How to Complete the Work Experience Section of a Law Firm Application

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The work experience section of a law firm application gives recruiters a picture of what you have done before you apply and what it has taught you. Most candidates either underestimate what they have (and leave strong experiences off) or overestimate the section's weight relative to the written application questions (and spend disproportionate time on it). Getting this section right means being honest about both of those tendencies before you start writing.

This guide walks through the three things you need to do: choosing the right experiences, presenting them well, and deciding whether to tailor the section for each firm.

Step 1: Choosing the right experiences

The first task is to separate everything you have done into legal and non-legal categories. This is not about ranking one above the other. It is about making sure you end up with a balanced selection that demonstrates both technical engagement with the profession and the transferable skills that commercial legal work requires.

What counts as legal experience

Legal experience is not limited to vacation schemes at City firms. It is any experience that gave you genuine exposure to legal work or legal thinking. Shadowing a solicitor at a local high street firm, handling client matters at a university law clinic, attending a mini-pupillage, shadowing a judge during sixth form, or completing a structured insight programme at a commercial firm all count. The common thread is that you learned something about what legal practice actually involves, not just what it looks like from the outside.

Open days and insight evenings count too, but with an important qualification. If you have attended several, group them under a single heading rather than listing each one individually. Pick three or four of the most relevant and be specific about what each one taught you. "Attended an insight evening at Kirkland and Ellis, which deepened my understanding of how leveraged buyout structures are negotiated and the role of the finance team in managing covenant packages" is worth including. "Attended open day" is not.

The value of legal experience in an application is that it signals genuine engagement with the profession and gives you a technical grounding to draw on. Recruiters want to see that your interest in commercial law is based on something real rather than on the profession's reputation.

What counts as non-legal experience

The net here is wider than most candidates assume. Working in retail, hospitality, tutoring, receptionist roles, coaching, volunteering, administrative positions, and virtually any other kind of employment or structured activity all count, provided they taught you something that transfers to commercial legal practice.

The transferable skills that matter most in commercial law are communication (particularly adapting to different audiences), organisation and time management, resilience under pressure, teamwork, leadership and initiative, attention to detail, and client or customer-facing judgment. Most roles, if you think carefully about them, contain genuine evidence of at least some of these.

The practical test is: can you identify a specific moment or aspect of this experience that taught you something relevant to being an effective trainee? Working the tills at a supermarket over Christmas while managing coursework deadlines demonstrates time management and resilience in a way that a more prestigious but passive experience might not. Tutoring younger students demonstrates organisation, communication, and the ability to explain complex ideas clearly, which is a direct parallel to how lawyers explain legal positions to clients. Do not discount experiences just because they sound ordinary.

The experiences worth omitting are those where, after genuine reflection, you cannot identify any transferable skill beyond basic reliability. A warehouse role where you stacked shelves independently for several months without any meaningful interaction, responsibility, or challenge is harder to extract value from. Even then, think hard before discarding it: did you manage competing tasks under time pressure? Did you train anyone? Did you identify and fix a problem? If the answer to all of these is no, leave it out. If there is something there, it is probably worth including.

How many to include

Four or five experiences is the right number. Not three, which risks looking thin, and not eight or ten, which is the brute force approach that actually harms rather than helps applications.

The practical reason for this is that graduate recruiters are reading your written application questions alongside your work experience section, and their time and attention is finite. A work experience section with ten entries means either ten very short entries that say nothing meaningful, or a section so long relative to the rest of the application that it distorts the balance. Four well-chosen experiences, each described with enough depth to be genuinely informative, will outperform a longer list every time.

The other reason is that a longer list almost inevitably includes experiences that overlap in what they demonstrate. If three of your entries are all evidence of communication skills in client-facing roles, you are using multiple entries to make the same point. Four diverse experiences, each demonstrating something distinct, give the recruiter a richer picture of who you are.

Step 2: Presenting your experiences well

Bullet points or prose

Both are permitted in almost all applications and the choice is yours unless the word limit or the application format suggests otherwise. If you have been given fifty or a hundred words per entry, bullet points may be the only practical option. If you have two hundred and fifty to three hundred words, prose is almost always better.

