Five Steps Towards Getting a Top Law Degree
You’ve settled into your digs at university and have become fully immersed in your surroundings. “This academic lark is easy”, you might think to yourself. Whilst being a student comes with more than its fair share of fun and games, to get ahead after graduation, you’ll need to do at least a little hard work when exams and essays are on the horizon.
This is certainly the case for any law degree, undergraduate and postgraduate. Keeping up to date with the latest developments, great attention to detail and passion are all important, but what else is needed to make studying law work for you? We have five top tips that you will find easy to follow from Freshers’ Week to the hand-in date for your dissertation.
Perfect your writing skills
This applies to a lot of courses, but in Law, you’ll need to be a pretty competent writer. Try to avoid costly spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and other things like slang. If you fall into those traps when writing essays and working on other assignments, it’ll prove costly. Should you become a barrister after graduation, you’ll need to get every report as accurate as can be.
To be on the safe side when writing an essay or making notes, proofread them at least twice. If something seems wrong, correct it. Having a dictionary and thesaurus by your side won’t do any harm!
Pick a specialism
At the start of your course, you may be eager to learn about all different aspects of law. However, to build yourself up as an expert in a specific field, pick a specialism like, say, divorce law and stick with it throughout your course. Do so up until you start searching for entry-level law graduate jobs.
If you do that, set aside a little time each week. Search for news stories and academic articles online, scour the campus library for relevant textbooks and speak to your lecturers. They’re all useful sources to help your build up your knowledge with each passing semester.
Keep an open mind
If you’re given a case study or see something in the news, try to consider both sides of the argument, even if you have strong views on certain topics. This will prepare you for your exams and, post-graduation, a career in the legal industry.
From the smallest dispute to the longest, most-drawn out case, see it from the view of the defendant and the claimant. You never know who you might end up representing in work!
Use the right tech
Now more than ever, technology has a huge role to play in studying. This certainly applies to law, where vast amounts of information can be found online in libraries and even through apps. On the subject of apps, everything from cross-referencing sources to archived legal cases is covered.
LexisNexis have an app for iPhones called “On The Case”, which has over 300,000 legal cases to search through; it’s free to download! For note-taking and writing, cloud-based storage apps like Google Drive and Dropbox are your friend. They’re both free and can be used on phones and laptops with ease.
Learn the lingo
Law degrees come with their fair share of jargon. You’ll need to brush up on the language used in courts to understand much of what you’re studying. To get to grips with legalese, look at buying a book with legal terminology.
Alternatively, if you’re strapped for cash or there aren’t any books left in the library, there are jargon busters online that you could consult. This one for students is a good place to start, particularly if you’re in the first year of your course or find it hard to tell injunctions and superinjunctions apart.
