much as mine or my colleagues’) that you do something to develop your interest in the law before making your application. You’ll probably find yourself having to explain why Law interests you as a subject in your personal statement or (depending on the approach taken by the college to which you apply) any interview. You should probably also develop your interest enough so that you can be sure you really want to spend three years reading and learning about it in the first instance. Work experience might be one way of doing that, but there are many others, too.
You could sit in on court proceedings for in your local area for free and often without restrictions (albeit that special considerations apply for some family cases, for example) and there are a lot of relevant books you could read. Merely providing a list of firms or chambers in which you have spent time will not make the difference between whether you get an offer or not, even if learning something specific from the experience might contribute.
Incidentally, the same is true of books: while there are several great books specifically designed for would-be Law applicants, simply listing them on your personal statement is not nearly as impressive as articulating why the books you have read have specifically encouraged you to pursue a course of study in Law.
A further problem with simply listing firms or chambers is that some of our applicants will have a lot of lawyers in their family, while others will have none at all. Either situation is absolutely fine, but we’re evaluating your relevant academic ability and potential, not your connections.
Another point worth making is that working in a law firm or similar before you apply won’t necessarily help you to prepare for a Law degree as much as you might think. Law at Cambridge is an academic subject, and while academic lawyers do have to think practically, we are not admitting you because you’ll make a brilliant barrister or solicitor in the future.
What we’re looking for is genuine intellectual interest and potential in the subject and broader public policy. Academic Law essentially concerns:
(i) what the law is (generally speaking);
(ii) why it is as it is;
(iii) whether there are good reasons why it should be changed.
Of course, most practitioners will often engage with the first point, but they may spend much less time thinking about the academically fascinating issues (often relating to history, politics, culture and philosophy) arising out of (ii) and (iii). Moreover, there will be some practice areas where the law is sufficiently settled that it provides the background but doesn’t need to be at the forefront of the practitioner’s mind while s/he concentrates on providing essentially commercial advice to the client.
From your point of view, remember that we don’t require any specific, pre-existing legal knowledge for the admissions process. What’s more, even if you’re entirely sure that you want to be a solicitor or barrister at the time you apply, it’ll realistically be at least 4½ years before you enter practice even as a trainee solicitor or pupil barrister. You might even end up specialising in an area that you discover only after you finish your Law degree.
So while a Law degree will give you a number of very useful skills that will help you in legal practice (Professor Virgo has recorded a video on this here), the converse is not necessarily true: legal work experience won’t always help you very much in preparing for your Cambridge Law degree. If you have a work experience opportunity that really interests you, by all means take it up if you want to. But be aware that you shouldn’t feel obliged to do so, and that it won’t directly get you into Cambridge to read Law. Conversely, if your opportunities are a bit thin on the ground, don’t worry!
For more information on applying to study Law at Cambridge, see our website for prospective undergraduate students. To learn more about what we’re looking for in an application, see the University’s website, or contact the college you are interested in with specific questions.
The information in this article is considered correct at the time of publication.
