Training contract offer prep

[hugekline]

Hello all,

I'm fortunate enough to have been offered a training contract with an MC firm. With the GDL not starting until September, is there anything I could start doing soonish to familiarise myself with the teaching style/content or more generally some relaxed prep in advance of embarking upon my career in law?

Also if you have any questions that might help with your apps I'm happy to answer.

Thanks!

 

[CallumJR]

get a paralegal job. With a TC secured it is much easier to get a job

 

[axelbeugre]

Hello all,

I'm fortunate enough to have been offered a training contract with an MC firm. With the GDL not starting until September, is there anything I could start doing soonish to familiarise myself with the teaching style/content or more generally some relaxed prep in advance of embarking upon my career in law?

Also if you have any questions that might help with your apps I'm happy to answer.

Thanks!

Hey @hugekline,

Huge congratulations on obtaining an offer of a training contract with a magic circle firm! You are great! You really need to celebrate this win and I would day to take some time to just rest and enjoy this!

When it comes to preparation, I am now doing the PGDL at BPP after getting my training contract back in May. I would say that there is not much you could do to actually prepare. What I did was simply read a couple of law books that I was interested in and I also bought a law dictionary to help me with some words I would have struggled with.
Some things that I would recommend now are:

• The courses that you are going to study on the PGDL are the basic law subjects that everyone will have to study. I would advise reaching out to your friends/family that do study or have studied law and ask them if they can give you their notes. I did this and it was really useful to have an understanding of what is contract law, or what is tort law etc. Alternatively, you can find this online too, there are lots of notes/ information that will give you a brief introduction into these core subjects. It was useful to have an idea of what we were discussing, especially in the first days, however I did no use these notes as much so hopefully you will do better than me!
• Talk to people who completed the course at the university you are going to. ULaw and BPP are a bit different in how they approach the teaching and assessments of these courses so I would make sure to talk to people who did the course at the university you are going to. I am sure that this will help you massively. I reached out to a couple of students on LinkedIn and they were super useful. They explained how the assessments went, gave me tips and also shared their notes with me.
• Alternatively, reach out to future trainees at your firm you have done the course recently. Some from my firm were very nice in giving us tips and sharing notes and these are being very useful now that I am almost done with the first semester of the course.
• Something I did was asking my law students friends for problem questions and their answers to familiarise myself with this method. Being non-law students means that more often then not we would not have been exposed to this kind of assessments. This was useful in helping me with familiarising myself with the assessment and understand the skills required to tackle exams like this.
• Enjoy this time before the PGDL. The course in quite intense but very interesting. It requires a lot of studying on a day to day basis and you need to stay on top of things all the time so be sure to relax and have fun before starting it. Having said that, you can have a life outside of it too so do not be scared! I definitely try to do many other things and I am succeeding so do not worry too much!

I hope these can help you and good luck with your PGDL next year and huge congratulations again on your training contract!

 

[hugekline]

Hey @hugekline,

Huge congratulations on obtaining an offer of a training contract with a magic circle firm! You are great! You really need to celebrate this win and I would day to take some time to just rest and enjoy this!

When it comes to preparation, I am now doing the PGDL at BPP after getting my training contract back in May. I would say that there is not much you could do to actually prepare. What I did was simply read a couple of law books that I was interested in and I also bought a law dictionary to help me with some words I would have struggled with.
Some things that I would recommend now are:

Thanks so much, this made me smile and is really helpful! I'm currently working full time so will just do some relaxed prep and check out notes for the PGDL. Good luck with your studies!