Three years ago today, I was awaiting a final partner meeting. I had to confirm my decision to leave a US law firm, only months into my training contract. It was around this time that I had the idea for The Corporate Law Academy (TCLA), and I hired a freelancer to build the first version of our website.
Fast forward to today, and this is the second time I am writing this annual review. (You can check out last year’s review here.) So much has happened, and I find writing this review helps me to take stock of what we’ve achieved this year, map out where we’re going, and keep me accountable. Since I started, so many of you have been so supportive, which is why I hope that you enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at the running of TCLA.
The Long Term View
Many of you reading this will know that I want TCLA to become an online law school. In short, I think there are issues with BPP and The University of Law being the primary providers of post-graduate legal training. In particular areas, I think we can do better.
Our aim is to transform legal education. We can do this more cost-effectively, more transparently, and in a way that’s more relevant to the needs of aspiring lawyers. It shouldn’t be the case that legal education after university is something to simply ‘get through’. We want to deliver training that is not only enjoyable but also provides substantive value to your legal careers.
Because we don’t take outside funding, our entrance into this market will take time. Importantly, though, this means that we won’t grow outside our means. We’ll keep growing year-on-year, stay profitable, and remain responsive to the needs of aspiring lawyers. We’ll continue to be accountable to our customers, not external investors.
To reach our goal of becoming an online law school, there are two parts. First, we want to produce courses taught by the best lawyers and professionals across a variety of firms. Second, we want to make the TCLA forum a hub that is able to support every aspiring lawyer interested in a career with the leading global law firms.
Highlights of 2020
Given the circumstances, I am very lucky and grateful that TCLA has been able to even have highlights this year. We won’t take that for granted. Here are a selection of my proudest moments:
1. TCLA has rebranded! Almost three years since TCLA’s inception, and I’m still proud every time I look at our new website. A shout out to the fantastic team at 438 Marketing for their consistent support.
2. We’ve worked with record numbers of aspiring lawyers. Those of you who follow us on LinkedIn or Instagram will have seen some of the recent success stories. Truthfully, this is what makes TCLA worthwhile; there are few better feelings than seeing a candidate who has overcome personal hardships to secure a training contract with one of the best law firms in the world.
3. We have built an incredibly talented team. TCLA would not be what it is without the support of these guys. A huge thanks to:
- My longstanding colleagues, Alice Gossop and Jessica Booker, who have advised thousands of aspiring lawyers through the forum, shared their best advice in our series of webinars, and reviewed applications on behalf of TCLA. They’ve also been an incredible sounding board when launching new ideas and attempting to overcome challenges.
- Our consultant, Arun Sohan-Pall, who solely runs our mock interview service, and has delivered speeches and run webinars on behalf of TCLA.Our application review team, Rachel Tsang, Faye Ho, and Lucrezia Noiret. The work ethic and diligence of these guys have helped us through our busiest-ever application cycle.
- Our new forum team, Jacob Miller, Dheepa M and Naomi Ugoh. I’m so excited to see these guys spearhead our forum’s growth in 2021.
- Our project manager, Patricia K, who used fantastic initiative to secure her own role at TCLA, and who manages our society partnerships and video interview service.
- Our commercial editor, Violet O’Gorman, and our commercial writers, Alison Catchpole, Curtley Bale, Matthew Unsworth, Sairah Saeed, Rachel Strickland, and Alice Manners, who are helping us to build the best commercial newsletter for aspiring lawyers in the UK.
- Our longstanding forum contributors, such as Daniel Boden, and the future trainees, trainees and the partners who have supported TCLA over the years.
We ran a number of successful projects:
- We launched our most successful free course, ‘Securing a Training Contract’, with Harry Clark and Gordon Chung, as well as the first lecture in our partner-led training series.
- We released our most advanced course, ‘Mastering the City’, covering everything from project finance and the capital markets to understanding financial metrics and law firms as a business. This was followed later in the year by the release of 40 law firm profiles, designed to teach aspiring lawyers what makes the biggest law firms in the City unique.
- When in-person filming wasn’t possible, we ran two months of virtual training sessions, taking hundreds of aspiring lawyers through intensive interactive case studies. We proceeded to run seven (completely free) webinars, reaching upwards of 1,000 participants in some of these sessions.
- We re-launched TCLA’s Trainee Network, with almost 200 future trainees and trainees joining the group. We are delighted to see the number of future trainees who continue to give back to aspiring lawyers in our forum.
