There’s a myth about the legal profession: that it’s populated entirely by dazzling intellects, gliding effortlessly to partnership, pausing only occasionally to win a case or draft something incomprehensible.
This, we are told, is success.
It is also, according to Peter Jackson (not that one, sadly no hobbits involved), largely nonsense.
Peter — a Liverpool-born lawyer who has spent more than four decades at the same firm — describes himself, with disarming honesty, as someone who was “good at passing exams” rather than “the greatest intellectual in the world.”
Which, for anyone currently sweating through applications, should come as both a relief and a mild irritation. If brilliance isn’t the differentiator, then what is?
The answer, unhelpfully, is everything else.
It starts with technical ability
The first lesson is almost offensively simple: law is about the law.
Precedents. Statutes. Repetitions of the infamous billable hour.
“If you’ve got good people and you develop them,” Peter says, “you’ve got the ingredients to go places.”
The profession has, historically, had a complicated relationship with this idea — preferring a model best described as sink or swim. Peter himself trained in an era where you might be handed a file and told, in essence, “off you go, let me know if it all goes terribly wrong.”
Which, to be fair, has its merits.
But the real learning, he suggests, came not from being abandoned entirely, but from what happened afterwards: the red pen, the conversation, the explanation of what had gone wrong and why.
In other words: feedback.
You probably don’t need to be a genius
You do not need to be the cleverest person in the room.
You do, however, need to be competent, curious and capable of improving.
Peter admits he had no real understanding of law when he started. No grand calling. No childhood dream or Legally Blonde moment.
What he did have was:
- exposure (through someone who explained what the job actually involved)
- a willingness to try it
- and, crucially, the ability to stick with it when it became — as it inevitably does — rather dull at times
Because parts of legal training are, by universal consensus, mind-numbingly tedious.
Law school? “Flipping dull.” Pensions law? Even worse.
And yet, here we are.
The bit no one tells you: most of this is learned on the job
There is a phrase beloved by senior lawyers: learning by osmosis.
It sounds faintly scientific. In reality, it means sitting near someone more experienced and quietly absorbing how they do things.
You listen. You watch. You notice.
You begin to understand not just what to say, but how to say it — which, in law, is often the difference between winning a client and losing one.
This, incidentally, is why remote working debates make partners slightly twitchy.
Because you can teach black letter law in a classroom. You can run training sessions on negotiation. You can even, in theory, simulate client interactions.
But you cannot replicate the moment when a senior lawyer handles a difficult conversation in real time — and you realise, perhaps for the first time, how it’s actually done.
Don’t specialise too early
Another quietly subversive insight: specialising too early might not be the winning move.
Peter reflects that he “specialised too narrowly” and would have benefited from a broader understanding of other disciplines.
This is mildly inconvenient advice in a profession that loves specialisation.
But it makes sense.
Lawyers who progress — particularly into leadership — are rarely just technical specialists. They understand how businesses operate. They grasp commercial context. They can join dots beyond their immediate practice area.
Which is difficult to do if you’ve spent a decade becoming the world’s leading expert in something niche.
Law is a business (whether you like it or not)
Here’s the part many junior lawyers prefer to ignore.
Being good at law is necessary. It is not sufficient.
At some point you’ll be required to contribute to the business of law. That means:
- building relationships
- understanding client needs
- and, yes, occasionally persuading people to pay you
Social media can help, Peter acknowledges. But it is not the foundation.
“You’re not going to attract clients simply on the basis of a LinkedIn post.”
Quite.
A well-crafted post might get attention. It might even get you a conversation.
But clients, inconveniently, still want to know whether you solve their problem.
Which brings us back to the beginning.
The long game (and why it matters)
Over 40 years at one firm. In an era where changing jobs every three years is considered the norm.
Was there temptation to leave? Of course.
But, as he puts it, the firm “worked for me.”
And that, ultimately, is the point.
There is no single route to success in law. No universal playbook. No guaranteed shortcut.
There is, instead, a collection of habits and decisions:
- doing the job well
- learning from mistakes
- building relationships
- staying curious
None of which are particularly glamorous.
All of which, inconveniently, take time.
Final thought
You won’t have all the answers at the start. You may not know the right questions.
But if you keep turning up, keep improving and don’t take yourself too seriously, you’ll probably be fine.
And if not — well, there’s always pensions law.