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Commerical Awareness

If you are pursuing a career in commercial law, you will most certainly be faced with the challenge of demonstrating 'commercial awareness.' It is a major component of the selection process for both commercial barristers and solicitors. However, many students struggle with identifying what commercial awareness is and how they can develop and demonstrate it to potential employers.

The definition most often used is by Christopher Stoakes in his excellent book 'All You Need to Know About Commercial Awareness' (a copy of which is held by QM Careers):

"At heart, commercial awareness is about being able to talk to clients, finding out what they want, why they want it, what they will do with it and what they are prepared to pay, and then delivering it in the way they want.

To do that you need to understand how organisations work, the issues they face and the role of people within them."

Developing legal commercial awareness requires first being aware of what is going on in the world around you. Secondly, you need to know what effect that is having on businesses and the legal profession. Commercial awareness is described in more detail on the Herbert Smith web site.

Although honing commercial awareness often takes many years, you can get a good start by staying on top of current awareness and issues affecting the legal industry. Read a business newspaper regularly, or sign up to get current articles automatically by RSS feeds at the following sites: