Commercial awareness that gets you hired: How lawyers read the news and how you can too

Commercial awareness is one of the skills firms value most, but it can be hard to know what it looks like in practice.

In this session, trainees and junior lawyers who were applying not long ago explain how they read the news and turn it into insight. They’ll share what they thought commercial awareness meant as students, how that changed once they started working on real matters, and how it was tested in their own interviews and assessment centres.

They’ll then put it into practice. The panel will take one of the big themes that keeps coming up (AI, interest rates, regulation, sustainability or global politics) and show how it affects businesses and how it feeds into the work of the teams they’ve sat in.

You’ll come away with:

• A clear, practical understanding of what commercial awareness really means
• An inside look at how it’s tested, and what separates a weak answer from a strong one
• A worked example of how lawyers connect a news story to client work
• The sources they actually read, listen to and follow
• One simple habit you can start building now

Whether you’re starting your first applications or preparing for an assessment centre, you’ll hear from people who’ve just been through the process and know what works.