Laura Healy, lecturer at ULaw, draws on seven years in practice to share her advice for aspiring lawyers facing a crowded jobs market
“The market is very competitive. It was even very competitive when I started out,” says Laura Healy, a lecturer at The University of Law (ULaw). “I don’t think anything has necessarily changed in that regard.” Getting into law has always been hard and Laura understands this firsthand. Before moving into teaching, she spent around seven years in practice, predominantly in personal injury, acting for both claimants and defendants across regional, national and international firms, as well as in-house at an insurance company. However, combining the rise of AI with the competitive job market means that today’s aspiring lawyers are facing some particular challenges.
Laura has been at ULaw since 2020, teaching across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes with a particular focus on public law (constitutional law, administrative law and human rights law) though she has also “been known to turn my hand to other subjects when needed”. However, a combination of lifestyle and vocational aspirations prompted a switch to education. “Legal practice is very demanding in terms of hours and stress levels are often very high,” she says, “and the work-life balance was no longer what I wanted”. Having spent those years mentoring and teaching colleagues along the way, she was equally drawn to educating the next generation of lawyers and “passing on some pearls of wisdom to them”.
So what are firms actually looking for? Laura returns to a phrase every applicant has heard — the well-rounded candidate — and tries to flesh it out properly. Much of it, she suggests, comes down to getting involved: mooting, negotiation and debating, all of which build transferable skills, but also “just putting yourself out there and having different experiences”. That might mean “starting a society that you’re interested in or joining a society that you’re interested in, even if it’s nothing to do with the law”, “trying to obtain positions of responsibility”, or volunteering. However, paid work should not be discounted. “Paid work is equally as valuable,” she says, noting that “juggling a job alongside study is itself a source of the transferable skills firms prize”.
Laura’s own experience confirms this. “I used to fence competitively,” she tells me, and the hobby turned out to be a surprisingly effective foot in the door. “Sometimes I would literally get an interview simply because fencing was on my CV. They just wanted to know more.” The lesson, she suggests, is that the experiences which set you apart are worth shouting about.
When it comes to the applications themselves, her advice is familiar but, she concedes, easier said than done. “Tailor the covering letter and CV to the particular job that you are applying for,” she says. With candidates firing off dozens of applications, the temptation to recycle content is strong but counterproductive. “If you’re using the same covering letter, the same CV, it’s probably not going to get you in the door.” Better, she advises, to “highlight why you are the best candidate for this role, use the words that are in the advertisement, and let the employer’s own language shape the pitch”. This applies for all legal roles, including those outside the typical vacation scheme to training contract pipeline.
Naturally, once candidates reach the interview stage there is a shift in the dynamic. “It’s all about developing that rapport with the people interviewing you,” she says and remembering that the scrutiny runs both ways. “An interview, regardless of what it’s for, is as much about you interviewing them as it is them interviewing you. Is this a place you can see yourself working? Are these people you can see yourself working for?” Laura is also quick to stress that in the current job market, it is sometimes not possible to be too picky. “If you’re offered the role, seriously think about accepting it because it’s much easier to find another job whilst you’re in one and provides valuable experience” she advises.
Laura draws on her perspective as a legal educator and what she has seen first-hand in the lecture halls and seminar rooms. It’s perhaps an overlooked fact nowadays but it’s worth noting, Laura stresses, that the cohort of Gen Zs now entering the profession is, of course, the one shaped by the pandemic. The isolation of those years, Laura observes, combined with a generation more accustomed to interacting through a screen than in person, has left some students readier to retreat than to speak up in seminars, their attention spans worn down by a diet of 30-second clips. It is one reason she is so insistent on the human skills no software can replicate. “Emotional intelligence is incredibly important,” she says, and likely to become more so. “As aspects of legal work become more automated by AI, we are going to need that human judgement, empathy and integrity,” she explains.
Communication sits at the heart of it. “As lawyers, people come to you when they’re at their lowest points a lot of the time. So you often have to translate complex legal analysis into clear, practical advice,” she explains, and that means learning to flex your register. “It’s about being able to tailor the communication to different audiences in different environments”. Regardless of AI’s potential to increase efficiency, clients can always tell when the human touch is missing. “Clients don’t want to feel like they’re speaking to a robot, they don’t want to feel they’re speaking to something that’s been computer generated.”
That instinct shapes Laura’s view on AI, which she would rather students used thoughtfully than not at all. The stakes, she stresses, are professional as much as academic. “There’s got to be public trust in the profession,” she says, and “lawyers are held to very high ethical standards”. Citing fabricated authorities is no small thing and “inventing cases or making use of cases that don’t actually exist, that is a big breach of the ethical codes of conduct.” As she points out, solicitors and barristers who leaned on AI to draft submissions, only for the tools to produce Court of Appeal or Supreme Court cases that did not exist, have faced disciplinary action. The risk begins earlier than many realise, too — academic misconduct on a student’s record must be disclosed to the SRA or BSB, and “that may actually prevent you from becoming a lawyer, whether barrister or solicitor”.
Laura Healy will be speaking at ‘Secrets to Success Manchester — with Pinsent Masons, DAC Beachcroft, Walker Morris, Express Solicitors and ULaw’, an IN-PERSON student event taking place on Thursday 18 June at ULaw’s Manchester Campus. Apply now to attend.
