Hi all,

I am an Australian graduate and am practising in IP/IT in Australia at the moment.

I am planning to do an LLM in England next year. However, I am unsure what area I should focus on - after practising in IP/IT, I have found that my interest in the area is not as great anymore.

As such, I'm wondering what my prospects are if I complete an LLM focused in another area, say, Maritime Law, and then looked for a job in England. In particular, would potential employers discard my 2+ years of working experience?

Any thoughts or advice from the folks here would be great!

I have no direct experience, so what follows is just my best guess: I think part of what you gain in your immediate post-qualification time is not substantive law but those good old transferable skills - time management, how to listen to and communicate with clients, how to deal with corporate clients, a sense of how much time you're loading on a file (even if you haven't got a clue how much the client can take) and the beginnings of commercial nouse. I would have thought that a couple of years would not be enough for you to start to develop a particular reputation in a field, which would be the big loss if you did change direction. So, I wouldn't worry too much, though I would be careful how I phrased my cv on coming out of the LLM and emphasise the general practice related skills just in case those reading the application hadn't thought about that bit (giving evidence rather than hideous generis self-starter statements - do they convince anyone?)

Thanks for the input, lmwoods. It sort of tallies with my personal thoughts on the matter, but there is comfort in knowing that someone else is of a similar opinion.