Legal Cheek Careers chats to ULaw LLM student Dadiva Eduardo about studying, training contracts and commercial awareness
“My legal journey started at Birmingham City University when I started taking my degree in law,” says Dadiva Eduardo, LLM student at The University of Law (ULaw). Much of that time was spent at workshops and events aimed at pinning down which corner of the profession suited her, because at the outset, she admits, “I was very undecided between being a solicitor or barrister.”
Like most aspiring lawyers, she got as much exposure as possible, shadowing judges, sitting in on hearings and going to law firm open days to see both routes up close. “I always wanted to help people who don’t have access to justice, to the legal system. So it’s very easy to help those people as a solicitor,” she explains. It isn’t a knock on the barrister route, she stresses, just a question of fit. “The solicitor role was the road that matched best with what I want to do in my career.” Long term, she sees herself drawn to welfare benefits, employment, and family law, “anything that is very related to actually helping people”. Despite a few vac schemes along the way, her interests have been “more in public law rather than commercial”.
With the undergraduate degree finished, Eduardo could easily have stepped straight onto the vacation scheme and training contract treadmill. Instead, she opted for a master’s. “It was more a personal choice,” she says. “I needed that time for myself to understand what I want to do in future.”
Asked what the course at ULaw is actually like, Eduardo describes it as demanding on more than one front. “The LLM is definitely an intense course,” she says, and with SQE preparation running alongside it, “it’s very demanding at the same time.” What she hadn’t expected was how collegiate it would feel, particularly given the support on offer: “with the bachelor’s, my studies were very independent,” she says, whereas the LLM cohort has become a source of support in a way her degree never was.
It’s the depth of the teaching that has stood out for her most. “I really enjoy how deep we’re going into each practice and each area,” she says. Property law is the proof: preparing for the SQE, she explains, “showed me that I could understand it. And once you understand something, you start enjoying it.” Her exams are still some way off. “I started my LLM in June last year and I’m preparing to sit for the SQE1 in January and then for the SQE2 in June 2027,” she explains, before, hopefully, securing a training contract.
With the SQE on the horizon, Eduardo has been thinking about how best to approach these daunting exams. Her first piece of advice is to get moving early — “prepare in advance, from the first day, trying to understand what you need to do and what your goals are,” she says. Cramming isn’t an option: “it’s a continuous prep for the SQE, both 1 and 2.”
Her second piece of advice is not to go it alone. “Don’t take this as an individual journey because you’re going to need support, you’re going to need help,” says Eduardo, speaking from experience. “Even when I started, I was so lost with everything, especially with the SQE1.” The fix, she found, was simply to ask: “as soon as I started asking questions and asking for advice, that’s when I started understanding what I had to do,” crediting fellow students and staff at ULaw.
Her third piece of advice is more obvious. “Time management is very important,” she says, but so is switching off. “You need to be well prepared, especially physically and mentally. So rest, and take breaks if you need them.”
When it comes to training contact applications, her message is research over volume. “You need to research the law firm, you need to make sure that your values, your skills match with what they are looking for,” because, as she points out, “it’s a lot of students and graduates applying for the same training contract.” Eduardo, who has volunteered with Central England Law Centres, has watched applicants with less legal experience land training contracts, and puts it down to presentation. “The way they presented themselves to the law firms was probably different from what I did.” Her advice is to treat every setback as “a matter of improvement”, since “what can be a rejection for one law firm could be an acceptance for the next.”
Commercial awareness is the final piece of the puzzle, and one Eduardo admits took her a while to grasp. “When I started my bachelor’s, probably until the third year, I didn’t know what commercial awareness was,” she admits. And even once she did, “I knew that I needed it for vacation schemes and training contracts, but I didn’t know how to demonstrate it.”
The lesson for aspiring solicitors, she says, is to attend as many events as possible. For Eduardo, that meant full-day sessions in Manchester and London, where firms “show you how they apply their practice into real life cases”. Closer to home, ULaw’s ‘Wednesdays Live’ sees students pick over the latest news and work out how it might land on firms and clients. That, for Eduardo, is the whole point. “Commercial awareness is not what you know, it’s how you apply that thinking to the news.” Like any other skill, it’s ultimately a habit: “even day to day, read some news, go to some business-focused news websites. There’s a lot of legal websites that you can check too — including Legal Cheek!”
And when it comes to rejection, like most going through this journey, Eduardo understands it’s simply part of the process. “I did experience rejection, and it’s not great to receive an email saying that I’ve been rejected,” she says. “But one thing that I started understanding about rejections is they are not really rejecting you.” You might just be a better fit elsewhere.
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