Careers and employability

This award winning service located in Mile End organises events featuring representatives from top UK and international law firms. These events help you understand the legal job market and help you choose the most appropriate career route for you after graduation. You will also be able to take advantage of a wide range of other careers events, workshops and services to gain more information about law and non-law careers and receive advice on job hunting and applications.

For more information about these events and services, visit Queen Mary Careers and Enterprise.

In addition to the numerous career services provided to all Queen Mary students, the Queen Mary Careers & Enterprise Centre organises an extensive range of career activities exclusively for LLM and MSc students. This includes:

• Exclusive events with law firms, leading industry professionals and our alumni
• One-to-one careers sessions with specialist legal careers consultants
  Workshops on CV writing, interview skills and job searching techniques (including usage of social media)
• Awareness of the requirements and recruitment processes of international law firms and gaining entry to training contracts
• Career option events for those considering a career outside law such as policy, compliance, legal technology and more.

The School of Law mentoring programme complements the professional growth of our LLM students by pairing you with Postgraduate Law Mentors to enhance your knowledge of the legal world, gain a greater understanding of opportunities in the field of law and to hone their executive skills.

During the 2023-24 academic year, we successfully paired over 150 student mentees with legal practitioner mentors.

Our Postgraduate Law Mentors possess diverse legal backgrounds and are based both in the UK and overseas. They bring a wealth of experience as solicitors, barristers, legal consultants, and industry executives, and many are alumni of Queen Mary. 

We administer two programmes within the academic year, tailoring to both legal and non-legal career aspirations.

A mentoring journey

Sofía learned about the International Institute of Communications (IIC) through Emanuele Vadilonga, Director of Regulatory Affairs Europe, BT Global Services, who mentored her as part of the CCLS Postgraduate Law Mentoring Programme in 2019. The IIC is an independent, global organisation that brings together senior policymakers from across the emerging digital ecosystem to explore and discuss the opportunities and challenges that the new environments bring.

Emanuele encouraged Sofia to participate in the annual Future Leaders’ competition in 2020. She won with her paper “The Gossip Algorithm: Human Intervention in the Context of AI and Privacy.” Winning the competition has opened several professional doors for Sofia as she tells the audience in her podcast conversation about how it has impacted her professional life and personal development. — Mentee Sofia Mancilla, Technology, Media, and Telecommunications Law LLM, 2019.

Student testimonials

All my sessions have been incredibly productive. My mentor’s appreciation of my work and her passion for law humbles me. Thank you for matching me with the best mentor I could have. — Aishwarya Bhonsale, Laws LLM 2021

We met for lunch and that experience was much better than having virtual mentoring meetings. Our mentor is humble, and kind. They helped us gain insights into the legal sector of the UK as well as India. Having such an experienced mentor helped us gain knowledge and information about how to progress ahead and more importantly, after having such insightful meetings, I feel confident to enter the cycle of applications and making my way through it. — Urvi Gulechha, Comparative and International Dispute Resolution LLM 2021

Taking part in the mentoring programme has enabled me to reinvent myself at the postgraduate level and to achieve everything I strived for. Not only have I gained a long-lasting professional connection. I have also received very useful tips on how to navigate my career and maintain a healthy balance for both my personal and professional development. — Mentee Sharon Odeny, Commercial and Corporate Law LLM 2020

My mentor introduced me to the inner temple, the exclusive dining place and library for barristers. It was a fantastic experience! Furthermore, we shared topics related to my future career and he supported me in applying for an internship. — Mentee Yunjoo Park, Banking and Finance Law LLM 2020

Part-time work experience

• Energy Law Institute at CCLS
• Human Rights Law Centre at CCLS
• Privacy Culture Ltd.

Full-time work

• Preiskel & Co. LLP 
• Privacy Culture Ltd. 
• INSOL International/ World Bank Group 
• United Nations (UNCTAD), Geneva
• Ashurst 
• Clifford Chance
• Freshfields LLP 

Essay Competition for Summer Internships 

Preiskel & Co LLP, situated in the heart of London, specialises in both UK and international corporate and commercial law, as well as handling specialist litigation and regulatory matters.

