After qualifying as an accountant in 2011, Rachel spent the early part of her career as a management accountant working for prestigious brands including Ferrari and Maserati. After taking time out to raise her young family joined a firm of solicitors as their management accountant, and her growing interest in conveyancing led to an exciting new opportunity.
“One of the partners asked if I was interested in starting a role in conveyancing. I thoroughly enjoyed conveyancing and being involved in property law, so decided that this would be a change in career that I would be interested in taking.”
Now, Rachel handles her own caseload, managing property transactions from start to finish – buying, selling, remortgaging and transfers.
When she discovered the Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC) qualification route, she was thrilled: “I was so excited to find that I could encompass a degree level of qualification without having prior legal qualifications. So I decided to go the CLC route, and I did the CLC Level 4, quickly followed by Level 6. I’m now a qualified property lawyer.”
The accessible, flexible CLC pathway suited her perfectly: “This particular pathway was great for me because I have a young family and I work as well, so being able to adapt to my own commitments both inside and outside of work and study from home, work from home, within my own time and at my own pace, meant that this route was so much more appealing.”
Rachel credits Law Training Centre’s structure and flexibility for her ability to qualify in just 18 months, telling us, “I think if I’d gone down the traditional route of attending university that would have slowed me down, whereas being able to work at my own pace really benefited me because my pace is quite quick.”
While she admits she initially found academic writing daunting, having previously studied as an accountant focusing on numbers, Rachel tells us that the support she received from her tutors made all the difference. “Academic writing was something I wasn’t familiar with…but those preconceptions were dealt with by Law Training Centre as they reassured me that they have academic writing workshops if I wanted to attend those, and that there was a lot of support and guidance about the writing aspect of it, and making sure that you could write a bibliography when you have never written one before.”
The flexibility of online learning was key for balancing her many responsibilities. “For me, it was the prerecorded lectures that allowed me to balance it properly, because I could just do it in my own time. If I found a particular lecture difficult, challenging, I could just pause it, come back another day and start again.”
She also praised Law Training Centre’s resources and platform. “The learning resources from the Law Training Centre are all held on a portal… at the end of a lecture, there’s a quiz which again is so helpful because you can immediately see if that lecture has made sense to you.”
But one thing that really stood out to Rachel was the supportive community she joined when she signed up with Law Training Centre – the course was about more than just studying and qualifying: “I felt so supported by the tutors, even though it was distance learning. Even though I’ve never laid eyes on them. You know, I could pick up the phone, I could email them, and they were so responsive and so supportive. And it was their guidance that allowed me to progress quite quickly.”
“Training and developing with the Law Training Centre has allowed me to progress to a qualified property lawyer within such a short period of time due to their amazing resources, and I expect that that ongoing support throughout the qualification will not just end here. We’ve made friendships. You know, there’s a great deal of support from the Law Training Centre and the peers around that. I expect that post qualification, if I needed anything, I could get back in touch with them.”
Looking back at her journey, Rachel left us with some advice for others considering this route to qualify: “If you’re thinking of studying the CLC qualification to become a property lawyer with the Law Training Centre, I would highly recommend it. And I would just say, stop thinking about it, and get on with it.”
