Dispatches from London: How I Googled My Way to Being an English Lawyer in London

Me and Law School Friend Winter 2006

I was a college graduate working a low-level but upwardly mobile assistant position (can you say Devil wears Prada?) at a major corporation in Boston and was in the midst of a bitterly cold winter in 2005. I spent a lot of time on the computer between tasks Googling a way to be anywhere but where I was. As I had a English boyfriend that I spent most of my days desperately missing in that way that you can only miss a love on another continent. He wanted to move to America so I Googled “English citizens moving to America” extensively and realised that it was a dead end with his lack of qualifications, money and martial status.

Next, I tried to figure out how I could go to England. I set up a few informational job interviews for that February. My main grasp of the interviews was that the job market was going to be more difficult than I expected as I would need to be on a “graduate scheme” for most careers starting in September and the applications were already in. Also, no one was willing to give me, as a recent grad, a work permit. I looked into the possibility of a fiancée visa and, gulp, a UK marriage visa.

My boyfriend didn’t have the haphazard approach to marriage that I had in my early 20s (think: “if Britney can do it, why can’t I?”). On our next holiday, he proposed and we were then engaged to have a normal engagement and wedding rather than a rushed one to bring us to the same continent. As one cannot work on a fiancée visa, this left me with only one choice for entering the UK without a wedding band and having something to do with my days: back to school.

Returning from the trip in February, I resumed my post Googling my way to a future abroad. After eyeing the cost of graduate degrees ranging from $20k-$60k for a year I was becoming increasing disheartened. Then, like every other good political science graduate in America I thought, “what about law school?”

Now this seemed remarkably easy: if you already have an undergraduate degree it only takes 2 years to become a lawyer (split into two types—solicitors and barristers) in England and Wales. The application cost was £5 and I happened to have a five pound note left over from February so I attached it to the simple one page application, added an international stamp and poof! I’d applied to three law schools in London in the course of an afternoon. Do not pass Go. Do not take the LSATs.

Further research showed me that while law school was easy to get into if you already had a degree, the tricky part was getting someone else to pay for it and that’s where something called a Training Contract (solicitors) or Pupillage (barristers) came in. If I were to get one of those, not only would the firm or chambers granting them pay my way and give me a small stipend, they’d employ me for two years when I finished school. Sign me up, I said!

In March I heard that I had been accepted into law school and in April I heard back from several firms granting me interviews. I lined up in the interviews for a week in May and flew over for a stressful few days. Two weeks later I received an email from my current employer telling me that they were offering me a contract and I accepted.

Four years down the line it’s strange to think of sitting all those miles away dreaming of working in London and that it’s actually what I’m doing now. Certainly things haven’t gone the way I’d planned then –the least of which being that the English fiancé never materialised into a husband. I’m very happy with my London life and having found a career and law firm that I love from Googling my way through that long Boston winter