As the legal world becomes more competitive, lawyers are looking for ways to stand out from the crowd. Going back to get your LL.M. degree may be just the way to take your skills to the next level.

Although some lawyers get a graduate degree in order to teach, there are many other reasons why you might want to consider going back to get an LL.M. Perhaps you’ve been laid off due to current instability in the marketplace and want to avoid having a gap on your resume. Maybe your practice is no longer fulfilling and you want to change career directions — but the thought of starting at square one learning the ropes on the job in a new firm is not appealing. Or perhaps you’ve taken a break from practising law for awhile, to start a new venture or raise a family and need a way to make your knowledge current and make you more competitive.

According to Philip Girard, former associate dean of graduate studies and research at Dalhousie University in Halifax, the large majority of LL.M. students do not end up teaching. Most, he said, plan to go back into practice and added that “an LL.M. is especially useful where a practising lawyer wants to change fields.” He gave the example of one graduate student, a labour lawyer who wanted to go into environmental law, and said this student found the program “extraordinarily useful” as he was able to develop the expertise in that area that allowed him to pursue his new career path.

Girard explained that the advantage of doing a graduate degree is the opportunity to take courses that are entirely of interest to you. He called it “individualized learning” in that you set the goal, taking the kind of courses you like, and that makes it much more satisfying than law school, where, of necessity, you have to take a broad range of courses.

Victoria Watkins, director of the Osgoode Professional Development program, said that in addition to their traditional research-oriented LL.M., which is focused on getting students to produce works of publishable quality and is generally for those who want an academic career, they also offer an Executive LL.M. program, which is designed for lawyers who are currently working full-time. She said, “We make it accessible for lawyers with busy lives and busy jobs, and we have classroom intensives, where you do a semester in four days.” She believes the program succeeds in balancing the rigorous and intensive requirements of an LL.M. program with the needs of students who are working and have family commitments.

She agreed that there are many other reasons besides a career in academia to get an LL.M. “Some feel they need the credentials to demonstrate their expertise in a particular area such as tax law, while there are others who don’t like what they are doing now and want to learn a whole new area of law.”

Watkins also concurred that graduate legal education is very different from the undergraduate program — so if law school was not your favourite educational experience, don’t let that deter you.
“There is much more interaction at the graduate level,” she explained. “The classes tend to be smaller and the participants are expected to contribute. It’s a very different kind of student experience.” Another exciting factor in today’s legal education, which differs from many lawyers’ law school days, is the use of technology to add to the learning experience. Watkins said, “We have a system of two-way video conferencing that makes our program accessible to people who would not otherwise be able to do it.” Split screens showcase the professor, students who are at their computer and students in the classroom, so that discussion continues as if they were all in the same room — even if they are actually across the country from each other.

Geoff Hall is a partner at McCarthy Tétrault LLP in Toronto. He went back to school to get his LL.M. after just a few years of practice. His firm was supportive, giving him a leave of absence so that he could do his LL.M. full-time over nine months at Harvard University. And although he was away from his practice for some time he, said “it was surprisingly easy to reintegrate and pick up where I left off.”

In fact, some of his files came back to him, even after that time. He suggested that if you are planning to do a full-time LL.M., timing is important to minimize the disruption to your practice. He also felt it was valuable to have had a few years of experience practising law prior to going back to school and that this allowed the theoretical and practical aspects of the law to dovetail in a way they might not have if he had done his LL.M. right after law school. “I think I got a lot more out of it than those who were looking at the law in a purely theoretical sense.”

Teresa Walsh, a partner at Ogilvy Renault LLP in Toronto, had been practising law for about 10 years when she decided to get her LL.M. through Osgoode Hall Law School of York University’s part-time Executive LL.M. program. Her reason for going back is one with which many lawyers in a busy practice can identify. “The more senior I got, the less time I had to think about the law and write about the law.” She took courses concentrated in her practice area, civil litigation,  because she wanted the courses to be relevant to her practice. Although the course load was heavy, she found it was still manageable and enjoyed the opportunity to engage in spirited intellectual discussion with not only the professors, but other students who brought considerable expertise of their own to the classes. Walsh also appreciated the opportunity to delve intensively into an area of law, something that just doesn’t happen in practice.

If you want to become an expert in a new practice area, or if you miss the intellectual stimulation of discussing the law, then perhaps getting your LL.M. is something to consider. For many lawyers, like Teresa Walsh and Geoff Hall, it is just what they were looking for. As Geoff Hall said, “If you have the opportunity to do it, it’s a great experience.”