Law

Unlike many other professions, it is possible – common, in fact – to have a glittering legal career in practice without any postgraduate qualifications. Securing a chambering position with a good master in a good law firm is what a fresh graduate should be focusing on. The training provided by the firm and a master gives budding lawyers their direction in their professional career.

 

A bachelor of laws (LLB) degree ensures that a graduate has mastered general legal concepts and acquired appropriate legal skills of research, writing and reasoning. Substantively, the law student is taught the basic principles of criminal, contract, tort, constitutional and property law and the law of evidence. 

 

There is little, if any, specialist knowledge taught in an undergraduate law degree. A lawyer’s specialisation comes from the areas of practice of the firm he or she has chosen to join. In other words, the LLB programme prepares the soil for the law firm to plant the seeds of legal practice, through training and experience.

 

Nonetheless, postgraduate law degrees offer the opportunity to study a particular field in depth. At the Master's level, it is possible to specialise in a particular subject by submitting a research paper or dissertation. Alternatively, one can opt for the opportunity to take a diverse range of subjects and further broaden one’s academic horizons. It is even rarer that practising lawyers venture into the realms of the PhD, unless it is their wish to enter academia. Law practice is certainly one of the fields where experience counts for more than paper qualifications.