What are the best career opportunities for law graduates

[gmrlegal]

What you you think? Is practicing law is the only career option?

I'm a law grad. Many years ago now, but my year group have settled into various careers. Solicitors (City, High Street and In House), barristers, court clerks, but also management consultants, insurance company stuff and one friend is now an actor.

I do think it is a degree with a fairly clear career path, though. Certainly when I was at university, it was assumed we would either go into law school or bar school.

Never took the bar exam out of law school due to multiple relocations.

Started working as legal counsel for the claims team of a Lloyds broker with an international re-insurance portfolio?and quickly moved up to underwriting by taking the standard chartered of insurance qualifications.

I got married and followed my husband on the expat trail where in re-invented myself a few times.

During my first maternity leave I found myself in Amsterdam and started studying gemology as a hobby and took a summer course in antique jewelry at Central St Martins so did a bit of insurance valuation for art collections etc?.as a part time job.

During my second pregnancy, we relocated to Asia and I started working as a property consultant ( it just happens that I met the right person who was growing their business and needed someone to help with contracts etc?.). That was great as I could work from home and due my language skills I could open up new lines of business and help expand the business into relocating services for expats.

My friends ended up in journalism, banking, education, human resources & professional development, the foreign service (would have loved to do that!), NGO's, International agencies, trade and commerce chambers.

There are many avenues to explore.

I never had it in me to sacrifice my family life to make it as a partner.
Never had any family around to help with with kids and DH has a very demanding technical job which he loves and where being out of the market for any length of time would mean sudden death.

So my career path was always very much about accepting our needs as a family and being adaptable since we wanted to see the world.
In the end, I think a valuable lesson not taught in school is that a career is very much about networking and identifying the best opportunity you have at any given time.

What are your prospects? Anything you are passionate about? anyone you can latch on to give you a break?

I would look at the university and see how many have actually got jobs in their chosen field as they graduate. There are very few jobs at the moment and the law graduates that I know haven't managed it yet.

Accountancy is available to graduates of all sorts of subjects, if you don't mind a few more years of exams. If you fancy specialising, you could go for Tax. Tax, after all, is a form of law. Both Accountancy and Tax are very flexible career paths: you could aim for global Senior Partner or a P/T work-round-the-family role.

I ended up as a Welfare Rights Officer for a local authority. The pay is crap (especially in comparison to the level of complexity. Benefits Law is quite tough to master!) but it's useful and interesting work and family friendly

I wouldn't recommend a career in law these days. Too many LPC/BVC courses and too few training contracts/pupillages. All you'd end up doing is saddling yourself with more debt.

It's like any other academic, non-scientific degree: it teaches one to think. I read history and went into law; and lots of my contemporaries who read law went into other jobs (media, environment, finance). It's hard work and a law degree course should only be started by someone with a genuine interest in the subject. It's also only worth doing at a "good" university. Just as with all humanities subjects there are many unemployed graduates from less good institutions or with 2:2s from good ones

I'm also a law graduate - many many years ago. About a third of the people in my year didn't go on to practise as solicitors/barristers and most went in areas such as tax, accountancy, insurance.
Some of those who did go into big city firms then had a career change in their 40s (or for the women it was often post-children).