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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andrei Radu" data-source="post: 190420" data-attributes="member: 36777">Hi [USER=28496]@bella98[/USER] I just wanted to add my perspective to [USER=36738]@Ram Sabaratnam[/USER]'s excellent points and to also use the opportunity to do a bit of overanalysis of the 'theory' behind an optimal 'why commercial law' answer. I think there are essentially two ways you can make a 'intersection of business and law' reasoning work. One of them, as Ram explained, is to focus on the intersection directly. Essentially, this means looking at the most important features of work that involves both commercial and legal thinking and explaining how that attracts you. The advantage of such an approach is that it is very direct, clear, and will not take up a lot of word count. The disadvantage is that it will likely not in itself be sufficiently specific to justify your choice of law over any other career. For instance, say you make your point about how the work of a commercial solicitor involves a lot of collaboration with sophisticated parties like opposing counsel, bankers, consultants and so on. And this is a good thing to mention. This reasoning explains, for instance, why you prefer a career as a commercial solicitor to one as an academic or sole legal practitioner. From the point of view of the recruiter, writing about this collaboration-centered interest restricts the field of potential career options compatible with your fundamental motivations. However, it does not restrict it to only commercial law and nothing else. Investment banking and consulting for instance require similar levels of collaboration. And this problem persists with a number of other commonly-cited motivations, such as a desire to work in a client-facing role or to use analytic skills for problem solving. Essentially, I think whichever are the two or three reasons you cite, you want to picture them as Venn diagrams. Each of them will exclude a number of careers and include a number of other careers, and each circle will have some overlap with the others. To be sufficiently specific, you want to ensure that you only find commercial law at the intersection. This can definitely work with the aforementioned type of 'direct' reasoning, but you will need to supplement it with reasons that will eliminate other applicable careers such as consulting or finance.The second approach, which is the one I used, has the disadvantages of being less direct and of taking up more space. However, if done correctly, I think it has the important benefit of ensuring that only commercial law will be at the intersection of your "motivational" Venn diagrams. The approach involves stating the same 'intersection of business and law' point, but instead of trying to pick up one attractive aspect of the job to justify the claim directly, it splits it up into a 'Why law' and a 'Why business' part. As Ram explained, you cannot simply assert this, so then you go on to explain (i) what about working with law interests you - examples of what I have seen work well here included focusing on an interest in legal reasoning; advocacy; textual analysis skills; and (ii) what specifically makes you interested in the business world - examples of what I've seen work is a general interest in learning about the inner workings of the economy; how relationships between institutions and individuals work in different industries and geographies. This further focused analysis on what about the concept of law and business attracts you does not need to go into too much depth. In theory, we could always ask further whys to any answer you give, and recruiters are not absurd. As long as you pick up one one central aspect of law and once central aspect of business that draws you and you then illustrate that with a concrete experience/achievement, I think you will have a great answer.</blockquote>

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