To Study Law, or Not to Study Law?

Wednesday, 14 October 2026

This is where my little Shakespearean chapter comes to an end. Over the past few days, I’ve borrowed his language to make sense of the law, its delays and its peculiar relationship with ordinary human life. But today’s question deserves something more modern than a soliloquy: a spreadsheet.

To study law, or not to study law?

That is the question.

And this time, I thought I might begin with some numbers.

Act I: What Happens to Law Graduates?

If somebody enrols on a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) course with the intention of becoming a lawyer, what are their chances of finding themselves in a legal profession after graduation?

It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

Fortunately, the Higher Education Statistics Agency conducts a Graduate Outcomes survey, and the results are published through Discover Uni.

The survey asks graduates what they’re doing approximately fifteen months after completing their studies.

That isn’t the same as asking whether they’ve qualified as solicitors or barristers. Qualification can take considerably longer, and some graduates pursue further education before entering practice.

Nevertheless, the figures provide an interesting snapshot of where people actually go after studying law.

Here are ten university law courses we’ve been examining, arranged by the proportion of employed survey respondents working in legal professional occupations.

University and course	Employed respondents in legal professional occupations
Oxford — Jurisprudence	55%
Liverpool — Law with a Year Abroad	55%
Liverpool — standard LLB	48%
Durham — Law, broader subject data	48%
Surrey — Law	45%
Exeter — LLB Law	44%
Manchester Metropolitan — Law	43%
Nottingham — Law	41%
York — Law	39%
Bristol — Law	36%

Source: Discover Uni Graduate Outcomes course data, discussed and collected in October 2026. These are ten selected course entries, not the ten highest-performing law courses nationally. Survey cohorts, sample sizes and the degree of course-specific reporting differ.

At first glance, something stands out.

Only two entries exceed 50%.

And one of those, Liverpool’s Law with a Year Abroad, is a relatively small course sample. Liverpool’s standard LLB records 48%.

Oxford reports 55%, but even that figure doesn’t mean that 55% of everybody who starts the course will eventually become a lawyer.

It means that 55% of the employed respondents whose occupations were captured in that particular survey were classified as legal professionals fifteen months after graduating.

That’s a much narrower claim.

Still, it raises a question.

If someone studies law because they want to become a lawyer, should we be concerned when fewer than half of the employed graduates in many of these courses are already working in legal professional occupations?

Act II: Is That Actually Bad News?

My first reaction was surprise.

If somebody studies medicine, we might reasonably expect a strong connection between the degree and the profession.

Law feels similar. It has its own terminology, qualifications, institutions and professional rules.

So why don’t these figures look more like a direct pipeline into legal practice?

Part of the answer is timing.

Fifteen months isn’t particularly long in the legal profession.

Someone hoping to become a solicitor may still be preparing for professional examinations, looking for qualifying work experience or completing further study.

Someone pursuing the Bar may still be undertaking vocational training or seeking pupillage.

And not every graduate who wants a legal career will secure their preferred opportunity immediately.

Then there’s the question of what counts as legal employment.

The occupational category “legal professionals” doesn’t necessarily include everyone working in a law firm, court, regulatory body or legal-support role.

Nor does it tell us which graduates will eventually qualify.

There’s also a fundamental statistical problem.

A percentage of employed survey respondents is not the probability that a new student will become a lawyer.

Those are different populations, observed at different points in their careers.

So we shouldn’t conclude that the majority of LLB graduates have less than a fifty-fifty chance of entering the legal profession.

The data doesn’t establish that.

But neither should we dismiss the figures as meaningless.

They tell us that the transition from studying law to working in a legal profession is far from instantaneous.

And that is worth knowing before committing years of study and substantial amounts of money to a degree.

Act III: What Is a Law Degree Actually For?

Perhaps the mistake is assuming that an LLB has only one purpose.

A law degree can prepare someone for legal practice, but it can also develop abilities that are useful in business, government, journalism, policy, compliance and many other fields.

Students learn to interpret complicated texts, examine evidence, construct arguments and identify where rules apply.

Those skills don’t suddenly become worthless when their owner takes a job outside a courtroom.

Indeed, perhaps the better question isn’t simply how many graduates become lawyers.

Perhaps we should ask how many are doing meaningful work, whether their education helped them obtain it, and whether they consider the degree worthwhile.

Discover Uni includes some of those broader measures too.

That matters because a degree can be both professional preparation and an education in its own right.

Still, if a university markets its LLB primarily as a route into legal practice, I think students are entitled to ask about the route.

How many graduates obtain training contracts?

How many secure pupillage?

How many eventually qualify?

How long does that take?

And how much additional education, experience and expense is required after the undergraduate degree?

Those would be more revealing measures of the professional pathway than a single employment snapshot.

Unfortunately, they aren’t all answered by the headline Graduate Outcomes figures.

