About the BPP Legal Awareness Society
The BPP Legal Awareness Society was founded in January 2011 at BPP Business School, The City, London. The aim of the Society is to consider how key decisions are made in corporate strategy by corporate clients, and to consider further the importance of commercial and corporate lawyers in promoting business success.
Whilst currently based at BPP Law School in Holborn (as of January 2012), the Society continues to generate much goodwill and a good reputation across the whole of England, in part due to its very active efforts in the social media. The Society prides itself on inclusivity and accessibility, and is therefore open to all past, current, and future members of BPP, in all disciplines, across all sites.
How to contact the BPP Legal Awareness Society
To contact the Society over anything, please e-mail us at: legalaware1213@gmail. Alternatively, tweet Shibley, the Society’s current President, directly at @legalaware. We should be particularly keen if you would like to offer input into the ‘Corporate Client Strategy’ project, described below, if you, as a lawyer, are interested in how business strategy is taught at GDL/LLB(Hons) or LPC level to law students, or if you would like to take part as a guest in the podcasting project; you do not have to have trained or taught at BPP to be able to contribute.
The ‘Legal Aware’ flagship blog
Our blog contains up-to-date corporate and commercial news, as well as educational videos (http://legal-aware.org). You might find it useful in preparation for training contract interviews, inter alia.
Our meetings
The BPP Legal Awareness Society as in previous terms will be holding fortnightly meetings during term time at BPP Law School. For timetables of previous meetings which we have held please go to the following links: Jun – Dec 2011, Jan – May 2012, and May – August 2012. You will notice that our meetings consider in detail common practice areas of international commercial and corporate professional legal work, and also the online psychometric verbal reasoning tests used by the majority of City law firms in their selection process.
Activities
These provide information about how to get involved in activities of the Society:
The brand new ‘Corporate Client Strategy’ project of the BPP Legal Awareness Society
This is a brand new initiative which we are launching for the 2012/3 academic year. The aim is for students who are current members of the Society to research in detail the corporate strategy of clients of their choice using only information in the public domain (these may be firms that they may be dealing with in their training contracts, for example). Then, these students give mini-presentations on their findings, suggesting how commercial and corporate law can be used innovatively to create competitive advantage for the corporate client, thus maximising shareholder dividend. We anticipate that students who are yet to secure a training contract may seek to be involved with this new project, as evidence of ‘commercial awareness’ for the training contract application form.
Take part in blogging for Legal Aware
Blogging is an excellent mechanism of knowledge sharing, and creating networks of like-minded individuals. Our popular blog is read by people from a number of different backgrounds, including junior and senior lawyers, professionals in business, finance and economics, and current, past and future GDL/LPC/LLM students. The blog is currently updated virtually daily, and we are looking for a small team of writers to take responsibility for producing accurate, intelligent and thought-provoking articles based on the contemporary commercial and corporate news, for publication on the blog. All authors will be given their own admin credentials for the blog, and there will be minimal editorial input. All posts will necessarily conform to the current SRA Code of Conduct (LPC student edition).
Apply to be a member of the executive steering committee of the BPP Legal Awareness Society
The BPP Legal Awareness Society executive committee runs on the basis of the ‘cluster’ basis of management. These means that executive committee members tend to have defined roles, such as internal publicity across various sites, liaising with internal stakeholders, arranging meetings at Holborn, taking responsibility for podcasting (see below), but will participate in running the society according to demands of the Society within BPP. This allows flexibility according to our needs, and encourages teamwork amongst our team members. We will this year be asking students to prepare a short CV of their relevant background, education and/or experience, at the least, as we should wish all members of our committee to pull their weight and not to require prompting to do things.
Be a member of our podcasting team
In this academic year, we are especially keen to produce podcasts and widely distribute them. If this project is successful, we wish to make our Legal Aware podcasts available for free subscription on the internet through the iStore. The podcasts are produced by members of our podcast team, who research and discuss topics of their own choosing. This is our last podcast (from the last academic year) on the changing nature of legal education, in response to the ongoing ‘Legal Education and Training Review’. This initiative relies heavily on the competences of attention-to-detail, proactivity, commercial awareness and teamwork.
Verbal reasoning psychometric tests for training contract applications
The Society has also been involved in an initiative for law students to improve their performance in verbal reasoning psychometric tests for training contracts (“Legal Recruit”). This initiative is entirely separate from the teaching provided by BPP.
Educational videos
Factsheets: Please feel free to download and print for personal use, but the Legal Recruit project would be very grateful if you could observe the terms of use contained in the copyright statement at the end. These factsheets are not endorsed by BPP Careers, and they have had no input at all from BPP Careers.
Background to verbal reasoning tests
Background to situational judgement tests
Background to difficulties and online assessments
25 September 2012
