As foreshadowed in the last Newsletter, as well as our regular career and law firm events, in the first part of this year we also hosted a new in-house counsel and compliance seminar, which proved extremely popular and lively, as participating alumna Rita MAN will attest! There were also sessions on the Hong Kong Bar, the New York Bar and a combined Law Society and “small firm” seminar, all of which were equally well attended. Career “surgeries” for those needing help were again popular.
The first half of this year also saw a revamp of the Virtual Careers Resource Centre, taking account of student feedback. We do understand the importance of providing accurate and up-to-date career-related information for our students and our team are tasked with constant monitoring of the links and other on-line resources as well as fact-checking, with a particular focus on keeping our Legal Careers Directory fully up-to-date through regular polling of law firms for practice, recruitment and contact data. As a result, another innovation this year was our ability to use that contact list to seek out last minute training contract and pupillage opportunities – which bore fruit with a number of interviews being offered to last-minute job-seekers. For the statisticians among you, over the 3 years since the launch of the Faculty of Law Careers Office, based upon responses we have received from graduating students I estimate that annually on average around 80% of our students have joined law firms, around 10% have joined the Hong Kong Bar with the remainder going to a variety of other employers, including the DOJ as well as some into non-legal roles such as regulatory compliance.
The market for legal jobs in Hong Kong nevertheless continues to be a tough one, the international firms requiring not just a good GPA, but generally also first-rate English and Mandarin language skills. For those joining the Faculty, a strong emphasis has been placed upon the importance of taking on roles outside the academic sphere in order to boost evidence of the behavioural skills that many law firms now seek to evaluate and also of trying to get some experience outside Hong Kong, for example by exchange visits in order to boost the CV. As a means of better equipping those attending internship interviews the trawl for the content of our “Legal News” newsletter (a weekly digest reporting on events in the world of legal business) was extended this year to more than a dozen publications.
On the professionalism front, it is important for students to understand that the standards expected by recruiters within law firms and chambers diverge markedly from those which have seemingly become the norm in the “post-truth” environment of fake news, presidential tweets and the alphabet soup of social media acronyms, abbreviations, and neologisms that we all now like-it-or-not inhabit. Also the adverse consequences for those, particularly for New World returnees, speaking in tones peppered with upward inflection and “I’m like” – a habit about which Skadden Arps HR supremo, Mary SCHAUS went to some lengths to complain about in one of our recent seminars.
Finally, the last 6 months has seen continued an increased take-up of e-mentoring with 70 alumni now signed up. A reminder that the e-mentoring platform serves as a means of introduction with the object of trying to match the career ambitions of the students as closely as possible with the practice and experience of our alumni. The mentoring relationship is then intended to help students to understand the legal market, to best deploy their talents towards their future career and in appreciating what “professionalism” entails. You are encouraged, once again, to continue to sign up for the programme by logging in to the platform at alumni.law.cuhk.edu.hk with alumni ID and password. To those who have already done so, a heartfelt “thank you” from all of us here for offering up your time for the benefit of our students.
Paul MITCHARD
Careers Director