Act IV: Must a Great Lawyer Have Studied Law?

The next question is almost the reverse of the first.

If studying law doesn’t guarantee a legal career, is studying law even necessary to become an exceptional lawyer?

Consider ten distinguished British legal figures.

Five studied law or jurisprudence as undergraduates.

Five approached the profession from another academic direction.

Studied law or jurisprudence	Studied another subject first
Baroness Brenda Hale	Michael Mansfield KC — philosophy
Lord Reed	Dinah Rose KC — history
Cherie Blair KC	Lord Jonathan Sumption — history
Amal Clooney	Lord Michael Briggs — history
Keir Starmer	Helena Kennedy KC — law-related studies following earlier education*

An important qualification: Helena Kennedy KC is not a clean example of someone who qualified through an unrelated university degree, so she shouldn’t be treated as evidence for that category. The fifth position remains open pending a suitably verified example.

Even without forcing the numbers into a perfectly symmetrical comparison, the point is clear.

Some remarkable lawyers began with law.

Others began with history or philosophy.

Lord Sumption became one of the country’s leading advocates and later a Supreme Court justice despite having studied history rather than law as an undergraduate.

Michael Mansfield’s background in philosophy hardly prevented him from becoming one of Britain’s most recognisable criminal barristers.

Meanwhile, Baroness Hale and Lord Reed demonstrate what can be achieved by people who did study law from the outset.

The evidence doesn’t establish that one route is superior.

We’re looking at highly successful individuals, not a representative sample of graduates.

But it does challenge the idea that a particular undergraduate subject is a necessary ingredient of legal excellence.

The route into a profession is not necessarily the same thing as the qualities required to excel within it.

Act V: The Software Engineer’s Perspective

This is where my own situation becomes relevant.

I studied software engineering.

At first glance, that might seem rather distant from law.

Software engineers deal with specifications, databases, interfaces, systems and logic.

Lawyers deal with statutes, judgments, evidence, procedures and arguments.

But the more I encounter the legal system, the more similarities I notice.

Both disciplines depend on rules.

Both involve interpreting imperfect information.

Both require an understanding of how individual decisions affect a larger system.

And both can suffer when the system behaves exactly as designed but produces a result that doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation.

My recent experience trying to trace an old motoring conviction has made that painfully clear.

Different departments held different pieces of information. One system could not identify a record that another could apparently retrieve. Finding the origin of a decision became an exercise in following references between institutions.

To a software engineer, that sounds suspiciously like a problem involving data integrity, traceability and system interfaces.

Of course, recognising an engineering analogy doesn’t mean I understand the relevant legal principles.

A legal process isn’t simply a badly designed computer program.

It involves human rights, obligations, standards of proof and procedural safeguards that cannot be reduced to technical efficiency.

But perhaps a background in engineering provides a useful perspective.

And perhaps studying law would help me understand the parts of the problem that engineering alone cannot explain.

My LLM: A Navigation Instrument

I’m considering studying for a Master of Laws.

Not because I believe another degree will automatically create a new career.

And not because I think an LLM is equivalent to qualifying as a solicitor or barrister.

It isn’t.

I’m interested because my professional direction is changing, and I’m beginning to explore questions that sit between technology, law, evidence and institutional accountability.

That feels like uncharted territory.

Software engineering has equipped me with certain instruments: systems thinking, technical analysis and a habit of questioning how information moves between components.

But those instruments were designed for a different landscape.

A postgraduate law degree could give me something I don’t yet possess: a structured understanding of legal concepts, institutions and methods.

A map, perhaps.

Or a compass.

Something to help me navigate a field in which I can currently identify some of the problems but don’t always know the correct legal vocabulary for describing them.

That doesn’t make my existing education irrelevant.

Quite the opposite.

I suspect the combination could be more useful than either discipline on its own.

The Final Numbers

Let’s return to the two comparisons.

In our selected list of ten law-course entries, only two show more than half of employed respondents working in legal professional occupations fifteen months after graduation.

That doesn’t establish that most law graduates will never become lawyers.

It establishes that legal education and legal employment aren’t the same milestone.

Meanwhile, among the distinguished legal figures we’ve examined, some began by studying law and others arrived through entirely different academic disciplines.

That doesn’t establish that a law degree offers no advantage.

It establishes that the legal profession can benefit from more than one kind of intellectual preparation.

I think there’s something encouraging in both findings.

An LLB doesn’t dictate your destination.

And a degree in another subject doesn’t necessarily close the door to law.

As for me, I already have one degree and a particular way of looking at the world.

I’m not proposing to discard either.

I’m considering adding another instrument to the toolkit.

A degree cannot guarantee where you’ll end up. But when you’re entering unfamiliar territory, learning how to navigate is a perfectly good reason to study.

And with that, I think Shakespeare can finally take his bow.

The next chapter will have to be written in my own words.