AppId is over the quota
Queen Mary University of London’s LLM in Paris offers an alternative way to pick up a new language and additional legal qualification Photograph: Brian Harris/AlamyBack when the economy was booming and junior lawyer jobs grew on trees, having a masters degree in law (LLM) on your CV was seen as highly desirable, with law firms and barristers' chambers valuing the benefits of an extra spell of in-depth legal study. But these days, as the downturn drags on and student debt levels spiral, there is some ambivalence about the wisdom of doing a conventional LLM before you have obtained a pupillage or training contract.
Edward Walker, graduate recruitment manager at corporate law firm Pinsent Masons, sums up the prevailing sentiment:
"We'd be neutral about a masters, which we don't view as intrinsically better than a year spent working in industry. Chances are, if you haven't met minimum academic requirements by the end of the Legal Practice Course (LPC), you're not going to reach it with a masters. And if you have reached it, but not got a training contract, the gap you have is not academics but elsewhere."
Law schools and universities are alive to this shift in mood, with several introducing new courses to reflect an ever-more competitive legal education market where students are demanding more bang for their buck. Tuesday saw the latest example of this trend, with the College of Law announcing that it is to offer a new combined Legal Practice Course (LPC) and LLM from next year. The new "LLM LPC" will enable students to specialise in either international or national legal practice.
The former focuses on examining the legal principles, structure and mechanics of cross-border transactions. The latter will be based around exploring general commercial or legal aid practice. According to which modules students take, they will be awarded either an LLM in International Legal Practice or an LLM in Legal Practice. Significantly, the cost and duration of the new course will remain the same as the traditional LPC.
The thinking behind the new course was probably fairly similar to that which led City law firm Simmons & Simmons to overhaul its graduate recruitment programme earlier this year and introduce a new requirement that all its future trainees complete a firm-sponsored legal MBA alongside their LPCs. From September 2014, future trainees at the firm will begin the MBA during an accelerated LPC at BPP Law School, and then continue the course throughout the two-year duration of their training contracts.
Simmons & Simmons' graduate recruitment partner Alex Brown has said that the MBA – which the firm has been offering on an optional basis since 2009 – "adds a lot of value to trainees". Certainly, it will be interesting to see whether this model or the College of Law's proves more popular with the international law firms who drive the LPC market via their sponsorship of new recruits' law school fees.
The desire to "add value" is also informing the LLM programmes being offered by traditional universities. For example, LLMs that combine law with a language, or allow students to study a different legal system, are becoming more popular – a symptom of an increasingly international legal market, where law firms place a premium on language skills and experience of other cultures.
Options looked on favourably by employers include the two-year law and Chinese LLM launched last year by Edinburgh University, and a host of specialist European law LLMs offered by universities including Kings College London and Kent.
Intriguingly, the Edinburgh LLM includes a spell "at a prestigious Chinese University", with students expected to graduate with a "solid grounding in Chinese language." For those who don't fancy attempting to master a whole new alphabet, Queen Mary University of London's LLM in Paris – which focuses on exploring commercial law from both comparative and international perspectives, within a common law framework, but is taught in its entirety in the French capital – offers an alternative way to simultaneously pick up a new language and an additional legal qualification.
Other innovative new LLMs include the broad range of part-time online courses offered by Northumbria University – enabling wannabe lawyers to work while they boost their CVs – and the specialist advocacy LLM launched this September by Strathclyde University, which is the first of its kind in Britain.
Amid this array of options, some traditional LLM courses are still going strong, of course. Postgraduate legal qualifications from Cambridge or Oxford, in particular, remain highly regarded by law firms and chambers. What remains to be seen is whether students will still choose to do these courses before getting a training contract or pupillage under their belts.
Alex Aldridge is the editor of Legal Cheek
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