If you are interested in all things legal then you might consider a career as a lawyer. This can be a very rewarding career, providing work that is intellectually challenging and with many exciting opportunities. Lawyers are involved in almost all aspects of life, making it a highly diverse career.
Lawyers offer confidential advice and make direct contact with clients, offering legal expertise and legal advice in a variety of situations:
• support the community by providing free assistance to those who cannot afford legal services
• provide expert guidance on issues that are routinely faced by people such as buying and selling houses, drafting wills, and handling divorce
• helping businesses with the legal side of commercial transactions
• protect individual rights, ensure they are treated fairly by public or private bodies, and that they receive compensation when they are treated unfairly.
Lawyers can represent clients in lower courts such as magistrates courts, county courts and tribunals and with specialist training can also represent them in higher courts such as crown court or court of appeal.
What qualities do you need?
Academic excellence is important because you need to get a law degree, but employers also look for many other personal attributes:
• Communication and interpersonal skills – the ability to communicate with people at all levels and win their trust and respect
• Responsible and professional with integrity and ethics
• Committed and dedicated to hard work
• Numerical skills – being able to understand financial statements and interpret accounts
• Commercial awareness
• Good time management, problem solving, prioritizing and project planning
• Flexibility, versatility and positive approach
• The ability to understand complex information and present it in simple English
• Commitment to sustainable personal development
There are several ways to become a lawyer. You can do a law degree, called LLB or a degree and then take a Legal Practice Course. There are other options for conducting a non-law degree and then following the Common Professional Examination or the Graduate Diploma in Law and then the LPC. For Gloucester Solicitors, consider Dee & Griffin.
Various fields of law include:
• personal practice – providing legal services such as probate, family law, civil proceedings, conveyancing, criminal law and personal injury, for example.
• commercial practices – provide advice and act for business in areas including contract law, taxation, labour and sales law and company mergers
• provide internal legal advice to companies, governments or local authorities
• Crown Prosecutors Service – examine evidence to decide whether to bring a case to court
Your work will include representing clients in court or instructing lawyers. You also need to compile confidential letters, contracts, and examine legal records and case law. You will be busy attending meetings and negotiations and preparing papers for the court.
After becoming a lawyer with experience, you can become a partner at a private law firm or as a commercial lawyer you can manage in the in-house legal department.
5 things to consider when hiring a solicitor
So, you are looking for a lawyer to represent you. There may be many reasons why you might want to use a lawyer: perhaps you have suffered personal injury because of:
An accident at work
road traffic accident
clinical negligence (where a health professional has made a mistake that causes you pain and suffering).
industrial diseases that you develop through your work, such as asbestosis.
Or, you might need a lawyer service that specialises in employment law – who can help you with:
unfair dismissal claims
settlement agreement (where you arrange how the work will end).
discrimination claims
No matter what the legal problem, sourcing the Gloucester Solicitors is very important to successfully resolve the problem. But how do you find the right lawyer for you?
1. Recommendations from friends and family are not the last word
Whilst information and advice from people you know and respect are always handy when deciding on who to choose for your legal representation, you must ensure that every company recommended to you has legal experts in the field of law that are relevant to your legal issues. If not, then you don’t have to follow the recommendations.
2. Larger companies do not always mean better companies
Just because a company has many lawyers working for them, and a huge advertising budget, doesn’t automatically make them the right company for you.
3. You don’t always have to choose a company that is local to you, or to your place of business
Years ago, if you had a legal problem that needed a law firm, many people would choose firms based near them. As the only way to communicate with your lawyer was to write and receive letters, call them from a landline, or actually make an appointment to go to office, choosing a local lawyer was a wise choice in many cases. Of course, there is nothing wrong in choosing to involve local lawyers (provided they meet other requirements).
4. Check online reviews
When deciding which restaurant to go to, which hotel to go to, which Amazon book to buy, most of us depend on online reviews. Of course, not all online reviews – good and bad – are always fair, but usually inauthentic reviews are easier to recognise.
5. Finally, go with your instincts …
How do companies respond to your questions?
Are they polite, pleasant and friendly, while displaying confidence and professionalism?
Who will handle your case if you give instructions to the company? Talking to them can be a useful basis for instinctive impressions.
Also remember that you have the right to choose the law firm that you want to act for you. You don’t have to use any company that might have been ‘assigned’ to you – maybe by an insurance company, car rental company, garage, trade union, or any other organisation. That is your choice.
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