Should you Study Law at University?

[Music] hey guys and welcome back to another video if you don't know I'm Chelsey I studied for three years at the University of York doing a law degree now graduates so I thought I would answer the question of should you do law and sort of explain why I did law some of the skills and things that you need to be a lawyer and hopefully it will enable you to decide whether you should do law you know whether you are thinking that you wanna do law at university but not quite sure or whether you're deciding about university course options and law might be one of them hopefully this video will help you decide whether you want to dedicate three years of your life to studying for a law degree so firstly why I studied law so I went into my law degree thinking I wanted to be a corporate barrister that's gonna make loads of money I was gonna work in London and I was gonna have this flash Swiss job have the prestige and that's something at 1718 that I really wanted and I thought okay this is gonna give me a complete change of lifestyle and I'm never gonna have to you know struggle for money ever again and every ality that sooner what a barrister really is and it's not the right reasons to go into law and I mean don't get me wrong I really enjoyed the qualities of a law degree and the things that we would study and how intellectually challenging it is and how intellectually challenging a job would be those are things I really liked and also the mix of working in a team and also on your own having the opportunity to be you know self-employed if you wanted to be those are all the things that attracted me but fundamentally I just wanted a really good job and to be comfortable and financially stable and I thought that you know what law is something that can give me that and that's why I went into law which probably isn't the best reasons and it probably explains why after about six months of studying for my law degree I did a bit of work experience in the law and in the areas of law that I thought I wanted to get into and realize actually it's really boring and it's just not something that I wanted to do personally it just wasn't my thing and I have a whole other video on why I chose not to be a lawyer and I'll link that down below but basically I like the study of law I just didn't like the practice of law so you know there's a two different distinction that you need to consider whether you're doing a law degree because you want to study law or whether you're doing laundry because you want to practice law because if you want to practice law you might hate certain elements of studying but in the end of the day it's three years of your life and practice is very different studying it or vice versa if you just want to study it then you might see love studying it but then end up with a degree and think what am I gonna do with it if you hate practice so ideally you know you'll want to like both but that's not always the case and that's also okay and lawyers are brilliant a foundational degree for life it's transferable to so many sectors a lot of employers kind of see it as a respectable and prestigious degree and also 50% of law graduates don't go into law so you wouldn't be alone if you did a law degree and then decided you didn't want to go into it there are so many other career options for you know law students and law graduates so you need to bear that in mind as well if you do want to just study law for the sake of studying law rather than to be a lawyer but as I said study and practice are very different the study of law really involves reading a big breath of you know legal cases and books and things like that but also being able to pull out the main neut details and go deep in depth and come up with theories and really critically evaluate and analyze what you're reading and come up with opinions for both sides and argue on something so abstract on the anse within you know the legal world or within a certain area of law and really the study involves a lot of reading independent research and just sort of going over a lot of different legal topics and you do get to do a bit of advocacy and things like that when you study law but realistically not as much as you would do in practice whereas in practice depending obviously on what type of job you do it would be more client-facing you'll be doing a lot more practical things a lot more hands-on a lot more you know walking between courts if you're a barrister or going around the building as a solicitor and you your tasks vary all throughout the day so if you're a trainee solicitor or an associate you could do things from my proofreading to meeting with a client to jumping on phone calls to doing some research like it varies quite a lot throughout the day same with the barrister you could be meeting the defending you could be devising on the phone you could be then drafting legal documents you could also be prepping to go to court actually giving advocacy in court the job roles are quite you know fluid and there's a lot of things you can do in them whereas the study is very focused on like just the reading and the analyzing of the law so also on the note it's just important to know what the job roles entail I've also made a video on the difference between sister and barrister and what their jobs entail and it also included a lot of places to go to look and research for each job role and it's important that you know that before you do a law degree to know whether you're going into a law degree because you want to study law or go into a law degree because you want to be a lawyer because they are two different things and you'll get two different experiences out of a law degree depending on which one you actually want to do and yeah it's just it's like you don't want to end up how I was going into law thing and I really want to be a barrister or it'll be a lawyer and then within three months being like I couldn't think of anything worse and then you're kind of like just doing a law degree like how am i doing and then luckily for me I enjoyed studying law and I enjoy academic study generally so I didn't dislike my degree but you know you could be in a situation where that might be the case and now I guess I want to outline some of the skills that you need to have or you need to be willing to develop and need to want to study for three years and you know practice for three years because these are the skills that a law degree really polishes so things that you really need to want to be comfortable doing so you need to cope with an intense workload and also intense people law students and lawyers generally a very intense people they're very stressed most of the time they have a lot of things to do and not enough hours in the day so you know that stress level does sort of go through offices and go through law schools especially towards an exam periods or times when cases might be reaching like you know a pinnacle point so it is important to have to handle stress quite well as well as workloads more generally there's a lot of work that you do have to do as I said especially in exam time to be a law student so you have to be able to cope with stress and also accept that during those times you might have to just give up you know your hobbies or seeing your friends and things