ULaw senior lecturer Jim Tsihlis on law conversion myths and why the route into law remains wide open
If you didn’t study law as an undergraduate, the legal profession can sometimes feel like a club you were never invited to join. Jim Tsihlis, senior lecturer in law at The University of Law and programme lead for the Law Conversion Programme at the University’s London Moorgate campus, has spent a good part of his career pushing back against exactly that idea.
He speaks from experience. Trained and qualified in Australia, later requalified in England, Jim Tsihlis has worked across private practice, large corporations and government bodies. That varied career, spanning multiple jurisdictions and sectors, now shapes the advice he gives to students thinking about a move into law. It also means he has seen, first-hand, the kinds of people who do well in the profession and what they actually bring to it. “Spoiler: it is not always the person with a law degree!” he says.
The biggest barrier for non-law graduates, he argues, is rarely ability. It is assumption. Too many aspiring lawyers conclude that because they didn’t study law first time round, the profession is “locked out to them.” He calls it “a massive misconception.” Conversion programmes exist precisely to bridge that gap, letting non-law undergraduates convert into post graduate law students and go onto qualification and legal practice. “The route is well-established, widely recognised by firms, and has been producing good lawyers for years,” Jim explains. “The idea that a non-law background is some kind of permanent disqualification simply doesn’t hold up.”
What firms are actually looking for, Jim suggests, is often broader than people assume. “Good inter-personal skills, close attention to detail and fresh approaches to problem-solving are all qualities that law firms actively seek out, and a non-law degree can be where those skills are built,” he says. “The legal profession, after all, serves clients across every industry you can think of, from finance and technology to healthcare and government.” Firms need people who understand those worlds, and sometimes the best person for that is someone who spent three years studying them. Firms don’t, as Jim puts it, “slam the door in the face of the non-law grads.” His message to applicants is simple: “Apply, and tell firms what you’ve got.”
Asked which subjects translate best into legal practice, he refuses to pick favourites. “The law is a social science. It’s a many-headed beast,” he says. “Humanities students tend to be comfortable with conceptual side of the discipline, the kind of thinking that asks not just what the law says but why it says it and what it is trying to achieve.” STEM graduates bring a “rigorous way of working and a sharp eye for distinctions that matter, skills that are particularly useful in areas like technology, data law or complex commercial disputes”. Business students, meanwhile, “often have a head start in understanding the commercial pressures clients actually face, which is an increasingly important part of what good legal advice looks like”. His conclusion: “I wouldn’t eliminate any background!”
Whether a non-law graduate can really learn to think like a lawyer is a question Jim gets a lot, and his answer is straightforward. “It is taught. There is a methodology and a way of thinking,” he says. “Students learn to identify the facts, know the law, and apply one to the other meticulously”. Over time, Jim says that process builds a habit of looking beyond first impressions, asking follow-up questions, ruling out variables and getting into the detail, all while keeping the client’s broader goal in view. “It is careful work, but it can be learned, and the conversion programme is designed specifically to teach it,” he adds.
But analytical thinking alone isn’t enough, and Jim is quick to point that out. Lawyers shouldn’t try to teach clients legal methodology, he says. They should explain the outcome of it, clearly and in plain English. “You need to be able to talk like a human, to explain to your clients the results you achieved when you went away to think like a lawyer,” he tells us. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but it is a distinction that gets lost surprisingly often. “The ability to take a complex legal position and turn it into something a client can actually understand and act on is just as important as the thinking that sits behind it. For non-law graduates who have spent years writing essays, presenting research or working in client-facing roles, that skill may already be more developed than they realise.”
On legal technology, Jim is equally relaxed. There is no hand-wringing here, no talk of AI taking over or the profession becoming unrecognisable. “We don’t have to be afraid of it,” he says. “Legal tech is simply part of the legal process now, a set of tools that good lawyers need to understand and use well”. If anything, Jim thinks non-law graduates have an edge here. Without being “overly wedded to law in a way that’s quite traditional in conception,” they are more likely to approach new tools with fresh eyes.
That openness to new ways of working matters more than it might seem, because the opportunities in this space are growing fast. Jim points to expanding roles in legal project management, legal technology and hybrid positions sitting across law, operations and tech. In some firms, departments that barely existed a decade ago now sit close to the centre of decision-making. “For students whose interests cut across disciplines, or who are drawn to shaping how legal services are delivered rather than simply delivering them, that should feel like an opening rather than a problem,” he says.
The SQE is another area where Jim urges people not to be misled by the headlines. While it is technically possible to sit the assessments without a formal law qualification, he is blunt about the risks of going in underprepared. “Fifty per cent of that exam is underlying foundational law,” he says, and attempting SQE without proper grounding is, in his words, “cloud cuckoo land.” Firms still expect future solicitors to hold an underlying legal qualification, whether that comes from a law degree or a postgraduate conversion course. The SQE has opened some doors, but it has not replaced the need for a solid foundation in the law itself.
Ultimately, for anyone from a non-law background still wondering whether they belong in the profession, Jim keeps it simple: “follow your heart.” Law can lead to a firm, the bar, in-house roles, government, policy or education, and it can look very different depending on where you take it. It isn’t, as he puts it, “cookie-cutter.” Different backgrounds, different ways of thinking and different life experiences are not liabilities. They are, increasingly, exactly what the legal world is looking for. And for anyone who still needs to hear it said plainly: “The law is for everyone!”
Jim Tsihlis will be speaking at ‘Why non-law students make great lawyers — with Ashurst, Pinsent Masons, Reed Smith and ULaw’, a virtual student event taking place TOMORROW (Tuesday 2 June). Apply now.
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