Legal Cheek has created a short student perceptions survey, which seeks to find out what really matters to you when applying to law firms or chambers.

We want to know what makes you tick when choosing where to apply, what legal practice areas take your fancy, and how you prefer firms and chambers to communicate with you.

At the end of the super short survey, you can enter your email address to be in with the chance of winning a £100 Amazon voucher. Not bad for three minutes work!

All your responses are anonymous, so don’t hold back in saying what you really think.

If you’re a wannabe solicitor, complete this SURVEY.

If you’re an aspiring barrister, please complete this SURVEY.

Be sure to complete the surveys as soon as possible to be in with a chance of winning!

The post Calling all aspiring lawyers! Have your say in our short student perceptions survey appeared first on Legal Cheek.

Amid all the opining and pontificating by lawyers and academics about the future of legal education and training, one notable group often goes unheard: the students.

Yes, ironically it’s the people who have to actually do — and pay for — the Legal Practice Course (LPC), which will soon be replaced by the Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE), who tend to have least input into what form changes to it should take.

So, ahead of this month’s Future of Legal Education and Training Conference, Legal Cheek is asking students and junior lawyers for their view. The results will be presented to the learning & developments professionals and academics at the conference.

The survey below takes two minutes to complete and is totally anonymous.

Create your own user feedback survey

You can also complete the survey here.

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As we move into what one Harvard law professor has termed “the age of trauma”, the methods law academics use to teach so-called hard subjects such as rape, discrimination, insanity and war crimes have been thrust into the spotlight.

We explored this at length in a recent Legal Cheek feature, which sparked a flurry of comments about the value of amending teaching style when dealing with more emotionally-challenging subjects. Now we’d like to hear from you in a survey that has been embedded below and that can also be completed by clicking this link.

Create your own user feedback survey

Amending one’s teaching style could, perhaps most obviously, involve giving a trigger warning before potentially offensive or upsetting content is taught. Or, it could involve teachers toning down what’s known as a Socratic style of teaching, which is just a fancy way of saying ‘picking on students for answers even if they don’t have their hands up’.

On the former, regular commenter Not Amused said that while trigger warnings were born out of good intentions, they’d been “hijacked by the narcissistic left”. Another said: “[R]eal life has no trigger warnings.”

Others were more open to the concept. One anonymous commenter thought:

“A trigger warning needs to be no more than a list of the lecture topics. A student can then know what is being taught, in advance, and either prepare themselves for it or choose not to attend and, if needed, seek the support they need.”

As for the Socratic point, comments were similarly mixed. Though one said that “law is no place for snowflakes”, another urged tutors to be “sensitive” about this so-called ‘cold calling’ style of teaching. They continued:

“I fairly recently saw a guest lecturer pick on a female student and press her on a question despite her obvious, painful discomfort and increasing attempts by her companions to turn the question onto themselves. Lecturer persisted, student broke down and said that she’d been raped at 17 and had had to give evidence in court.”

Ultimately, and in the words of another commenter, this topic is a minefield of “a huge number of really difficult questions” — which we’d like you to have your say on. Should law tutors and lecturers use trigger warnings when teaching hard subjects? And: Should law tutors and lecturers cold call students when teaching hard subjects? Use the survey embed above to share your thoughts with you. If you are viewing this article on a mobile, you can take the survey here.

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The Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC) is the gateway to the bar… for the 400 or so of the 1,500+ students who take the course each year and secure pupillage.

It is populated by a mixture of hotshots (they make up most of those 400 successful pupillage-baggers), oddballs, dreamers and no-hopers, alongside a significant number of overseas students who will use the qualification to practise law in their home jurisdictions.

Satisfaction levels vary. With practitioners often teaching the course, some students find themselves experiencing daily master classes. Others see their many thousands of pounds of course fees frittered away on instruction from rather less impressive individuals.

There are also notable discrepancies between providers in areas like course materials, careers service, options subject choices, study space and pro bono opportunities.

Help us create a BPTC course comparison for the next batch of law students seeking a life at the bar by completing the survey below. It’s short, completely anonymous and open to all BPTC students and recent graduates across the country.

If you are reading this on a phone, you can complete the survey here.

The post How good (or bad) was your BPTC? Take the Legal Cheek 60 second survey appeared first on Legal Cheek.

For many aspiring solicitors, the Legal Practice Course (LPC) is an exciting stepping stone towards their dream of a successful trainee life, as they transition from student caterpillar to lawyer-to-be butterfly. For those less enthused, it can be a rather more forgettable experience.

The course itself is vocational and not the most riveting in the world. But the experience can vary quite significantly according to which provider you attend.

Did your LPC live up to its price tag? Was the choice of electives lacking or abundant? Were you left feeling ready for life in practice, or do you regret ever going to law school? Did you finish with a training contract to look forward to or do you feel like your hopes and dreams have been shattered?

Help us create an LPC course comparison for the next batch of law students seeking a life in the legal profession — by completing the survey below. It’s short, completely anonymous and open to all LPC students and recent graduates across the country.

If you are reading this on a phone, you can complete the survey here.

The post How good (or bad) was your LPC? Take the Legal Cheek 60 second survey appeared first on Legal Cheek.

