Practice area · 4 editions

Practice & Skills

The part of the job no seat teaches on purpose: how you draft, how you negotiate, how you are known, how you sound, how you grow and how you sell your work — in any practice area.

Every seat hands you its documents. Few teach you to draft one from a term sheet, and none teaches the rest of the job: what people say about you after you leave the room, whether your page still says Trainee, who will read your CV and what they know about law firms, how plain your emails are, which messages you send to the people who qualified with you, and what you ask for at an appraisal. A junior learns these by accident, if at all.

The workbooks here are about the craft around the law, not the law of any one seat. One, for a reader new to English law, follows one dispute a London firm answers for a client abroad, from the client's email to the advice letter. Another follows a single contract a trainee drafts for a bakery, from the partner's term sheet to signing. A third follows the same bakery three years later, as it renews that contract with the garage. The fourth, on the personal brand, teaches it on purpose, in the house way: one fictional lawyer followed through one year, every document written out in full and read line by line, and a short test after each chapter. Nothing in it depends on a practice area; a trainee in disputes, property or private client reads the same year as one in corporate.

The titles still being written for this shelf take the same craft further: legal design and staying well in a demanding job.