Introduction
Judging from my experience and journey to getting a vacation scheme before securing a training contract, I believe commercial awareness is something that can be easily complicated in the mind of an aspiring solicitor. Because there is an understanding of its importance and how law firms emphasise it, it is easy to develop a complex mindset about commercial awareness to the extent that you will fail to develop it in a productive way. In this blog post, I explain what commercial awareness is not and the wrong way of thinking or approaching commercial awareness. One of the things that most candidates stumble on at the assessment centre is the case study and/or group presentation where the recruiter is looking at how you are applying the commercial awareness that you have. I am hoping that after reading this post you will have an idea of what pitfalls to avoid as far as applying commercial awareness in real life is concerned.
The Wrong Mindset
When I first got introduced to the concept of commercial awareness and its importance on my journey to obtaining a vacation scheme, my first impression was that I needed to understand the ins and outs of Brexit as well as its impact on every industry in Britain and abroad. I thought I needed to understand everything about AI technology; GDPR; blockchain and be able to sit in an office with ten law firm partners giving them a lecture on every facet of these topics. I am sure most of us can relate to this and perhaps for some, this has been your mindset prior to coming across this post. However, truth be told, I was wrong for thinking about commercial awareness this way. Why? Well the simple truth is that it did not get me anywhere and neither will it get you any further. Instead of pushing me towards developing a habit of following the news on topics I was genuinely interested in, it led me into binging on the FT and BBC News business section, reading five stories in a role of which if you were to ask me to provide a succinct summarise of each story I had just read, I would barely do it.
Binging on news stories?
For me, binging on the business stories came in two ways. It was either I read five stories today and forget about keeping up with the news before returning maybe after two weeks and do the same. And it’s not like during that four weeks I would be trying to follow up on what I have been reading. No. I would completely forget about commercial awareness and would be caught up in other things. That often led to me feeling guilty about not keeping up with commercial stories and in response what do you think I would do? Well, I would get in the phase of reading as many business stories from as many different sources as I can just to make myself feel better or feel like I am commercially aware. In both of these ways of binging on the business stories, there was one common trend which you may have noticed already and that is I didn’t follow up on what I was reading, something I will call active commercial awareness as opposed to passive commercial awareness. My experience would fall in the passive commercial awareness category. One of the key problems was that I thought of it as commercial expertise as opposed to commercial awareness. It is almost inevitable for an aspiring solicitor like yourself to feel like law firms are expecting you to be an expert in blockchain or be able to explain the ins and outs of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 or to understand all the facets of why Rolls Royce aeroplane engine manufacturing has not been doing well recently. Let’s face it, recruiters know that you are still in Uni or have recently graduated and therefore you cannot be a qualified solicitor yet, let alone a partner who has been in this business for decades. Put it simply, no one is expecting you to be an expert! It is unrealistic and unreasonable if they are. Instead, your task is to be aware of the commercial issues. Think about it, even the experts do not even have the full picture of the outcome of Brexit regardless of the deal which the U.K will choose, hence the uncertainty around its impact on various industries. So why should all the weight be placed on your shoulders?
The wrong mindset is to think that law firm recruiters are expecting to see the work of an expert on your CV/application form or during the assessment. The better and more productive mindset is to understand that recruiters want to see someone who is aware of for instance issues surrounding the loss of trust in the audit market following from the recent collapse of Carillion and be able to relate it to the law firm and its clients who either operate in that market or are directly/indirectly affected by the possible regulation of the auditing market. They want to see someone who is able to read a news story be able to give a succinct summary of that story before forming an opinion on that story and be ready to defend their opinion should they be challenged on it. You will become an expert as you grow as a trainee to a qualified solicitor but for now, focus on developing commercial awareness not commercial expertise.
The Wrong Approach
I have talked about binging on news stories on the previous section. Binging on news stories is simply my way of describing the habit of simply reading as many news stories and leaving it there. However, I think the proper term I will use here is passive commercial awareness. This is when I simply read as many news stories but never take time to follow up what I read to see how the news story has been developing. Passive commercial awareness can take the form of overloading myself frequently with too much information without taking time to regurgitate what I read through following it up on different news sources from the one I read. Or it can take the approach of reading news stories today and go away for a month without following up on what I read, let alone bothering on being aware of what is happening in the news. You see, if you are aiming to build up your commercial awareness by reading the FT from front page to the finish or every news story on the BBC Business section, then you are only going to end up frustrated and overwhelmed because overall, the approach is not productive, and it will clash with other commitments you have. Being commercially aware is not necessarily about reading every story in The Economist or on Bloomberg or be able to interpret all those funny-looking numbers on the FTSE.
So, what is the more productive way of approaching the developing of my commercial awareness?
This is where active commercial awareness comes into play. Instead of binging on the news stories, I take time to think about industries or practise areas I am interested in and law firms which operate in them. Industries can include energy; insurance; banking & finance; aviation, and shipping. On the other hand, practise areas can include mergers & acquisitions; insurance; litigation, and arbitration. That leads me to be intentional about the kind of stories I am looking for when I am building my commercial awareness. Additionally, that allows me to also be intentional about how I apply my commercial awareness. So, for instance, if I am interested in a law firm such as Slaughter and May which specialise in M&A, I will be asking myself, how might a no-deal Brexit affect M&A activity throughout 2019 across Europe. This will help me to form an informed opinion on how Slaughter and May’s clients might be affected by that. Or if I am interested in energy and one of the firms I am thinking of is Vinson & Elkins, I will be able to put my commercial awareness in context by looking at how the race for renewable energy and campaigns to curb greenhouse gas emissions will affect this firm’s clients. These are just few examples of how active commercial awareness can help you move from feeling stuck to approaching it in a more productive way.
The Wrong Application
There is a fine line between this section and the previous one and so I will be very brief here. One of the things I have witnessed with aspiring solicitors who are hoping to bag a vac scheme and a training contract in the process is the struggle to link what they already know with the firm they are looking at. This is where knowing the law firm’s unique identity and way of operating helps to keep you from generalising your ideas. If your commercial awareness is not correctly applied, that can easily be the difference between you securing a vacation scheme or failing to do so. For example, Boeing is going through hard time at the moment and you can imagine that a number of city firms have this company as their client. The wrong application of commercial awareness in this case would be to generalise the impact of Boeing’s woes on the aviation market. Instead, what will help you during an assessment centre is to know how the law firm is connected to Boeing. So, do they serve this company in aviation from a litigation point of view or transactional side? Or does the firm serve a client which supplies engines to Boeing or some sort aeroplane parts to this company? In other words, your application of commercial awareness has to be tailored to the firm you are looking at. Just because HFW and Clyde & Co have a strong presence in the aviation industry does not necessarily mean trends within the aviation/aerospace industry will impact them exactly the same way, and the reason being the way both firms operate and the type of clients they serve within that industry.
Conclusion
Obviously, the worst mindset on commercial awareness is to conclude that you do not need it and therefore will not bother putting the effort to develop it. This of course, is guaranteed to add no value to your pursuit of a vacation scheme or/and training contract. If you were reading this post, I am assuming that you have actually been putting some effort into develop commercial awareness but have are often found yourself in the cycle of frustration and feeling like you are not doing enough. I hope the three key aspects about commercial awareness which were highlighted in this post have provided an insight into things may have been hindering your progress and how you can overcome the barriers in how you both build and apply it.