ULaw lecturer Kathy Garside on leaving commercial litigation for legal education, plus her tips for aspiring lawyers
When aspiring solicitors picture where their career might begin, London tends to dominate the imagination. But Birmingham, the UK’s second largest legal centre, has a strong claim of its own. The city is home to a host of major national and international firms, including Gowling WLG, Eversheds Sutherland, DLA Piper, Mills & Reeve and Pinsent Masons, and it offers something the capital often cannot. “Compared to London, Birmingham offers a more affordable cost of living, which can make a significant difference for trainees and junior solicitors starting their careers,” says Kathy Garside, who spent 25 years practising in the city. There is also an active community of law societies and trainee groups offering plenty of networking and mentoring along the way.
Garside knows the city’s legal scene better than most. Around the time she qualified, she relocated to Birmingham and joined the firm now known as Gowling WLG, where she would go on to spend a quarter of a century as a legal director in its dispute resolution group. For her, the move was no compromise.
These days, she has swapped the world of disputes for the lecture theatre, taking up a role as a lecturer at The University of Law (ULaw). “After 25 years in practice, I’d pretty much seen it all and dealt with everything, and I wanted a new challenge,” she tells me. The pull towards teaching didn’t come out of the blue. “I really loved mentoring and developing junior lawyers and trainees when I was in practice, and I decided I wanted to invest in their futures,” she explains. “So I decided to move into legal education to help the next generation.”
Law itself was never a lifelong ambition. “I had to do a work placement when I was in year 11, at the end of my exams,” Garside recalls, “and I did a week’s worth of work experience in a local high street solicitor’s office, which I really enjoyed.” It was “watching advice being given to help solve clients’ problems that really attracted me,” she says, along with a sense that the law was “precise and problem solving.”
Her path into litigation was just as much down to chance. After a law degree at Cambridge, a vacation placement turned into a training contract at a commercial firm in London’s West End, where she completed four seats in family, commercial litigation, corporate and real estate. The decisive moment came early. “On the first day of my seat, we always sat with partners in their offices, so you really got to live and breathe every single case they were working on,” she explains. “The partner had just had a big win, and we went out to lunch with the barrister who’d run the case, the late, great Anthony Scrivener QC. He was incredibly charismatic, and I remember thinking, gosh, if this is what litigation has to offer, then this seemed like a very glamorous lifestyle. And I got the bug.” For the uninitiated, Scrivener QC was, during his lifetime, one of the highest paid barristers in the UK and served for a period as chair of the Bar Council. The day-to-day was rarely so glamorous, she admits, “but I loved the sheer variety of what you could be working on.”
It is that variety, Garside says, which turns the average litigator into something of a jack of all trades. “You become an expert in all sorts of weird and wonderful areas of law. So, for example, handwriting. I had a case where we instructed a handwriting expert to decide whether a document had been forged, through to experts on whether buildings had been constructed properly,” she says. “It was that sheer variety which I absolutely loved.”
She makes a point of bringing that colour, or “flesh on the bones” as she puts it, into the classroom, where she teaches ethics and the legal services module alongside dispute resolution. “I really try to bring all that experience into the classroom to give our would-be lawyers of the future a glimpse of what their learning on paper and from books will then look like in practice,” she says, leaning on real cases to show why the rules matter. One concerned a client “who had his house sold without his consent because a fraudster had posed as him and instructed a solicitor using false, out-of-date ID.” The firm involved, since shut down, missed the warning signs: “the mid-terrace suburban house was sold within 10 days at a significant undervalue to a company in Belize. Nobody at the solicitor’s firm thought to check whether this had the hallmarks of money laundering.”
Other cases simply stood for the excitement. “When I was at Gowling, we ran a series of injunctions, about five in a row, where we were spotting scam advertising companies and shutting them down, then stopping the next one,” she recalls. It is in telling these stories that students grasp what practice really demands, namely “working round the clock as part of a team” and ” transferring that book knowledge into practice knowledge.”
The conversation turns, inevitably, to AI, and the effect it is having on both the profession and legal education. Garside is clear that law schools like ULaw are not simply reacting but keeping pace. “We have embedded legal tech content into our SQE master’s programme since its inception and have a specific legal tech and innovation module, which is extremely popular with SQE students,” she says. Students also gain access to actual AI tools used in practice, such as Harvey, Luminance and HiQ. Because “centralised SQE assessments do not cover this aspect of professional practice,” she says, “it falls to law schools to prepare students for these significant changes to their future careers in law.”
Even setting AI aside, the SQE is a daunting prospect. “We’re very mindful of the extreme pressures SQE places on candidates. We have a full suite of wellbeing services, and every student has an academic coach to hold their hand along the way,” she explains, noting that candidates are “often exhausted” immediately after the assessments. The biggest hurdle, she says, is mindset, as the single best answer questions “are very different from anything students will have completed beforehand.” The remedy? “We advise our students to approach preparing for SQE as if it’s a marathon,” she says.
So what happens once those exams are behind you? Employability, Garside says, is “at the heart of everything we do,” and she is unmistakably optimistic about the next generation entering the profession. “Many of the students we work with come from backgrounds that have traditionally been underrepresented in the profession, yet they bring incredible resilience, fresh perspectives and a genuine desire to make a positive impact,” she says. Far from being daunted by the technology reshaping the law, “much of this generation are embracing it,” recognising “that AI can enhance productivity and create opportunities to focus on higher-value work.”
And her single piece of advice? “Start early.” Many firms, she points out, “recruit their trainee solicitors two years in advance,” so students should make the most of networking and insight events, attend law fairs, build their CV early and gain experience such as “pro bono legal experience for a free legal advice centre, charity or an organisation such as Citizens Advice.” Finally, she says, “never lose faith. The legal industry is competitive, and you will have setbacks, but use these as learning opportunities and go again.”
Kathy Garside will be speaking at ‘Secrets to Success Birmingham — with Eversheds Sutherland, Mills & Reeve, Pinsent Masons, Reed Smith and ULaw’, an in-person student event taking place THIS AFTERNOON (Tuesday 30 June). Secure one of the final few places.
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