Any solicitors out there... tell me about your life!

[Persephone1]

I loved being an internal at UNE, best fun ever, great course, great teachers. I can't comment on the external experience except that so much of the learning is online and audio anyway.

I think it's the same Aus-wide, but in Victoria at least: a solicitor works in an Office, takes in clients, gives advice, prepares documents for court hearings, etc. A barrister is self-employed and accepts "briefs" from solicitors, to do the court appearances and represent clients in court. A solicitor does the grunt work behind the scenes, the barrister does the hard yards in court advocacy.

Many solicitors do a lot of court appearances as well, and a lot of my work involves working as a Duty Solicitor at court. Barristers rely on solicitors to brief them in order to earn a living, but they get to do some really interesting advocacy work whilst the solicitors have prepared all the documents.

In many cases, law grads start as solicitors and perhaps later do the Bar Readers Course, and become barristers, which means many barristers used to be solicitors. The two options allow you to choose the lifestyle and areas you enjoy the most - the office legal work, or the court advocacy work.

[misty]

Hi Everyone.

Not a lawyer, but this make my 10th year at uni studying it.

I am finding this thread very interesting. I originally studied fulltime internally at UNE (armidale), but for the last 5 years have been studying part-time externally (had kids and moved to canberra). I am still undecided as to whether I will actually do my PLT and enter the legal field when I graduate next year, or go back and get my dip Ed and teach Legal studies and commerce (my other degree) at high school.

I have studied such a broad range of subjects: ciminal law, family law, taxation law, I am doing banking and finance law this semester along with medico-legal issues. I find it all extremely interesting to study - just not sure how suited I am to an office job.