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The importance of the MBA to my legal studies - a personal view

I am currently loving my MBA at BPP Business School. The mix of students, from all walks of life from public utilities to huge corporate industry corporates, are incredibly diverse in their...

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Commercial life

I am currently loving my MBA at BPP Business School. The mix of students, from all walks of life from public utilities to huge corporate industry corporates, are incredibly diverse in their views, but make the rich learning tapestry unique for me. Of course, the MBA is a very intense course, whatever anyone else tells you. There's a lot of extra skills to learn, as well as reading textbooks and original papers (the ones from the Harvard Business Review are particularly high quality); such as giving presentations (such as marketing pitches), groupwork and teamwork, financial and managerial accounting, understanding (and appreciating!) the financial data of the FT and the WSJ, and much more.

In this intense competitive environment for law students, I would strongly recommend people to consider doing a MBA at some stage around their LPC. I will be doing my LPC at BPP in January 2012. I completed my LLM (Master of Law from the College of Law in International Commercial Legal Practice) between 2008 and 2010, across a wide range of subjects including international public companies law, international commercial law, international mergers and acquisitions, intellectual property, international arbitration practice, international joint ventures, and international capital markets and loans. Doing the MBA allows you to understand the huge amount of detail in the business drivers behind these commercial entities. I believe that such a learning experience is far more important than fulfilling the 'commercial awareness' box of training contract applications - it should be something engrained in the DNA of commercial lawyers, as the corporate finance departments subserve much of the other practice seats in other major corporate firms.

You appreciate very little of this when you complete the Graduate Diploma in Law, if you're 'converting' from non-law to law; I suspect the amount of business and commercial law is not that huge in traditional LLB(Hons), including the one at the University I attended, Cambridge, some time ago. Learning how to talk to people and understanding the sectors of the clients you talk to are equally valuable skills to understanding the lex of the Romans, I'd humbly submit.

Being based near the Gherkin, you get a real sense of excitement of what the City contributes to London. I don't say this from a political allegiance - in fact, my political sympathies lie elsewhere. However, seeing how the financial and legal words interact with one another makes me intensely proud of the work that the square mile does. This is revealed in the statistic that it takes around 16 different disciplines to produce a successful initial public offering (flotation) in London. England is incredibly lucky to have such a skills mix working very close to each other, which is clearly an inspiring environment to work in.

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Comments

7 September 2011

I agree that the LLB degree on its own, being by its very nature an academic endeavour, is scant preparation for commercial reality. To be sure, LLB students can choose from a wide range of electives which can give them a grounding in the fundamental legal concepts involved in commerce (e.g. Company law, Revenue law, Competition law - to name but three), but my own experience is that this theoretical learning can be quite remote from what actually goes on outside the lecture theatre.

It's not without interest that many City law firms now have 'bespoke' MBA-style LPC programmes, intended to focus their trainees on aspects of commercial practice more than would the traditional LPC programme. This perhaps indicates that commercial firms value the MBA - or at least, MBA-style learning.

Having said that, if I had to pay for both LPC and MBA, I would definitely be quite unsettled - especially if I did not already have a firm offer of a training contract. And that is all the more so given that many law firms have the reputation - deservedly or not - for being quite set in their ways in terms of their recruitment policies...