Annually, CCLS presents the Preiskel & Co Essay Competition, offering participants the opportunity to intern at this esteemed law firm. Students are tasked with adopting a practical, commercial perspective on a given topic, analysing how the law applies to technology and a particular scenario. This exercise proves valuable for budding technology start-ups and covers pertinent issues faced by technology companies.

The competition is open to all LLM students, students in the Distance Learning Programme, and PhD students.

Entrepreneurship Law Clinic is a unique opportunity to learn and reflect on the legal issues that face entrepreneurs. In this module you will have the opportunity to:

• develop a number of professional skills and your professional identity;
• understand the practical legal issues that are faced by entrepreneurs and how to respond to those issues;
• interview and draft advice for a client;
• develop and practice public speaking and presentation skills;
• work within a team and network closely with legal experts and entrepreneurship specialists in London's Tech City.

The module will be taught by leading practitioners in legal engineering and design, combining both academic and hands-on practical experience using some of the latest legal tech. This module will examine the theory and application of technology to legal practice and procedures. It will consider how machine learning and AI has been, and could be, deployed within the legal sector to provide substantive legal advice, procedural risk analysis, the provision of legal services and contract and practice management. The interaction of technology and legal design will be examined, as well as the practical, legal and ethical issues that legal tech raise.

This module will examine the theory and practice of public affairs advocacy. Public affairs advocacy concerns how organisations try to influence the development of public policy and its resultant implementation through laws, regulations and related measures. Such advocacy may occur at a national, regional or international level, and is an increasingly important area of practice for lawyers. With technological disintermediation culling many functions of traditional legal services, a premium is placed on the very human skills of political advocacy – the ability of legal counsel to help their clients and organisations navigate the external world to influence and effect positive changes.

This module examines the basic principles and techniques of advocacy for lawyers engaged in commercial disputes. The focus is on England and Wales, but much of the material the module covers applies to advocacy in other jurisdictions.

The module combines theory and practice. The theory derives mostly from classical rhetoric, the name given to the systems for teaching oratory developed by the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Much of classical rhetoric remains relevant to modern advocacy. The practical parts of the module cover some of the key skills of commercial advocates in this jurisdiction, including case analysis, written and oral submissions, and cross-examination. Many of the module materials either come from real commercial cases or were written by commercial lawyers.

The convenor of this module practised as a commercial barrister in London for over 20 years.

The Public Legal Education for Start-Ups module gives students hands on experience preparing commercially aware, engaging and accessible legal education videos and other resources for UK start-ups and entrepreneurs. Module students will be trained and supervised in the preparation and delivery of legal education resources covering UK commercial, corporate, intellectual property, data privacy and employment law. Students learn through inter-active class discussions and exercises during the classes and are supervised in their legal education work by qLegal staff and UK practicing solicitors.

In this practical module, students will work in teams to solve a problem for a real client using a Legal Design approach. Legal Design is a creative problem-solving framework used by lawyers and legal innovators to help them adapt for the future of legal practice. Students will learn the theory and practice of Legal Design and apply their legal knowledge to develop and deliver a prototype solution to the client. Students will engage with the client and external lawyers in addition to the teaching team.

In this practical module, students will undertake a 4-week part-time internship in a law firm or other organisation with a legal function, organised through CCLS. The placement is in addition to interactive classes on theoretical and practical aspects of lawyering delivered by the CCLS teaching team. Students will have the opportunity to develop legal and business skills, demonstrate professionalism, and reflect on their own professional development while expanding their network in the UK.

The International Tax Law LLM qualifies students to sit the exams for the CTA Direct Tax route. In addition, four modules on the International Tax Law LLM - International Tax Law, EU Tax Law, US International Taxation and Transfer Pricing - can be used to prepare for Advanced Diploma in International Taxation (ADIT) exam papers, and a dissertation on a tax topic can be submitted instead of the second or third ADIT paper.

If you are seeking a career in patents and trademarks, we offer several courses that provide exemption from the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys (CIPA) or Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys (ITMA).

• Certificate in Intellectual Property Law
• Certificate in Trade Mark Law and Practice
• MSc Management of Intellectual Property