I sought some practical legal experience that could complement my studies. Of course, the typical approach would be to intern with a law firm but for obvious reasons, that is not viable during term-time. I found the solution to that in the award-winning Queen Mary Legal Advice Centre (LAC).
A law degree, by modern standards, gears students more towards academia than legal practice. The reality is that practice of law is much different from the study of it. To get any real experience of law in practice, students can visit their local courts or shadow a lawyer. But what about law students who want to get their hands wet with real legal work and apply their knowledge and skills? I was one of those students. I was and still am, far more curious about the practical application of the law rather than its academic side. Naturally, I sought some practical legal experience that could complement my studies. Of course, the typical approach would be to intern with a law firm but for obvious reasons, that is not viable during term-time. I found the solution to that in the award-winning Queen Mary Legal Advice Centre (LAC).
The LAC provides free legal advice to the public and provides a platform for students to connect with real clients so they may experience law in a practical setting. It is a first-tier advice agency which provides, among other things, preliminary advice on the strength of a client’s case, explanations on procedure and clarification on complex legal issues. It deals with a wide range of areas, including family law, intellectual property law and even revenge porn law.
Before or early in the academic year, applications to join the LAC open to law students of all years. There are three roles available: note-taker, student adviser and support team. For a better understanding of what these roles entail, the following is an example of how a typical case goes through the LAC.
A client phones in and a member of the support team records the client’s details and the general facts of his legal issue before booking an appointment for the client. It is at the appointment where the student adviser comes into play. He interviews the client with the assistance of a note-taker and the supervision of a practising solicitor. This interview is a fact-finding exercise for the student adviser to delve into the client’s problem, clarify any issues and to ascertain what exactly the client is seeking to achieve. Legal advice is NOT given at the interview. Immediately after the interview, the student adviser identifies the relevant issues with his supervisor. Over the next 14 days, he peruses any documents provided by the client, conducts research and finally drafts a letter of advice which, once checked and amended, is sent to the client.
In my second year, I applied to be a student adviser and was accepted. I can confidently say that my experience in the LAC was the highlight of my second year. As I expected, most of what I learnt was experiential and this was precisely the type of learning I enjoyed the most even though the learning curve was steep. Here area few things I learnt from my time as a student adviser.
One of the challenges I looked forward to was learning up on a new area of law from scratch. As I experienced in my previous internships and from what I had heard from practitioners, the reality is that you learn the law as you go along. It is simply not possible to know the law in-and-out, or be prepared with all the answers before seeing your client. The challenge really lies in how quickly you can digest the facts, identify the issues, conduct your research, apply the law to the facts and come to a conclusion. In some ways, it is like a law exam except that in real-life, you have not the luxury of time to study for it.
Three of the four cases I handled concerned intellectual property law, while the odd one out concerned family law. I never studied these areas of law but I was sufficiently aware of the general approach to solving legal problems, and where to look for answers. This is probably the reason why the LAC only accepts at least second-year students to be student advisers—the legal-thinking skills need to be acquired first. This is also one of the reasons I enjoy the practical aspect of the law — it is flexible in that you do not necessarily have to formally study an area of law to apply it so long as you have research and problem-solving skills.
This was the first time I dealt with clients I could call my own. I had to shoulder a greater level of responsibility than I was used to. However, it added another dimension to my work. I was not solving a fictional scenario in an exam; I was advising on a real legal problem for a real person who relied on the advice because it concerned his or her livelihood. My reaction was to do whatever necessary to ensure the client’s needs would be best served, even if it required a little less sleep and less relaxation. This came naturally—no contrived effort was necessary. From this, I became more certain about wanting to go into legal practice. Granted, legal practice is a different beast from writing legal advice letters but it did give an indication of how I operate in that sort of environment.
At least for my exams and assignments, brevity and straightforwardness are highly valued. You identify the issues, state the relevant rules, apply them, and conclude. Some teaching staff even advised us students to answer our exams in a mechanical fashion. But when it comes to real-life problems, things are not as clear-cut.
With real cases, finding the ‘answer’ to a legal problem is half the battle. The other half is thinking about how to structure and phrase the letter, not just in a clear way, but also in a way that allows the client to feel reassured. Once, a supervisor remarked that my advice sounded too negative. Another supervisor thought my advice too academic, as though I was answering an exam question. Unsurprisingly, I became more conscious about the way I presented my writing. It became clear to me that providing legal advice is not just about giving an answer to a legal problem—the human element plays a big role too. The advice had to be presented in a manner the average person could understand without sacrificing clarity or accuracy.
I am a calculated person. I like to foresee issues wherever possible. However, when it came to working with clients, I had to factor in a certain degree of unpredictability. In the cases I completed, there would almost always be something—a document, or a piece of information—that would alter the direction of the advice. Almost all my advice letters never turned out the way I initially expected them to because of something that threw me off.
On a particular case concerning patents, it took me days to understand the subject matter and procedures before realising that the actual issues and solutions were a far cry from what I initially had in mind. The fact is that some issues can’t be anticipated or prepared for, and so I learned to always be mentally prepared for the vagaries of each matter.
Being a student adviser was a lesson in time management and endurance. I had to juggle between my LAC cases, my studies and my part-time tutoring job. To make things worse, I could only draft my advice letters and study my clients’ documents during the LAC’s office hours (this is done to avoid any information leaks). This meant that I had to do everything else around those hours. This introduced a major shift in my daily schedule for two weeks at a time. However, I took this as preparation for my potential legal career. A dispute resolution lawyer once described working in litigation as “Putting out fires everyday”. Of course, my juggling between tasks comes nowhere close to that colourful expression—my LAC cases were short sprints compared to the marathons that litigators run. Nevertheless, I was happy to endure the tiredness and short-term fatigue as I saw it as a way to build endurance for the marathon that lies ahead.
To be frank, I didn’t think too much about client confidentiality when I went through the training provided by the LAC. “So what?”, I thought to myself. I suspect my fellow student advisers felt the same way. I reacted that way because I thought, in a rather simplistic manner, that of course the LAC would be obligated to ensure that we received training about confidentiality, but it isn’t really that serious an issue in practice—it’s just one of those ‘filler’ things we learn about in the law.
I was clearly mistaken. When I saw first-hand the great lengths that the LAC staff took to maintain client confidentiality, I quickly accepted that I had to take it more seriously. The cases I did were fascinating and I would have loved to share them with my friends (and even on this blog) but in the interest of confidentiality, I could not speak about the cases to anyone who was not part of the LAC.
What fascinates me about the law are the different characters I encounter along the way. Through the study of cases in my legal studies, I encounter (and by that I mean, read about) all sorts of personalities—from the greatest judges, to the dishonest businessman, to the divorced mother who wants a share of the family home, down to the most vile criminal. In the LAC however, some of these characters come to life; I get to meet them. In my cases, my clients included a filmmaker, some engineers, a businesswoman, and a housewife. These were people I would never have come into contact with had it not been for the student adviser role. It is precisely this human element that infuses life and colour into the law, which can at times be awfully unexciting.
By Dominic Wan-Ee Lee.