Ways to increase commercial awareness

It isn't necessarily creative, but my advice is always to start following stories that interest you (might be a particular area of law, jurisdiction, industry sector). Then read around that topic - look at how the press present it, then look at the company's news page on the website and how the present it. Whenever you come across a topic/phrase you don't understand, read up on that. Whenever something sounds interesting, read more about it.

You'll absorb and retain more information that you have some affiliation with.

You could also blog as well (something more creative), but a lot of people don't want to put themselves out there like that.


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Commercial awareness is a big topic. Go onto the Law Society's website and read their report on the challenges in the legal sector. That was an enormous help for me and I think it scored me a big plus in my last AC.

Other ways I looked at it was looking at job adverts for solicitors in the local area. If the similar vacancies come up again and again saying 'due to growth in X sector' then it tells you which sectors are demanding extra legal work.

Following on somewhat from J-SP's post, but the best way to generate commercial awareness is to generate genuine interest. It's a difficult thing to work on artificially. Keeping up to date with current events is a basic requirement, but reading headlines will only help you to identify things that you should then be reading around. My advice for a more novel way to keep up with commercial awareness is Twitter. Now I will accept that there is an awful lot of rubbish of Twitter at the best of times, and cutting through that rubbish is probably the biggest barrier to using it. However, you'd be amazed at the number of active solicitors, barristers, legal journalists and commentators, legal bloggers, firms, Chambers, companies, and everything in between on Twitter. If you hop in and start following some obvious and high profile accounts, you'll quickly identify other accounts and individuals that you can rely on for information and insight. Twitter will never give you the whole picture, but you will often be quickly pointed towards issues (and often articles) that will serve to point you in the right direction for further reading.

I will clarify that I use Twitter pretty sparingly; I mostly do case law updates and get involved in some discussion that is relevant to the areas of the law that I practise in. But if I was an LPC/BPTC student now, I would certainly be using Twitter regularly to keep up with things.

Just a sideline, I am looking to apply for vacation schemes for next summer and fro my commercial preparation work I've set up Google Alerts for the firms, economist and Financial Times then go through that everyday. I also listen to Wake Up to Money every morning on BBC Radio 5 which has been really helpful in terms of Mergers and Acquisitions as well as a business outlook for cases such as Brexit. Its all about slowly building up your understanding. Hope this was of some help!