- After months of developing, designing, and iterating, we were delighted to launch our new commercial booklets, which featured a foreword from a former Freshfields partner.
- We revamped our commercial newsletter, hiring a Commercial Editor, and introducing a new Legal Profession This Week and Commercial Breakdown Of The Week section.
- We launched the biggest scholarship programme we’ve ever run, with 85 scholarships available, valued at £9,000.
- We’ve continued our rapid growth, reaching 36,000 monthly website visitors in December 2020, over 8,000 forum members, and partnering with almost 50 student societies.
Goals for 2021
Now that TCLA’s foundation has been built, we are hoping to scale more quickly in 2021, reaching more universities, hiring more staff, and ‘professionalising’ much of TCLA’s offering, without losing our community spirit. Here are four of our goals this year:
1. Reach every university in the UK, and grow to 15,000 forum members and 100,000 forum posts.
This year, we’re focusing on building the TCLA community. The journey to securing a training contract is a rollercoaster. It can feel overwhelming, isolating and extremely competitive – but it doesn’t have to be like that all the time. This year, we’ll continue to work hard to ensure our members feel welcome, supported and inspired. We want you guys to be proud to be a part of TCLA, knowing that you are part of a community whose members care about becoming the best version of themselves, and supporting each other in the process.
This year, we’ll work on making the TCLA forum the hub for all aspiring commercial lawyers pursuing a career in the UK. We want to reach more universities and candidates, particularly those who have access to few resources and connections. The vast majority of the content in TCLA’s forum will always be completely free, and we’ll ensure that anyone, no matter their age, background, or circumstances have access to the best advice we can give them. As discussed below, we’ll also continue to hire the best people, from future trainees to associates, to give back to the forum.
Finally, we’ll be rebranding and upgrading the TCLA forum in early January 2021. This will be the biggest change to the TCLA fourm since it’s inception: we’ll improve the design, make the forum easier to navigate, develop a reward system for helpful contributors, better organise the interview experiences section, and integrate commercial articles with the forum.
2. Release TCLA Premium 3.0, reach 15 courses, and restart our training series.
Our oldest members will remember TCLA Premium 1.0, which is what the TCLA Premium forum is today. In early 2019, we then launched version 2.0, which allowed us to significantly expand our premium offering, particularly through online training.
This year, we’ll be releasing version 3.0, which will involve a rebranding of TCLA Premium and a re-shooting of many of our older courses. We will also closely integrate the TCLA forum, TCLA Premium and our main website, as we work to produce a more seamless experience.
In early 2020, we began our plan to film experienced practitioners across a range of industries to provide you with the best training we can. We’ll restart this in 2021, kicking the year off with the release of our first course on mental health and resilience in the legal profession. Taught by a former magic circle litigator, this course will help candidates develop strategies for managing excessive stress, provide guidance on how to meet the demands of working at a leading law firm, and support you to handle conflict and remain focused under pressure.
3. Hire, build automated processes, and scale.
It took me a long time to hire at TCLA. However, it came to a point where not hiring was our biggest limiting factor. I have learned so much about the value of delegating this year, and I couldn’t be prouder of the team we have. As we continue our growth next year, we’re expecting to hire for the forum, TCLA Premium, and for customer support. We’re also looking to automate more of our day to day processes, freeing my time to focus on high leverage tasks (increasing revenue, hiring, and planning).
4. Conduct customer research, surveys, and develop metrics.
At TCLA, every piece of content we produce is a reflection of the kind of business we want to be. As we grow, we want to continue to provide you with the best possible resources we can to help you secure a training contract.
One area we have previously lagged behind is customer research. Going forward, rather than us making assumptions about what we believe would be useful for aspiring lawyers, we want to do a better job of asking you directly. One key benefit of being a start-up is that we are nimble. If you have ideas for what kind of content or training would make a difference to your application journey, we want to be responsive to those needs.
Finally, we want to do a better job of developing metrics for our premium service. TCLA Premium bears similarities with other Software as a Service platforms, as we rely on recurring revenue to keep us going. By using data to better inform our growth, we’ll be able to determine how to better improve our services.
…And that’s it!
If you’ve taken the time to read this, I wanted to say a huge thank you for caring about the running of TCLA as a business.
If there’s anything that has spoken to you from our 2020 Year In Review, please feel free to share it and tag us on LinkedIn or Instagram (and we’ll say a thank you!). If someone has sent you this newsletter and you’d like to subscribe to our weekly email, you can do so here.
I’m wishing you the best year you could possibly have.
Jaysen
