Building skills in the local community: Inspiring the next generation

Sixteen A-Level Law students from Wakefield College recently spent a day at Minster’s office to learn firsthand how a law firm operates. The initiative forms part of Minster’s Corporate Social Responsibility strategy, which goal is to build skills in the local community. The strategy is designed for colleagues to volunteer their skills and knowledge to benefit the local community and economy.

Our serious injury department recently used their knowledge and skills to help the next generation of lawyers. Luke Howard, a senior solicitor who organised the event, said “I wanted to use my skills as a lawyer to engage with the local community and I felt that showcasing the work of a solicitor to young people, in a way that encouraged participation, was the perfect solution.”

Students got to ‘follow a case’ around each of the departments as it moved from inception to a legal team, and potentially to our Serious Injury department. At each stage, students learnt about the inner workings of each area. It’s important Minster fosters business-minded solicitors, so our visiting students also met some of the key business areas that support legal services.

Trainee Solicitor, Matthew Itson, said: ‘By showing students the various support teams in the business, such as Finance, Marketing or Partnerships, I hope it really opened their eyes to the different career paths available at Minster Law – it’s not just solicitors on our payroll.

There are a lot of colleagues that work very hard to secure and maintain business relationships with key partners, promote our brand in the wider industry, or provide operational support to claims handlers, and it takes all of these teams working together to stay competitive so we can thrive and continue to ensure our clients have the best claims journey possible.’

Joanne Peacock, Operations Manager for the Serious Injury department, said: “I was overwhelmed at the quality of the presentations from the students at the end of the day, to stand in front of your peers and present the way they did excited me that these are our next generation of lawyers.

We also talked to the students about the various routes into law. University isn’t the only route in, we talked about non-legal roles within law which can include finance, partnerships as well as IT and projects which they were all quite surprised at.”

Every student delivered a presentation to members of our Serious Injury team, their peers and their lecturers. Four of the highest performing students have been given the opportunity to return to Minster for a one week work placement which will see them go on to develop their skills further. This was a fantastic and well received event from the students involved and we hope to continue this event for future students going forward.