LLB tips and information for studying law at Birkbeck College, University of London

Considering an LLB course at Birkbeck College (University of London)? Here are some tips, background and things I wish someone had told me before I started. Obviously the experience is different for each student, and some people find certain things easier or more difficult, so this is my personal perspective. End of caveat.

First the basics. Birkbeck Law School is part of the University of London, so you are getting a proper law degree. The difference is that it is designed for people who also have full time jobs, so the lectures are all in the evenings. Exams will be during the day, but you’re only likely to have two or three a year where you actually have to come in. The rest will be essays and coursework.

Most students take the part time route, but don’t confuse the term ‘part time’ with ‘easy’. You are studying a three-year degree in four years, and therefore the difference is only that you are taking 90 academic units a year instead of 120.

Birkbeck law schedules
In practice 90 points translate, in the first year, into three lectures and three seminars a week (with a similar load the following years). Schedules vary, but a typical week could look something like this:

Mon – no lectures
Tue – Lecture 6-7pm, seminar 7-8pm (Legal Methods & Legal Systems)
Wed - Lecture 7-8pm, seminar 8-9pm (Contract Law)
Thu – Seminar 6-7pm, lecture 8-9pm (Constitutional and Admin Law)
Fri – no lectures

You won’t necessarily have the seminar and lecture for the same subject on the same day, but the idea is that the lecture is given in a large lecture hall for all the students, and the seminar groups are smaller class-size exercises, where you can discuss the subject matter with a tutor. Lectures and seminars take place between 6pm and 9pm. The law school has asked me to clarify that the structure and delivery may change from year to year.

How many weekly hours?
This is obviously a piece of string kind of question, but for what it’s worth the official calculation for academic study is that for every two taught hours you should be spending eight hours of self study. Therefore, based on a 90 point course (such as the Birkbeck Law part-time LLB) you should officially be spending 24 hours of weekly self study (or 30 weekly hours in total). Conversely, in its prospectus, Birkbeck college says you should allow for one hour prep for every taught hour, which leads me to the next point…

PLEASE DON’T LET THIS PUT YOU OFF! Different students study in different ways, and not everyone needs the same number of hours. In fact, several have told me that if that’s the official figure, it must mean that it applies if you want to spend all your time studying, and that they managed very good marks with a lower time investment. In addition, the reality of part time job-holding students (some with small children) is that it doesn’t actually end up split that way. Halfway through the first semester we ran a survey that showed students spending an average of 10 hours self-study per week. However, once assignments and exams started featuring more heavily on people’s minds, the balance seemed to shift, and suddenly more effort went into assignments, study and prep. I also noticed that we were more likely to cram study into weekends and holiday periods rather than weekdays. When you come home after a full day’s work, it’s difficult to find the mental space to sit down and study, so I suspect we end up doing a similar (pro-rata) number of hours to full time students, but we spread them unevenly over the year.

It is also worth noting that first year results don’t count towards the classification of your degree so some students simply want to get through it, and do what they think is the required minimum (not recommended, but more on this later). In addition, the number of students who drop out in year one is quite high, so it may be that some come into the course halfheartedly and this affected the overall averages of our survey.

Is it tough?
Yes it is, but you have to bear in mind that the Academic year only has two taught terms, so you’ll be extremely busy October to December (with a week off lectures, or ‘reading week’ in the middle), and then January to March (with another ‘reading week’). In April you’ll be writing assignments and preparing for exams and then taking them in May (and sometimes the first half of June). This means you then have the rest of June, July, August and September off.

So the first year doesn’t count?
Well, yes. And no. Your grades are not used to calculate your law degree classification, but there are three reasons why you may want to work hard regardless:

working in law If you intend to work in law, you are very likely to have to submit your specific course grades and not just your degree class. Your future employer may not be impressed if you only barely scraped through your “Contract Law” course.

Borderline classifications: the awarding committee has some flexibility as to the eventual classification of the degree awarded, and if your first year marks are higher, it may well encourage them to consider you for a higher degree classification that you would not get otherwise.

Making the following years easier: time spent getting the basics right in the first year is time well spent. It becomes easier to produce law assignments, prepare for exams etc. If you spread learning the basics on to the following years, the whole thing might become a bit of a drag.

Drop out rates
This may be anecdotal, but some of the first people to disappear off the course are those who declared from the start that they came to law to ‘earn more money’. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to better your life and earn more, but law is a demanding mistress, and if you’re not deeply interested in it, you are not likely to have the energy and motivation to drag yourself to a seminar on a cold December night, when your favourite TV show is on, or your kids want their bedtime story read to them.