like that to be able to study or if you don't want to give those up except that you probably will get quite a lower grade secondly you need to be able to read a lot I mean we do read a lot as a law student typically you get set quite a few hundred pages a week of reading you don't necessarily read all you skim it and you learn to skim and pick out the bits and learn how to find sources when you're researching very quickly doing a law degree so we don't read as much as people probably think we do but at the same time there is a lot of reading in comparison to sort of like other subjects and also you need to be able to be competitive so if you really really want to be a lawyer you have to be that person that's willing to like fight for it and really want it and when you're in those interviews those things will then come through and that's what employers want to see the employers want to see that you genuinely want the job role whereas if you're like half assed and not bothered about being a lawyer and you're like well well if any work experience I did do it don't don't you're not really likely to get on in the law world you have to really show that you want it so you have to be willing to be competitive with your peers as well going off that you need to be confident you know confidence whether it's real or fake is important within law you know whether you're going up against a classmate in a moot or whether you're going for a job interview or whether you're about to tackle a really long essay and there's not enough hours in the day to do it you need confidence in yourself to know you can back yourself and that you are capable of doing that and have some element of strength because otherwise you're in a highly competitive highly intense stressful environment and cracks start to appear and unless you're really confident and back yourself and really think like I know I can do this it will be quite difficult so also you need to have good communication skills typically on a law degree you'll need to talk with other students and your lecturers pretty frequently you'll have to do advocacy and mooting you don't actually advocate for a client whether real or fake so you need to be able to speak to lots of different people and lots of different settings where there are small groups of people one-on-one you know big sort of public speaking events or in a professional manner and also in an informal manner to explain the law and an element of that is also being able to explain complex law to somebody very easily and simplistically and though those kind of skills are really important when you're being a law student and you also need to problem-solve so this is something that does get drilled in at university but you need to be able to look at legal problem and think about how can I find the answer to this it's not necessarily about knowing the answer it's just about knowing how I can go through a series of steps to then find that answer where do I go for research what do I need to look at in order to know how to solve that problem you need to be able to work in a group and independently so obviously your seminars at law school will involve other people and group work and even mooting and stuff like that at law school normally you get put in a team to do it so you need to be able to be a team player but equally you also need to be able to work independently and to put your own shift in and do a lot of research on your own and then meet back with your team and share it with them so you do need both sides to the coin there of working with people and also by yourself you need to be able to read breath but also depth so you need to have the skill of reading a lot of information but also knowing which bits are important and then that's not necessarily something that you need to already be able to have mastered before law school it's just something that you definitely will master at law school and it is a good skill to have you know to skim read and things like that but if you're the type of person who gets at 100 pages of reading and wants to sit down read a hundred pages of reading if you become a law student you will basically have no social life and all you'll do is have a read and it will be really intense for you you need to be the type of person that is willing to accept that you need to just skim read most of the stuff otherwise we're gonna have like new life so yeah you need to kind of be okay with like picking stuff out and not really completing the reading and just picking out the most important bits and finally this is sort of in two parts it's you need to be able to self motivate and you also need to be able to accept that you will have to sacrifice personal things at time so your self motivate because there is so much that you need to do a lot of it's independent study you're also going against all of your peers all the time and it is quite a lot and you need to be able to sit there on your own and push yourself through it and if you don't it's very easy to get behind and also you know going off that you need to be able to sacrifice your personal life there are times when you're just like doing well I'm not gonna be going out I'm not gonna be working out I'm gonna be eating like awfully the next week because I just physically can't eat healthily right now like it's just too much effort there are times when you just degrade your standards because you have too much work on and you kind of just need to like be okay to accept that and expect that when you go to law school because unless you're like the most organized efficient person ever and chances are even if you are at some point within those three years of law that's gonna slip you know that you need to be able to prioritize and be organized still because as I said otherwise it's so easy to slip behind and work and then that's a place where you really don't want to be so hopefully that answered your question of should I do Lord you know in summary you need to be going into it for the right reasons you need to know what the job bras consist of you need to know when you're going into it for the study of law or the practice of law and need to know the skills involve also have a lot of vlogs on my channel which show like a typical week at university and what it's like being a law student so check those out if you want to see like you know typical week typical day of the work code we get set to get more than I did that way and I'll also be putting out a video soon that's like what to expect at law school the type of workloads we have how many contact hours we have what students and career opportunities are like typically in law school so hopefully that also should give you a better idea but hopefully this video has answered your question of should you be a lawyer and if you need any more sort of guidance or you want to comment on anything that I've mentioned in this video then feel free to comment them down below I'll be happy to answer but that's it for this video I will see you next week I'll see in the next video bye guys [Music]

Channel: Chelsie Angeles

Views: 37,071

Keywords: law school, law, legal, barrister, solicitor, student, law student, uk, university, uni of york, ucas, should you do law, why study law

Id: EZUTtgvxGAc

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020