A bar candidate imagining practice imagines advocacy: a courtroom, a judge, an argument. The first two years of practice are mostly something else — and knowing what the something else is can make the review year more purposeful.
The work, honestly
A junior associate's week, in rough proportions:
- Reading. Files, contracts, decisions, transcripts. More than anyone expects, and slower than anyone expects.
- Writing. Drafts, memos, letters, and a great deal of revising other people's drafts. The first version is almost never the one that leaves the office.
- Deadline arithmetic. Periods, calendars, follow-ups. A surprising share of the value a junior adds is that nothing is missed.
- Waiting. For a signature, a response, a court, a client. Much of the work is not doing but monitoring.
- Appearing, eventually, and usually in something smaller than a trial.
The four are in that order because that is the order of volume.
What this implies for a review year
Three implications, and they are practical.
Writing is the skill to practise. The examination marks it, and so does the job. The four-part answer — conclusion, rule, application, consequence — is the same skeleton as a memo section, as described in writing a memo versus writing an answer.
Procedural precision is not a dead subject. The junior who knows which court, which remedy and which period is useful from the first week. The candidate who treated Remedial Law as an obstacle to memorise will be re-learning it under supervision, which is slower.
Verification is reputation. A junior who cites only what they have read becomes trusted quickly. One who passes on an unverified citation costs the supervising lawyer a correction they will remember. The habit is described in checking whether a case is still good, and it is cheap to build in a review year.
The things practice asks that the bar does not
- Instructions from a client who is upset. No examination tests how you handle a person in trouble.
- Judgement about what not to say. The bar rewards completeness; practice sometimes rewards restraint.
- Working with other people's drafts, at speed. The closest examination analogue is editing your own twelve-minute answer without rewriting it.
- Clients' facts, which are usually messier than a bar problem and frequently incomplete.
- Specialisation. Careers narrow; the bar is the last time you will be required to hold eight subjects at once.
What to do with this during review
Not much, deliberately. A review year is not the time to prepare for practice; that will happen on the job at a rate of about a year per year. But three small things are worth knowing:
- Your speed at a twelve-minute answer is a proxy for your speed at a same-day draft. Practise the format and you are also practising the junior's core skill.
- Your citation discipline is a professional habit, not an examination one. Build it now; it does not have an expiry date.
- Procedural knowledge is durable and immediately useful, which is why Remedial Law is worth the hours it takes — beyond its 25% weight.
The honest counterweight
There is a version of this article that says "everything you learn should be useful in practice", and that version is wrong. Most of what the bar examines is law you may never use again, and that is fine: the examination is testing whether you can hold and apply a large body of rules, which is the general competence behind any specialisation you choose later.
So: practise writing and verification because they transfer, and study the syllabus because the examination demands it. Do not study for a job you do not yet have.
A note on the first year
The first year is frequently discouraging: the work is small, the feedback is intermittent, and the responsibility is real while the authority is not. That is normal, it is short, and the lawyers who become useful are usually the ones who treated the small work well.
Which is, in miniature, the argument the review year makes: the marks are in the twelve-minute answers, not the heroic ones.
For what comes before this, see clerkship and apprenticeship; for choosing what to practise, choosing a practice area.