Do I need legal work experience to get a vacation scheme and/or a training contract?

For a vacation scheme, no.

For a training contract, it’s going to be tough without it.

A vacation scheme is legal work experience so there isn’t really an expectation of having previous legal work experience. Instead, you can focus on drawing your motivation and the skills needed for a career in law from law firm insight events, articles you’ve read, non-legal work experience, extra-curricular activities and perhaps from your studies. To help you stand out though, you could use some of the free informal legal work experience resources I recommend in this article. This will show you’ve taken your interest in a legal career one step further.

Training contract applications are different. They are explicitly job applications. You need to be able demonstrate a real commitment to pursuing a legal career and you show that by displaying legal work experience on your cv/work experience section and then drawing upon that experience to demonstrate your motivation and skills through the application form. Without any legal work experience, you may struggle to convince a firm that you’re properly motivated, that you actually know how law firms operate and what it will actually be like to be a trainee. They last thing they want is to invest time and money into a candidate - quite often they’ll be paying for a candidate’s law school courses (PGDL and/or SQE) and provide academic bursaries to live - for the candidate to decide upon starting their training contract that law isn’t for them.

Whilst it’s true that many firms now exclusively or predominantly recruit trainees from their vacation scheme participants so their vacation scheme applications are essentially job applications, they are giving candidates legal work experience to confirm whether they want to pursue a career in law and whether they want to train at their firm.