Should Lawyers Do Masters Degrees?

What this episode covers

It comes up quite a lot. Should young lawyers go beyond their Bachelor of Laws and expand into the heady world of a masters degree? Of course, there are (as always) a lot of factors to weigh up. So let’s take a look at this important question, before you go spending a bunch of time and money that might be best spent elsewhere. Related Resources for your Masters Degree Is University Failing Us Things you have to unlearn from law school From Assignment to Advice – Transition from uni to Practice Happy Lawyering! Transcript – Should Lawyers do a Masters Degree? Welcome to the Tips For Lawyers Podcast Episode 52. My name is Chris Hargreaves. I’m from TipsForLawyers.com and I hope you are having a fantabulous day. Last episode in 51 I had a talk about the concept of the hope method, whether it be hope training or hope progression. Today I wanted to drill down a little bit on one subsection of that which is the doing of a master’s degree. Now, I know in some jurisdictions, lawyer’s going to be a post graduate degree. That is not the case in all jurisdictions and many of you will have the opportunity at some point to do a master’s degree. This was really prompted by an article I was reading recently in Lawyer’s Weekly that I’ll link up in the show notes which you can get at TipsForLawyers.com/podcast/52. There you will see what was fairly transparently just an advertising platform for the college of law based here in Australia. They are releasing an applied law master’s degree. I know it’s something a lot of lawyers considered doing and they consider doing it at various stages of their career and they consider doing it for various reasons. Within the context of hope training, I wanted to give you some thoughts on doing something like a master’s degree. I’m not going to comment specifically on the College of Law program but I did want to mention a few things for you consideration if you were in fact contemplating going ahead and doing a master’s degree. The first and most obvious consideration … We’re going to do it chronologically by career. What we’re going to have is people who have only just finished their law degree whether they should do a master’s degree. Really that depends on what you want to do and this issue is going to come up which is what is the reason you are doing the master’s degree? Is it because you haven’t been able to find a job and so in order to continue getting your income from the government or in order to hopefully be doing something rather than sitting on your hands, you’re going to do a master’s degree because it gives you that sense of actually achieving something rather than simply resting on your laurels or in fact, not feeling like you’re doing anything. Perhaps you’ve gone through the round of clock office. Perhaps you’ve applied for a few jobs and you’ve been knocked back into thinking, “Wow. I’m really up against it here. I’m about to be graduated and I actually have nothing to do next year so maybe I should do a master’s degree in that circumstance.” To you firstly, I express some sympathies because it is a tough situation to be in but the reality is that doing a master’s degree is probably not going to change your job prospects that much unless the jobs you are looking for are jobs in an academic area because at the end of the day, a master’s degree is an academic program. Your lack of a master’s degree is not the reason that you haven’t got a job yet. Now, the reason you haven’t got a job might be many and varied but the people who are getting jobs are not people who have master’s degree. Your peers are getting jobs despite the absence of a master’s degree. You really need to ask yourself some tough questions. What is it that I’m not getting a job for? Doing a...

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