Prose communicates ideas more fluently, connects with the reader more directly, and allows you to show how you think about your experiences rather than just listing what they contained. If firms wanted bullet points in this section, they could have asked for a CV. The fact that they give you a word limit and ask you to write about your experiences signals that they want something more than a list.

Two approaches to structuring each entry

The STAR approach. STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) works well for experiences where there is a specific moment or challenge you can describe concisely and draw a clear lesson from. It is a structure that draws out transferable skills naturally, because the Action and Result steps require you to say specifically what you did and what it taught you. If you are unsure how to structure an entry and the experience involved a genuine challenge or achievement, STAR is a reliable default.

The aspect-and-learning approach. For experiences that are harder to fit into a specific narrative, such as open days, shadowing, or information-dense programmes, a different structure works better. Use the first part of your entry to explain what the experience was. Then in the second part, identify one specific aspect of it that acted as a genuine learning point, describe what happened or what you observed, and explain what you took from it. This approach is particularly useful when the experience is inherently passive (attending a talk, shadowing someone) because it forces you to find the active element: the question you asked, the moment that changed how you understood something, the realisation you came to.

The point of either approach is the same: every entry should tell the recruiter not just what you did but what you learned and why it is relevant to the role you are applying for. An entry that describes the experience without explaining its significance is an entry that does the minimum and no more.

One thing to avoid

Do not describe the role and leave the connection to commercial law implicit. The recruiter should not have to work out why a particular experience is relevant. Make the connection explicit: "This experience developed my ability to communicate clearly under pressure, which I understand is central to managing client relationships as a trainee" is better than just describing the experience and assuming the reader will draw the conclusion.

Step 3: Deciding whether to tailor

This step is optional and the honest answer is that for most candidates applying to multiple firms, full tailoring of the work experience section is not a good use of time.

The reason is that the skills commercial law firms are looking for in work experience are broadly consistent across firms. Communication, analytical ability, resilience, commercial judgment, and teamwork are valued at every major commercial firm because the job is fundamentally the same. The work experience section is also less about the specific firm and more about who you are as a candidate: what you have done, what you have learned, and what kind of person the experiences suggest you are.

That said, if you are making a small number of highly targeted applications and have the time to tailor, there are two ways to do it that are worth the effort.

The first is to align your legal experience with the firm's practice area focus. If you are applying to a firm known primarily for transactional work in corporate and finance, experience that gave you exposure to contentious or public law work is less directly relevant than experience that touched on commercial transactions, even if the commercial transaction exposure was brief. Lead with what is most relevant for that firm.

The second is to use the firm's own stated values as a filter for which non-legal experiences to prioritise. If a firm emphasises entrepreneurial thinking, lead with an experience that demonstrates initiative. If a firm emphasises collaboration and team culture, lead with an experience that demonstrates working effectively within a group under genuine pressure. This kind of tailoring is subtle and does not require rewriting the section entirely, just reordering and slightly adjusting emphasis.

If you do want to tailor, speak to the firm's graduate recruitment team at events or reach out directly. Ask what they value in the work experience section specifically. Firms are generally willing to give guidance, and the information you get will be more useful than anything you can infer from the website.

A note on time allocation

The work experience section matters, but it is not the most important part of a law firm application. The written application questions, where firms ask about your motivations, commercial awareness, and specific competencies, carry more weight because they yield more distinctive and differentiating answers. Your work experience section, by contrast, will share broad similarities with many other candidates: legal work experience at City firms, some non-legal employment, open days and insight events.

What makes your application stand out is how you write about your experiences rather than which experiences you have had. Spend enough time on this section to write about each entry with genuine depth and clarity. Then allocate the bulk of your preparation time to the written questions, where the difference between a good and a great application is most visible.

Want to see how strong work experience entries are written in practice?

The Future Trainee Academy includes a detailed module on written applications from a future Clifford Chance trainee who completed over 40 applications, with worked examples of work experience entries and written application questions across firms at every tier. Free to access.

For guidance on how to structure competency and motivational questions in the written application sections that carry the most weight, see our competency questions guide and motivational questions guide.