Q3: OLPAS strategies
Can you recommend a strategy for picking the 12 OLPAS sets you apply to?
posted by tor at 4:04 PM
Sunday, November 27, 2005
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posted by tor at 4:04 PM
1 Comments:
It's definitely important to be realistic. If the five most recent tenants they've taken on have published books in specialist areas of law or worked for five years running a legal advice organisation in a developing country, you'll have an idea of the kind of competition you face!
The strategy I adopted was to apply to about 6 top sets and about 6 less high-flying sets. It was rather hard to discern any logic in the responses. I was rejected outright by about 6 of them (not all the top sets) and interviwed by the rest.
People often say that if you've got a good CV, lower chambers will reject you because they think you're not really interested in them. I'm not sure if that's true and I certainly wouldn't apply just to top sets on the offchance that it is!
I found that in fact, the places who interviewed me were, in general, the chambers whose work most closely fitted what I wanted to do, and what my CV suggested I would be interested in. This sounds blindingly obvious, but I think it's worth saying. I said on my form that I wanted to do public law and clinical negligence. But some of the sets I applied to didn't do any clinical negligence - because clinical negligence was my second preference. Those sets were less likely to interview me, even though I'd said in my application to them that clinical negligence wasn't my main interest.
This makes it tricky if you really don't have a specific interest worked out. I guess the solution is to write a more convincing 250 words on why despite your range of chosen areas, you really are interested in what that set in particular does.
Another example: I applied to 2 sets which did public law, but particularly specialised in employment. What I really wanted to do was public law, and although I was interested in employment law, I didn't have anything specific on my CV that backed this up. I got rejected by one of the sets without an interview, and got an interview at the other. The difference between them was that I'd done a mini-pupillage at the one that interviewed me.
So, this harks back to my response to the mini-pupillage question. Each chambers might get as many as 400 applicants. If you can't show that you have a clear interest in their specialist area, you are going to find it tough competing with people who can. One way to demonstrate that interest, particularly if you've come straight from university and haven't had a chance to prove your interest, is to impress them on a mini-pupillage.
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