Another anecdotal observation (that may or may not be correct) is that although places in law school are relatively difficult to come by these days, the intake still assumes a large drop-out ratio in the first year. By Christmas we lost quite a few familiar faces. It is difficult to say exactly how many, because not everyone attends all the lectures, but if you compare like-for-like lecture attendance, we lost between a quarter and a third between the first and second terms of the first year. Between the first and the second years we lost about 40% of students.

Do I have to attend lectures/seminars?
Birkbeck Law School does not check part time LLB attendance. Names are taken in seminars, but according to staff, this is to ensure that if someone has a problem and doesn’t attend, they can reach out to them. They do however strongly recommend that you do attend everything and say that evidence shows that those who do, have much better marks and a higher success rate. Some lecturers are obviously better than others, and the same goes for seminar tutors. If there’s a tip I can give you on this, it is that the difference between being in a seminar with a tutor who isn’t excellent to one who is, can make the difference between a good year and a wasted one. If you don’t feel you’re getting a good standard of tutoring, you can either speak to the tutor (if you think the problem is solvable) or go to the subject lecturer or staff at the law school. Whatever you do, don’t sit on the problem and stew. Bitching may be fun, but eventually you’ll be the one to suffer.

With regards to attending lectures, it sort of depends on how you study best. There is no set way in which materials are provided: some lecturers record their own lectures and provide the recordings and presentations on the online learning environment (‘Blackboard’), some don’t. Being a new media person, I hope that with time they will realise that there is a huge benefit to students in having video access to lectures (the way BPP does it, and the way Oxford uni puts lectures on iTunes), so you can view them at your leisure, as many times as you like, and digest them better. However, in the meantime, the benefit of attending is often in the understanding of what the lecturer’s particular take is on the law. This focus is something that you’ll be expected to demonstrate in your exams and essays, and even if you know the subject well from reading books, you may be penalised in your exams if you didn’t ‘get‘ what the lecturer wanted you to focus on.

I’ve heard two types of stories (urban myths?) doing the rounds – one about those people who never attended any lectures and still got a good degree, and the other about students who studied really hard, knew the subject perfectly and still failed their exams, because they didn’t present the cases and perspectives their lecturer wanted them to. Personally I don’t really see how you can engage with the subject without seminars and lectures. You just have to be clever about those you can afford to miss, and strike a balance that works for you.

Financial tips
I’m not going to talk about student finance, because I funded my own studies, but as a student there are several things you can do that immediately offset some of your course costs. With a Birkbeck student card you can get a University of London Union (ULU) card and a National Union of Students (NUS) card, both of which give you discounts in various stores. The gym and pool at ULU are cheap and although not amazing are OK. Some of the biggest savings I made were through getting a student railcard and buying the educational versions of very expensive software (Adobe CS5 Master Collection was £2,000 cheaper. If you’re into digital production or graphic design, that’s an amazing discount, and with the railcard savings more or less offset the whole of my first year costs).

A little known fact I discovered recently is that if you are a member of a trade union, which is recognised by the TUC, you can get a 10% discount on your fees (details here).

Getting your head around the first year
The first few weeks can be daunting and confusing, and some of the materials you get can be really tough. In a short space of time you need to learn how to read and understand cases, think in legal terms, research law and speak its language. Here are a few things you can do to make it easier:

1. You may be told by lecturers to ignore all the simple prep books such as the Nutshell series or Law Express, because they oversimplify and do not give you depth. While they are right in principle, I found it quite useful to understand the basics from a simple book, and then progress to the more involved stuff. There will be plenty of texts for you to struggle with anyway, so you might as well get as much help as you can. Just be careful that you don’t end up relying on the simplified books’ examples alone, and pay attention to those given in the texts you are referred to. They will also warn you about Wikipedia, which I’m sure you’ll use anyway, but bear in mind that not everything you read there is correct. I’ve seen quite a few mistakes and bad analysis on it so, as they say, read critically and be careful not to rely on it – and, whatever you do, NEVER EVER reference Wikipedia in your coursework or essays.

2. This may be controversial, but with hindsight I would probably have looked at past exam papers for my specific topics early on, rather than just before the exam. They are available online and help you understand and focus on what you should be ready to answer at the end of the subject term.

