Law student statistics

As you would expect around half of you want to be solicitors and around one fifth would like to be barristers. The most important figure, for me at least, was that almost a third (28%) are not sure what they want to do. I don’t think this is particularly uncommon amongst most students and it may well be higher amongst the general student population, however for anyone interested in law it potentially poses a major problem.

Let us take the route to becoming a solicitor as an example. Most of the larger firms recruit their trainee’s from second year university students; vacation schemes also run during the second year for law students (final year for non-law students) and without the latter it can make the former more difficult to achieve (it is however by no means a pre-requisite).

The difficulty lies in the fact students who are not sure what they want to do and wait until the second or third year may find themselves at a disadvantage compared to the other 49% of their peers who had decided they wanted to be a solicitor from the first year. Catching up on work experience, open days, talks, and workshops can become a Sisyphean task and you may simply run out of time and never be able to catch up with your peers.

This argument does of course presume that because you do not know what you want to do you aren’t doing anything to prepare yourself for a legal career. It may well be that many students are participating in vacation schemes, pupillages and a whole variety of different activities in order to help decide which type of legal career they hope to pursue and although they have some ideas they aren’t exactly sure. In this case I don’t think there is a thing to worry about and in fact students in this bracket it could be argued are better prepared as they have explored all the options and decided based on experience.

Although, if we scale up the 28% to all law students in the UK it equates to around thirty thousand students! I hope that if you are one of those students who aren’t sure what they want to do, you are keeping your options open and are not writing yourself off before you need to.