Weighing the Cost of Expectations that Students Complete Legal Work Experience

Having completed multiple periods of legal work experience is often regarded as ‘pseudo mandatory’ for an Australian law graduate to be competitive for professional legal positions. This article explores the implications of these expectations, at a systems level, but also individually for past and recent graduates, and current students. It does this through both an exploration of literature, and through an ‘auto-ethnography’ in which the authors’ present their own experiences of seeking legal work experience and graduate legal positions. These data sources shed new light on the costs of expectations that graduates should already have practical legal work on their CVs, which calls into question the broad encouragement of work experience by universities, legal firms, and law societies.