For some star students, such as Supreme Court chief Lord Neuberger, the Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) is the beginning of a wonderful journey to the top. For others, it’s the prelude to life as a paralegal…

The course itself tends to be a fairly utilitarian affair of guiding students from A to B. But Legal Cheek understands that it can vary quite significantly from law school to law school.

Was the teaching you experienced inspiring or underwhelming? Were the course materials hurriedly cobbled together like a snap election manifesto or as lovingly crafted as a Supreme Court judgment? Were you left at the end of it working as a barista in Pret, or with a magic circle training contract offer in your back pocket?

Help us create a GDL course comparison for the next batch of non-law students seeking a life in the legal profession — by completing the survey below.

It’s short, completely anonymous and open to all GDL students and recent graduates across the country.

If you are reading this on a phone, you can complete the survey here.

The post How good was your GDL? Take the Legal Cheek 60 second survey appeared first on Legal Cheek.

In a bid to cast light on the secret garden of the bar, today Legal Cheek is launching its inaugural survey of the nation’s barristers.

We know you’re extremely busy, so we’ve made it as short (and hopefully amusing) as possible — the survey won’t take longer than 60 seconds. It’s also completely anonymous.

Is the quality of your work more online court than Supreme Court? Are your chambers’ facilities Conran or caveman? Do your colleagues support you or bully you?

Let us know — and help make the bar less impenetrable to students — in the anonymous survey below (or access the survey here if it is not showing in your browser).

Create your own user feedback survey

For all the latest commercial awareness info, and advance notification of Legal Cheek’s careers events, sign up to the Legal Cheek Hub here.

The post The Legal Cheek Barrister Survey 2017 appeared first on Legal Cheek.

On the day the Prime Minister took the plunge and notified the European Union of the United Kingdom’s intention to leave, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought of the news. The answer: not very pleased.

Our poll has revealed 70% of our readers — mostly law students and lawyers — are not happy about Article 50 being triggered. The next most popular answer picked was ‘Unsure’, which totted up 16% of the vote. Only 14% of respondents said they were happy Theresa May had done the deed.

How do you feel about Article 50 being triggered today? #BrexitDay

— Legal Cheek (@legalcheek) March 29, 2017

Assuming that those who clicked ‘Happy’ did so because they want to leave the EU and vice versa, this survey seems to show the demographic of lawyer remainers and leavers has not changed much since the referendum.

During the campaign stages, 75% of legal professionals told us they wanted to stay in the EU. Law students were particularly strong in their allegiance to Europe, with 81% vowing to place their cross next to ‘Remain’ when the polls opened on 23 June. This data showed lawyers tended to be Europhiles, and — given today’s news — the almost 300 days that have passed since the referendum don’t seem to have changed that.

It’s also worth comparing the latest poll with non-profession specific data. A poll by Sky News has thrown up very different results to Legal Cheek’s. It found that only 36% of respondents are “sad” about May’s withdrawal notification. Half said they were happy about the news, and 14% were either neutral or did not know how they felt.

For all the latest commercial awareness info, and advance notification of Legal Cheek’s careers events, sign up to the Legal Cheek Hub here.

The post Poll: 70% of lawyers are unhappy Article 50 has been triggered, compared to 36% of the population appeared first on Legal Cheek.

If a snap election was called tomorrow, most law student undergraduates would vote for Theresa May’s Conservative Party.

This according to a recent survey run by Legal Cheek. In it, we asked our readers where they’d place their ballot paper cross if they had to make the decision by tomorrow. The options given were: the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, UKIP, the Green Party, or another candidate. We also gave survey respondents the opportunity to click ‘Wouldn’t vote’ or ‘Spoilt ballot’.

Overall, it was the Lib Dems which came out on top, pipping the Tories to the post with 30.8% of the vote over May’s 29.82%. Corbyn’s Labour scored 24.37%, the Greens 5.65%, UKIP 1.27% and ‘Other’ 3.31%. Some of our readers (2.63%) opted for ‘Spoilt ballot’ and 2.14% said they wouldn’t vote.

What’s particularly illuminating, however, is seeing who voted for what.

When looking at undergraduate law students (first years to final years) in isolation, for example, it was actually May’s Conservatives that came out on top. They notched up 28.93% of the vote. Just behind was Corbyn’s Labour Party with 26.72%. Trailing in third place with law students — compared to first place among all voters — was Farron’s Lib Dems with 26.45%. Just over 6% of law undergrads went for the Greens, and 1.1% UKIP.

This result is interesting, not least because law students are typically left wing. The Lib Dems have long been a historical favourite among students (until that famous university tuition fee U-turn anyway…), yet their hopes of a second EU referendum don’t seem to have swayed our, overwhelming pro-Remain, law student readership.

However, this Tory stronghold seems to dissipate after graduation. When we looked at our law student postgrads — that’s Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) students, Legal Practice Course (LPC) students, Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC) students and law masters (LLM) students — away from their undergraduate peers, the Lib Dems were the clear winners (35.32%). Corbyn and May were tied on 26.61%.

