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Giulia Mazzu is a 2019 graduate from King’s College London with the kind of extracurricular hyperactivity to make your average office worker wince. In May last year she was given the LawWorks and Attorney General student pro bono award for best contribution by an individual student. Alongside her law degree at the Dickson Poon School of Law, she volunteered at an asylum and refugee charity, assisted on cases at two law clinics (specialising in criminal appeals, and immigration and human rights), and interned as legal research fellow at an international child labour and trafficking foundation.
Mazzu, it would appear, is on the right track. The way Craig Anderson, manager at the Stirling District Citizens Advice Bureau, sees it, if you’re an apprentice plumber, the first day you see a broken pipe shouldn’t be your first day on the job. So too with apprentice lawyers. When you go for the traineeship at the big firm with the 2:1 LLB, he says, you can count on them immediately asking: What else have you got? What real-world skills and experience have you accrued?
In our heightened times, there is no shortage of causes to join. The difficulty, of course, is that as a student, you’re not yet qualified. You can do admin at organisations like the nationwide Access to Justice Foundation, which gives out funding to charities offering free legal advice and is currently recruiting (though mostly only postgrads can afford the one day a week required). And the Free Representation Unit (FRU) in London uniquely trains up students (again, mostly postgrads) to represent clients in social security and employment tribunals. In the wider voluntary sector, though, they are the outliers. Most charities, NGOs and pro-bono set-ups simply can’t afford the investment.
The good news is that law schools across the country are on the case. While there’s nothing stopping students from pitching up at the local CAB, says Lawworks’ director for policy and external affairs, James Sandbach, the best place to start is your school’s own office. In fact, the details are probably already in your inbox. Liverpool Law Clinic’s Lucy Yeatman says you’d be surprised at how often students are unaware of what’s going on right under their noses. So check the freshers’ weeks stands, the volunteering fair, the school’s website, read your emails and sign up.
Many universities offer volunteering modules for which you can earn course credits, if not compulsory modules everyone has to take. Anderson was instrumental in setting up the country’s only class which trains students to be accredited CAB advisers. He says the trainees from Stirling University really appreciate the coalface view of everything that is going wrong in society – family breakdown, personal debt, benefits cuts, employment loss. The King’s College London law clinic, meanwhile, also offers a module, but Mazzu opted to up her time-management game, and volunteer instead on the days she didn’t have lectures. She thought she’d learn more working on the longer-term asylum projects than the quick turnaround cases the module covered – and she did. The law as defined by her statute-based coursework she found dry and boring. Hearing that a single mum with two British-born kids whose complex case she’d worked on for months had been granted leave to remain, however, was a moment she won’t forget.
For prospective students, what is on offer – how many students can realistically take part; what the specialism is – can be a reason to choose one school over another. The only place FRU operates outside of London is within Nottingham Law School. Cardiff, Manchester and Greenwich each head up big miscarriage of justice projects, while Liverpool is the national specialist for statelessness. About 300 students work in some capacity at Yeatman’s clinic each year. She says they might sometimes just be answering the phone, but no task is without value, even if your end game is a big corporate law firm: you’re learning to speak to people (like you would clients) or organise facts for filling in forms (like you might draft a contract or file an application to court). Mostly, you’re figuring out which bit of the law piques your interest.
Mazzu has just been offered a job she says she wouldn’t have got without her pro bono experience. She also says that being in a proper work environment has been a massive step up: her knowledge has skyrocketed, commensurate to her newfound range of responsibilities. “It’s like jumping in the deep end,” she says. Imagine if she hadn’t learnt to swim, so to speak, by racking up all those extracurricular hours?
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