Is Commercial Awareness Important for My LLM?

Commercial awareness is a buzzword for law students, and it stretches out to LLM students too. If you’re planning on entering the legal sector in any capacity then it’s really important to have an excellent knowledge of what’s going on in the legal and business worlds and what the impact of global occurrences have on clients.

Modern solicitors are not just legal experts – they’re business experts too. They have to be flexible in their approach to practice and must be able to apply their commercial awareness to their strategy for each case.

An LLM degree certainly leans towards the academic end of the scale. It’s likely that you will spend a lot of time engaging with primary and secondary research sources and analysis of legislation. But that doesn’t mean to say that there is no need to keep up to date with legal and industry developments!

It is always an advantage to be able to apply what you learn in an academic context to the outside world during and after your studies. By keeping up to date with business and global news via sources such as the national press (including the Financial Times for a strictly business/economy focus) and broadcast news, you will be able to pick up on topical situations that apply to your Master of Laws studies.

It could provide you with more inspiration for unique and up-to-the-minute research or essay topics, and will help you to ensure you are as up to speed as you can be with developments in your specialist area of law.

Commercial awareness will be crucial for your life post-LLM too in whatever career you choose to follow, whether it be in law, academia, or business. If you get into good habits of nurturing your commercial awareness throughout your LLM studies, it will serve you well when you graduate and set out on the next stage.