And it was the Lib Dems which came out on top among practising lawyers too, but only just. Filtering the results of our survey — in which we had over 1,000 respondents — to paralegals, trainees, solicitors, pupils, barristers and ‘other’, Farron and friends snapped up 32.6% of the vote, very closely followed by the Conservatives on 32.12%.

While readers may be surprised to know law students would vote for May over Farron and Corbyn, it’s worth noting our non-law respondents were more Tory than their law-loving peers. GDL-ers and students studying for a non-law undergraduate degrees backed May with 34.62% of the vote. Farron came in second with 28.85%, and Corbyn notched up just 23.08% of the vote.

For all the latest commercial awareness info, and advance notification of Legal Cheek’s careers events, sign up to the Legal Cheek Hub here.

The post Law student undergrads are more Tory than law student postgrads appeared first on Legal Cheek.

If rumours are to be believed, senior Conservative politicians are toying with the idea of calling a snap election on 4 May. Against this backdrop, we want to get a grip on which way our readership is thinking of voting.

Would your vote be spent on current Prime Minister Theresa May? The former Home Secretary and second ever female PM, May’s short stint in power has so far been characterised by a ‘keep schtum’ attitude to Brexit, a hand-holding session with Donald Trump, and, well, that laugh.

Or are you a fan of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party? The underdog of British politics, Corbyn is known — and in some quarters loved — for his humble lifestyle and non-jeery political approach. And then there’s Tim Farron’s Liberal Democrats. A historical favourite among students (until that famous university tuition fee U-turn anyway…), will the Lib Dems and their hopes for a second EU referendum get your vote?

If May, Corbyn and Farron don’t do it for you, there’s Paul Nuttall’s UKIP, Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley’s Green Party and a whole host of smaller parties out there. Whatever your political inclination, take part in Legal Cheek’s election poll below. If you are reading this on a mobile phone, please complete the survey by clicking here.

Create your own user feedback survey

To give you an idea of the way your peers have voted up until this point, it’s worth taking a look at a Legal Cheek poll we ran back in May 2015, the week before the last general election. Then, we discovered that 35.3% of the 750 survey respondents would be placing their crosses by Ed Miliband’s Labour Party.

As for David Cameron’s Conservatives, who as we know came out on top, they ended up winning the hearts of 33.8% of our readers.

For all the latest commercial awareness info, and advance notification of Legal Cheek’s careers events, sign up to the Legal Cheek Hub here.

The post If there was an election tomorrow, who would you vote for? appeared first on Legal Cheek.

Legal Cheek is inviting law students to take a break from revision hell to rate their experiences of the Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL), the Legal Practice Course (LPC) and Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC).

The survey is open to current students of each of these courses.

Anecdotally, the GDL, LPC and BPTC have very mixed reputations — with some students lapping up the postgraduate law training experience and others feeling short-changed. But to date no one has attempted to bring these views together.

The survey below takes two minutes to complete, is completely anonymous and will help us find out which law schools have the happiest — and saddest — students.

Take the survey below, or if you are reading this article on a phone you can take it here.

Create your own user feedback survey

The post Law school satisfaction survey — rate your GDL/LPC/BPTC appeared first on Legal Cheek.

With just three months to go until the referendum on the UK’ s membership of the European Union, the nation is alive with debate about whether we’d be better in or out.

The decision, for many, boils down to whether the UK should be subject to EU law, so solicitors, barristers and law students have a key role to play in the debate.

Already, two competing groups — with remarkably similar names — have been formed: ‘Lawyers for Britain’ and ‘Lawyers In For Britain’. Which one are you more inclined to support?

Take our anonymous Brexit or Bremain poll below:

Create your own user feedback survey

If you are reading this article on a phone, you can take the Legal Cheek Brexit poll here.

The post Brexit or Bremain? Take the Legal Cheek poll appeared first on Legal Cheek.

As the government prepares to criminalise a host of hitherto perfectly respectable products via its controversial Psychoactive Substances Bill — which was yesterday debated in the House of Lords — the awkward relationship between the law and drugs is once again being thrust into the media spotlight.

It is lawyers, of course, who will be responsible for processing the potentially vast numbers of defendants accused of partaking in soon-to-be outlawed “legal highs”.

And as thousands of young people are handed criminal records on the basis of their love affair with cheap air fresheners, expect the mean and nasty legal profession to come under scrutiny.

It’s no secret that some lawyers indulge in drugs from time to time, with reports of their elicit habits occasionally surfacing in the press. Cocaine and marijuana are, for example, said by The Guardian to be “rife” at the criminal bar, while Legal Business magazine has written of “cocaine clubs” in the basement of a leading law firm and a drug-delivery service used by lawyers at all the major London firms.

But to date no publication has ever attempted to delve deeper into these rumours. Our survey below does just that. It takes two minutes to complete and is totally anonymous. Whether you are a law student, a high-flying City partner or a top QC, we’d be grateful for your responses. The results will be published later this week.

Create your own user feedback survey

If you are reading this article on a phone, you can take the anonymous Legal Cheek drugs in the legal profession survey here.

The post Drug use among lawyers and law students: take the anonymous Legal Cheek survey appeared first on Legal Cheek.