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The value of gaining experience outside the legal profession
While many law students are eager to enter the competitive legal field right away, a current law student emphasises the importance of not disregarding the valuable experiences that can be attained outside the legal field.
Grace Robbie
Speaking on a recent episode of The Protégé Podcast, Amelia Daou, a final-year law student at Deakin University, shared the value law students can gain from obtaining experience beyond the legal profession. She also emphasised how such experience can significantly enhance their career prospects as they embark on their professional journeys in the industry.
In the same episode, she addressed the various challenges that current law students face in pursuing entry-level positions within the legal profession.
Daou elaborated on how such experiences allow individuals to cultivate transferable skills that can significantly enhance a law student’s résumé, thereby making them stand out as candidates for hiring law firms.
“The value for law students to gain experience outside of the legal profession, it can be important as well because you can develop those transferable skills, and I think that it can make your applications quite competitive,” she said.
Daou shared insights from her mentors and university professors, who conveyed that skills developed through varied experiences – such as customer interactions in a healthcare setting or superior communication abilities honed in a receptionist role – are transferable skills that can markedly improve an individual’s candidacy.
“Even when I’ve had conversations with mentors and unit chairs at university, it’s interesting because they do say to me that the skills that you can gain from even working at a job in hospitality or retail [is desirable].
“Those skills like interacting with people and building customer relationships and developing even simple trust with your managers and with the higher-ups in the company or the place wherever you work, those skills can be transferred, and it reflects that you can be professional, punctual and take direction,” she said.
Daou encourages law students to broaden their job search beyond traditional legal roles, stating: “There is value for law students to look beyond the legal sphere. Even if they wanted to apply for jobs that weren’t legal admin roles, they could apply for jobs as office clerks or admin assistants.”
She added: “It might be within a different profession, but those skills can still be quite valuable, and you can transfer those skills into a legal sort of environment because, in that sense, you will be familiar with using officer equipment, interacting with professionals, how to use applications like Microsoft Office and things like that.”
Daou emphasised the importance of recognising the value of skills that you have acquired from seemingly unrelated roles in relation to the legal profession, noting that students should never overlook or underestimate these diverse experiences.
“Also, law students [need] to utilise the skills they may have developed in retail or even hospitality. It’s important to not discount those skills and those experiences as well, and I think it is really how you phrase it in your applications, the skills that you have developed, because they are valuable skills.
“If law students realise that I’ve worked in hospitality and I can interact with customers, I can upsell, I can be trusted to carry out all of these different types of roles within my job. I think if law students realise that those skills are ones to be valued and they can articulate that in their applications, they will see their applications progress,” she said.
