LLB with Placement (Reed Smith)* (Streatham)

Our innovative LLB offers students a unique opportunity to spend a year gaining practical legal experience with top global law firm Reed Smith LLP.  You will develop skills relevant to a future career in law, especially in the field of legal innovation. The programme is a four-year qualifying law degree, with the third year spent on placement at Reed Smith. It will include a a series of four business skills masterclasses for LLB students, focusing on practical, workplace skills. In Year 2 students on the LLB Law with Placement will also be required to take a mandatory Legal Professionalism module which gives general preparation for a year in industry.  Students will spend their third year on placement at Reed Smith, experiencing two different practice areas, as well as gaining experience in business support functions, such as marketing and business development. There is an additional focus on the future of law. Each student will be assigned a supervisor and an informal trainee ‘buddy’ while they are at the firm. Training opportunities will be available throughout the placement, as well as formal and informal appraisals and feedback on performance.

LLB with Professional Legal Placement* (Streatham)
LLB Law with Business with Professional Placement (Cornwall) 
BBL Bachelor of Business and Laws with Professional Placement (Cornwall)

Spending up to a year carrying out a professional placement with a law firm or an in-house legal team as part of your degree programme is an invaluable opportunity. You will develop and deepen your understanding of business and legal practices. The programme is designed to provide a first-hand understanding of a professional working environment through the enhancement of key transferable skills such as working with others, problem solving and communication. This unlocks a world of experience that allows you to develop essential employability and interpersonal skills that relate to your degree and future career. You will take full responsibility for finding and organising your placement (either in the UK or abroad), with preparation, support and approval from the University. This is a great way to demonstrate to employers your adaptability, commercial awareness, independence and resourcefulness.

LLB with Industrial Placement* (Streatham)
LLB Law with Business with Industrial Placement (Cornwall)
BBL Bachelor of Business with Laws with Industrial Placement (Cornwall)

Spending up to a year carrying out a graduate-level work placement as part of your degree programme is an invaluable opportunity. It unlocks a world of experience that allows you to develop essential employability and transferrable skills for your future career. You will take full responsibility for finding and organising your placement in a business setting of your choosing (either in the UK or abroad), with preparation, support and approval from the University. This is a great way to demonstrate to employers your adaptability, commercial awareness, independence and resourcefulness.

If you opt for our placement programmes you’ll get the opportunity to put into practice some of the things you’ve learnt in your first two years. This means that you’ll come back to us for your fourth and final year well-equipped with practical experience in your chosen area of study. What’s more, your placement will give you a proven employment track record and extra confidence when you set out to find your first graduate job.

The placement year is credit-bearing and contributes towards the final degree classification. Information about assessments can be found on the module descriptor.

Whilst undertaking a placement year as part of your degree, you are still classed as a student and are therefore required to pay a reduced student fee. Fees are currently (as of September 2017) 20 per cent of the full fee for UK and International placements and 15 per cent of the full fee for Erasmus Placements.

For first and second year students interested in transferring onto the placement programme, please contact the SSIS careers team at ssis-employability@exeter.ac.uk.

*Not available via UCAS. Students apply in Year 1.

The Law School is committed to delivering a curriculum that blends doctrine with practice and to give its students opportunities to observe or participate in activities involving the application of the law.  It is with this in mind that the Law School created Exeter Law Projects (ELP). ELP has many streams of pro bono opportunities and a general appeal for interest is circulated to students in September of each academic year.

Find out more.

Your future employment is at the heart of the law degrees on the Cornwall campus. The combination of law and business will increase your core understanding of commercial awareness, key business skills and legal knowledge which will prepare you for careers or further study across corporate sectors.  Both the LLB Law with Business and BBL Bachelor in Business and Laws can be taken with a placement year option in either business or law.

All law degree programmes in Cornwall are underpinned in your first year of study by the Legal Foundations course. You will develop your core practical legal skills throughout this course. You will apply your learning in years two and three with activities such as the law clinic and our placement year in law or business. We work closely with our Industry Advisory Group to ensure the skills we train you in reflect current trends and standards.

A dedicated team of employability consultants will support your career decision making, planning and applications by providing careers advice and guidance, career planning and skills workshops.

Types of activities include:

• Visits to Truro combined court and the opportunity to work on the legal helpdesk.
• Visit to local and national law firms.
• Workshop on preparing for the Law fair and full access to employers via a virtual careers fair platform.
• Workshops on how to become a barrister or solicitor, applying for vacation schemes and training contracts.
• One to one support from a Careers Consultant
• Alternative Careers for Law students’ workshops helping you to consider other sectors where you can use your legal skills.
• Speed networking, panel discussions and presentations with alumni and employers.

We enjoy extremely good relations with members of the legal profession both regionally, nationally and internationally. The Career Zone coordinate an annual Law Fair, attended by many leading law firms who specifically target the University’s graduates.

The fair also provides an opportunity for you to find out more about further graduate study in Law, which in the competitive legal world can give you a chance to expand and deepen your legal knowledge and stand out from the crowd.

Law Fairs are the perfect opportunity to meet and network with prospective employers, ask questions and make an impression.  We help students prepare for the fair by hosting a “How to make the most of the Exeter Law Careers fair” workshop.

The Law School is committed to delivering high-quality, tailored careers advice and guidance to help law students make the most of translating the transferrable skills they acquire from the pro bono, extra-curricular and employability opportunities they are involved with. The Law Careers Consultants at Streatham offer individual appointments to Law students to give guidance on application forms, preparing for assessment centres and interviews and to give general careers advice to help with career decision making. First year students benefit from group workshops with the Law Careers Consultants where they learn about law application timelines, how to make the most of visits to or by firms and find out about the variety of things law students can do with their degree.

At Penryn, the Careers Consultant supports students by offering workshops for example Legal CV's, Commercial Awareness, applying for Vacation Schemes/internships and career planning workshops for those considering both law and non-law routes.

To help you navigate through the range of careers in the legal market, we arrange a series of employer visits and presentations. The visits allow you the opportunity to hear about different career paths which can help you with your own career decision making process. From commercial city solicitor to human rights charity officer, the speakers range in seniority and experience to give you the broadest view possible of where your law degree will take you and what you need to do to get there. As well as employer visits and the Law Fair, we offer opportunities to network, attend panel discussions with alumni, law specialism talks and practical “how to” workshops.

Employer workshops and presentations will be embedded within modules and also delivered on an extracurricular basis through the Career Zone team.  Event details can be found here:

Streatham:https://www.exeter.ac.uk/careers/events/whatsonexeter/

Penryn: https://www.exeter.ac.uk/careers/events/whatsonpenryn/

Our excellent links with alumni mean that we can offer second and final year students the opportunity to have a practice interview with a law firm partner or barrister.   

Feedback is given directly after the interview to the student on both their CV and interview techniques.

Our emphasis on helping you to develop your employability skills starts right at the beginning of your law degree. The Create Your Future programme (Developing the knowledge, skills and resources to build the career you want) will build on your Legal Foundations module and expand your understanding of graduate level career options including postgraduate study. You will learn about key topics relevant to the modern workplace including entrepreneurial thinking, sustainability, commercial awareness, Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity and the fourth industrial revolution.

With clearly defined activities to enhance your skills and attributes interwoven in much of the law group work, further workshops organised by the Employability Team provide extra practical support for application writing, interviews, assessment centres, commercial awareness and problem solving skills.