PGDL Study Guide
How to Pass the PGDL with Distinction | Law Conversion Top Tips
The PGDL is exhausting: Mentally and physically. But the subject matter is fascinating. Learning about everything from the legal significance of an auctioneer’s hammer falling, to the conflict between law and ethics when failing to help strangers in peril and, more obscurely, the unusual rules when making trusts for pets and gravestones.
Once you finish your law conversion, whether a PGDL, MA Law or other course, you will never view the world in the same way again. You might have the sudden realisation that you enter far more contracts than you would like to believe, or learn that the crimes you read about in the news may not be quite as clear cut as they first appeared.
After graduating with an International Relations degree in 2022, I decided to quit my job and throw myself into the storm of legal education. I finished the PGDL in August and sat SQE1 in January of this year. It’s one of the toughest courses out there; I cannot think of another that crams 3 years’ worth of knowledge into 8 short months. Many of the tips I read before starting didn’t quite prepare me for the intensity of the course. However, I was fortunate enough to obtain the highest overall marks nationally on the MA Law course. So here are my two cents on how to not only survive your law conversion, but to ace it and come out smiling.
Broad tips:
1. Make peace with the workload
This should be the first heading on every law conversion course brochure. Make peace with the fact that your social life, routine and possibly your hobbies, passions or fitness will be negatively impacted by the course. I often found myself turning down plans, missing concerts and skipping workouts in favour of a sedentary blur of books, flowcharts and Lord Denning quotes in the early hours. This was tough. Not only because it disrupted my active lifestyle, but also because of the huge amount of mental energy I had to use to understand the many technical and often wacky concepts for the first time.
I found it useful to look at life on the PGDL like a triangle. One tip of the triangle was my dedication to the course, leaving two other corners free for two other areas of my life. As the course progressed and exam dates loomed, this triangle shrank into a straight dot: the course became all-consuming. If this happens to you and your life triangle starts to become top-heavy, don’t be disheartened: it doesn’t last forever.
2. Don’t stretch yourself too thin
You have a finite amount of mental energy. During my PGDL, I was conscious of increasing my employability as someone with limited legal experience. There were many amazing resources at my university to assist with this.
You might choose to become a class representative to communicate between students and management to enact change. You may also get involved with mooting competitions, especially beneficial for aspiring solicitor advocates or barristers. There are pro-bono legal advice clinics which you can volunteer at too.
These are all fantastic but limit yourself to one or two extracurriculars, keeping a keen eye on the balance of your ‘life triangle’. For every activity you take on, the PGDL tip of that triangle is expanding to the detriment of other important areas of your life. There are only 24 hours in a day.
There will be plenty of chances to gain work experience and increase your employability, but you only have one shot at your first attempt PGDL exams. This is not necessarily the right approach for everyone, but it is certainly something to bear in mind. Assess your priorities, visualise your short and medium-term goals and work backwards to reach a balance.
3. Speak in class
Whilst it may be a scary one, speak in class! Contributing to discussions during weekly seminars really helps to solidify your learning. Even if you turn out to be wrong – and nobody is right all the time – the act of speaking aloud makes the knowledge stick much better. And, where you do make mistakes, these are instantly rectified by the professor. You now know immediately how to move forward even stronger. You have won!
If you speak up in seminars and you’re wrong, you might suffer momentary embarrassment, but you’ll never make that mistake again. Conversely, if you stay silent, you might miss the opportunity to have key learning points explained to you. This is critical. Additionally, as a lawyer, you will be expected to use your presentation and public speaking skills in your professional life. Speaking in class can be a great way to build this confidence.
4. Show up
Try not to miss a seminar. Don’t pay attention to those deciding to skip live teaching. And when you do show up, make sure you have consulted the reading in detail.
This was a tough point to stick to but I thought of the PGDL as a steam train: if you jump off for a second, the train will pull on without you. The compulsory reading amounts to hundreds of pages per week. Keep the pressure up. As soon as you slip into reading for the seminars from the previous week, it becomes more and more difficult to catch up.
Enter your law conversion with the mentality that you will have all your structures, flowcharts and case notes readily accessible to refer to during seminars. This will help you to contribute your ideas, and this way, your consolidation reading after each class will consist of merely tweaking your notes, rather than writing them for the first time. This is the key point that helped me to remember the finer details discussed in class and to avoid getting snowed under. It’s important to stay on the train until the end of the ride.
Technical tips:
5. Print and prepare
Print out and read seminar tasks in advance of each session. Whilst you are not expected to do this, you can spend the time in workshops discussing your ideas and thoughts with your classmates and professor, rather than wasting 20 minutes getting your head around complicated fact patterns for the first time.
Whilst many students choose to load up the PDF workshop documents during the class itself, do not do this. If the Wi-Fi drops, the entire class grinds to a halt (this happened). Either print them off and go old school with pencil and paper (also great for annotating), or download everything ahead of class so you’re not at the mercy of broadband.
6. Mocks are free mistakes!
Mocks don’t count towards your final grade, and at my uni, you weren’t forced to sit them. However, they are an essential stage in the learning process. You receive invaluable feedback, become accustomed to the adrenaline of typing 3,500 words in under 2 hours, and for those modules examined via a spoken presentation (Criminal and Company Law in my case), you can build your confidence at speaking. In my cohort, there was a strong correlation between those sitting the mocks and those who nailed the final exams.
In my contract mock, I received feedback that I had not stated which party had the burden of proving that a certain clause was ‘reasonable’. When a similar question came up in the real exam, I was quick to write which party held the burden of proof. These are the little points that can unlock the distinction band, so don’t miss easy opportunities to boost your marks.
7. Log the cases
Every week in the textbook, there are hundreds of court cases to read and understand. Do not skip past them or just note the names down. I decided to build a comprehensive spreadsheet of practically every case from each book on the course (over 1,500 by the end). I noted the year, the key takeaway points, factual background, and other related cases that may have challenged or built upon its principles. This became an invaluable reference tool which I used from the first seminar to the final exams.
8. Make your notes smart
Success in open-book PGDL exams lies not only in creating detailed, structured notes but in devising a system to rapidly consult these under time pressure. Hundreds of pages of detailed notes won’t help too much when you’re against the clock with no time to flick through.
Doing things a little differently, I decided to build a ground-up study ‘bible’ in Excel with flowcharts for every core problem structure in each module, dynamic menus for rapid navigation between topic areas and hyperlinks interconnected with my court case and statute spreadsheets to extract finer details instantly. The PGDL Bible was the only resource I had in front of my eyes during the exams themselves. Harnessing technology in this way can save you crucial time without sacrificing distinction-band details. An approach similar to this may work for those comfortable with tech.
As a parting thought, the one thing I found impossible to appreciate during the PGDL is that it does not last forever. Whilst it certainly feels endless at the time, you can, and will, make it through and smile once you have!
Adam Webb read International Relations at the University of Nottingham before completing his MA Law (SQE1) at the University of Law, achieving the highest overall mark nationally. He now works as a Litigation Paralegal at a listed London law firm.