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What's in a cover letter? A practical guide for law training contract and vacation scheme placements.
What makes a perfect ‘cover letter’? If you look up “killer cover letters”, you’ll find a plethora of tips, mostly giving conflicting hyperbolic advice. In a sense, the perfect cover letter is like pornography – you can recognise what it is, but it’s much harder to define it actually.
Many law firms ask for a cover letter, and after a while it becomes clear to you what people screening these letters want. Firstly, they don’t want a cover letter which goes on for a page, in the same way you should be able to get your CV onto 2 pages.
You must make an effort to find out to whom you’re writing. Often with standard cvmailuk cover letter form, they’ll tell you who to write to, and what their position is. This will be sometimes different from the actual person reading it, but that doesn’t matter. Sometimes it won’t state who the respondent is, but there’s no harm in ringing up the graduate recruitment division to find out – this at least shows initiative, and you also show proactivity and an attention-to-detail if you can spell his or her name correctly. It is also very courteous to get the precise wording of their job title right.
There are certain points of etiquette essential in your cover letter, from what I’ve found.
- Make it interesting, professional, and concise.
- Do not become long-winded.
- Do not use “flowery” language.
- If you get time, allow someone to spell-check it, and check it for other mistakes? (Career advisors will offer be able to give impartial advice, as legal recruiters will often tell you if your application is rejected.)
The letter should be professional and indicate that you can write, but don’t show off by using words that you would never use in conversation.
You should try to be yourself in the cover letter, without being over-familiar. One law firm actually bothered telling me what they wanted. They told me that they want the letter roughly in thirds:
- a third on why law in general (legal education perspectives, why a solicitor? why law? why are you interested in pro bono? why are you interested in tweeting law or blogging?),
- a third on why their firm attracts you (I found the Lex100 and Chambers and Partners Guide extremely useful here – and here it’s essential to demonstrate that ‘you’ve done your research’);
- a third on what generic skills can you “bring to their table” (it’s useful to consider especially whether the firm has particular cultural values or programmes you associate with?)
Helpfully, when I’ve run this advice past two other law firms (their Grad Rec managers), the response I got was : “perfect”.
What is 'commercial awareness'? A student's perspective
What is ‘commercial awareness‘? Nearly all law firms call this ‘commercial awareness’ in recruitment (it’s on their website); Freshfields call it ‘commercial insight’ with a semantic difference that is important to them.
My understanding of commercial awareness has evolved somewhat with time. A very nice follower on my new thread @tc_applications wondered if one could put my BPP Legal Awareness Society as a legal tweep to follow. I was of course honoured, but the answer is clearly ‘no’ as I doubt any legal recruiters have heard of our student society at BPP, the BPP Legal Awareness Society, although we’ve had a year’s worth of successful activities promoting the importance of regulation to corporate strategy. Besides, there are far more authoritative threads to follow, such as @GdnLaw or @EU_Commission. That’s from the perspective of a legal recruiter, mind you. I cover a lot of social justice, corporate and legal issues on my @legalaware thread.
So what about that dreaded question? Can you bottle ‘commercial awareness’, similar to ‘Eau de Commercial Awarenesss’. In a sense, yes, you can give somebody the tools to be commercial aware, but, given that I am physically disabled, I will never in my lifetime be able to beat Yusain Bolt in the 100m. Like other aspects of business life, you can run courses and workshops in subjects such as marketing, corporate finance, leadership, and even corporate awareness itself.
My framework for understanding ‘commercial awarneness’ has changed over time. To begin with, it was very much ‘being seen’ to attend events, to demonstrate commercial awareness. However, it’s clearly more than that. I don’t even think it’s to do with the huge amount of international commercial law I learnt in my LLM at the College of Law, or business management I learnt in my MBA this year. We covered all ‘the usual suspects’ ranging from leadership to international capital markets and loans.
Asking a future corporate trainee about commercial awareness in a sense is like asking a future junior doctor, who’ll be doing 5 billion phlebotomy sessions in their time, whether they like the actual subject of medicine before subjecting them to an on-call covering the Bank Holiday weekend. Or maybe it’s similar to asking a future cardiology registrar to write 200 words on their awareness of the physiology of the heart and cardiovascular system.
For me, I have learnt most about corporate law life, without any of the mundane aspects of doing the job for real, by keeping my ears close to the news. I understand the vocabulary of law and business from my degrees, but it’s very different to doing the job.
For example, I set up a website this year, ‘Legal Recruit‘, to help individuals tackle their online training contract assessments. This has been very successful, as I’ve had to consider carefully issues about pricing, quality, marketing, e-commerce, budgeting, and operations management. I have had to understand also intellectual property in delivering this, in particular being meticulous about the fact that I should not infringe intellectual property, and also I have considered carefully the branding issues, in making it extremely clear that it is an independent venture from students in my student society, and nothing to do with BPP. It has therefore be a minefield, but this is real life. I have gone through the motions of incorporating my own private limited company with Companies House, and therefore the Business Legal Practice course will mean something to me when I start it at BPP next week (as part of the Legal Practice Course).
So can you learn it from a book? Probably not. It’s for legal recruiters to mark it using whatever ‘matrix’ they wish. I feel it is about living a life that understands ‘competitive advantage’ for corporates. I believe that understanding, anticipating and implementing law and regulation all contribute to giving a corporate competitive advantage. Take for example the fact that BPP has a Business School, but the College of Law doesn’t (and to build one overnight would be impossible). This has implications for how they can organise commercial awareness curriculums (sic) in their law courses. I am currently doing the LPC, and I’ve been struck how little commercial awareness my student colleagues appear to have, simply in terms of knowing what’s going on in the business world around them.