3. Learn to do the basics as soon as possible – spend time at the start of the first term understanding how to find case law and read it, how to cite law, and what’s expected of your essays. I’ve provided some recommended resources for you below.

4. Get a Kindle or iPad – this is my personal view, and I do still prefer to use some books in hard copy, but having a bad back and considering the weight of some of the text books, I got one early on. The advantage was that I could carry most of my course texts with me wherever I went and, very importantly, that I could search through one or all my books for key words or cases when I was preparing for a seminar or exam. I also got a copy of the European Convention on Human Rights on my Kindle, which I referred to often. Of course not all law book are on Kindle, but most are, and are cheaper than hard copy. Note also that some of the old texts (such as Leviathan) are free.

Preparing for the first year
You are going to get your reading lists for the first year around the time of the start of the course. The first year LLB at Birkbeck includes the following core subjects: Contract Law, Legal methods and legal systems (“LMLS”) and Constitutional and Administrative Law.

Obviously you can wait until the course starts, buy the recommended textbooks and not worry about preparation. Some tutors even recommend this approach, because they suggest that if you read without guidance, you won’t know what you’re doing and might ‘read things the wrong way’. Personally, I can’t see how reading about a subject can harm you, and wish I had known a little more about what I could read to make the first term easier, since, if you have a busy working life, it can get tough to catch up on all your reading.

My suggestion therefore is that you get a general accessible book for each of the first year LLB subjects, so that you can start getting your head around them. Of course the focus of your course may be slightly different to the theme of the books you get, but during the academic year you are going to have to ‘read around’ the subject anyway (i.e. read different sources, not just the core texts), so the more you know, the better. In addition it would help you if you read a general book or two about studying law.

A note about buying law books
The law is an ever changing subject and so what seems like a cheap deal from last year’s students may already be out of date. Unless you can’t afford to, you’d be advised to buy the latest version of a book on any of the core subjects that you are going to study.

Exams during your first year LLB
Exam methods and schedules change from year to year, but the exam methods as of the academic year 2011-12 for the core subjects were communicated as follows:

Constitutional & Administrative Law: one unseen exam during May/June (100% of the mark for the subject).

Contract Law: two essays (one each term) the first is a 2,500 word research essay, the second a 2,500 word problem question (each counting towards 50% of your mark for the subject).

Legal Methods & Legal Systems: one statutory interpretation exercise (20% of the mark), one seen exam (80% of the mark). In a seen exam you are likely to be given the exam paper a month before the exam date, and then you are allowed to research the question bring an answer plan with you to the exam.

Time at the library
The Birkbeck College library is open daily during term time between 8.30am and 11.45pm (shorter opening times in summer), and there are intro tours to show you where things are. You can use the on-site PCs, or bring your own laptop and connect to the college wifi network. In the run-up to exams the library gets extremely busy, and sometimes there are no study spaces left, so it’s best to plan your study so that you don’t rely on library desks or texts when everybody else is in full revision swing. In addition, if you are looking for study space, there are several PC rooms outside the library, available to students for study, including the infamous room 536, which is open 24 hours a day. A full list of those rooms is available here.

Using other libraries
University of London colleges have an internal agreement that allows you to study in the libraries of almost all UoL colleges, on presentation of your student card (details here). You can also get a SCONUL card to gain entry to and borrow from other university libraries (a small fee applies, details here).

Connecting to wifi at other institutions
Many universities (both in the UK and outside) are part of the Eduroam network, which you should be able to access for free. To access it, you should find an Eduroam (or “Janet”) wifi network and then connect to it with the following credentials:

User name: (your Birkbeck username goes here)@bbk.ac.uk
Password: (enter your Birkbeck password)
Domain: leave blank.

Some recommended resources I found helpful

See also the list of prep books I mentioned earlier.

1. Legal Writing (Lisa Webley) – I recommend buying this book early, as it helps you understand what is expected of you, and how to prepare for exams and assignments.

2. For citing and referencing, you may want to note the Harvard reference system page here, and for case names this tutorial.

3. ECHR – In both Constitutional Law and Legal Methods and Legal Systems you may find you need to use the text of the European Convention on Human rights. If you have a Kindle, get yours here.

WANT SOME MORE?
If you want another person’s perspective on their studies at Birkbeck Law, try Daniela Osborne’s blog.

Good luck!

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A note about comments: you are welcome to add tips or comments, but please refrain from discussing individual members of university staff, or making derogatory remarks about specific courses. I reserve the right to not publish any comment which I deem inappropriate or unhelpful.

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