Originally Posted by Unregistered

Legal academia rarely holds bearing to legal practice. It’s just a bench mark because how else would the market evaluate a student? Unless you have a whole host of prior work experience, your grades are all they have going on about you. So obviously it’s good to have but not a deal breaker for most teams in big firms. Some teams do only take in firsts but if you’re struggling to get a first I doubt those teams are your goals anyways.

I mean HR and the recruitment partners aren’t blind? They can see if your 2nd upper is close to a first which will obviously hold a different light compared to someone that barely scraped a 2nd upper.

I’m sure you already know this but the main reason why there is a shred of comparison to legal academia is because disputes deals with the law a lot more than corp work. Some of my friends in corp has a **** understanding of most areas of the law and I am from time to time surprised they’ve gotten a first. They are often just naturally bright people.

From what I’ve seen, unless you do a lot of appeals-esq work your grasp of the law is often only relevant to how the facts can be twisted in that direction, and not so much the intricacies of the principles. No one is going to honestly care about your cutting edge legal paper that scored a 80%, but just as a gauge as to how well you can tolerate the rigour of the industry, your ability to comprehend difficult concepts in what is hopefully a short amount of time and finding relatively creative ways to frame arguments (and this involves fact finding which has nothing to do with the law) within the remits of the law.