Business Law Clinic

Gain specialist knowledge and relevant skills

The Business Law Clinic aims to provide our undergraduate and postgraduate students with an opportunity to gain new knowledge in various specialised areas of business law that not covered in the standard teaching curriculum and/or observed from a new angle in a practical setting.

It provides essential opportunities to enhance the practice-readiness and employability of business law-oriented students by providing transferrable skills such as teamwork, business communication, empathy, and many more highly sought-after skills by employers.

Delivering social justice

The Business Law Clinic follows the esteemed tradition of social justice upheld by Essex Law School, the Essex Law Clinic, and the Essex Human Rights Centre Clinic, championing social justice through the lens of business law. It delivers social justice with a business law focus, understanding social justice as equality and encompasses activities that aim to alleviate inequality in various settings:

• to provide access to justice to those individuals who are disadvantaged in society, e.g. because they cannot afford legal advice and/or do not know how to access it themselves
• to enable those groups of individuals to acquire learned key skills that have no social networks to support them, such as money management, or who need help in acquiring additional knowledge and skills to empower them for future employment
• to support those organisations that serve the public good, such as local authorities, not-for-profit organisations serving the community, or for-profit organisations that are either means tested or pledge to fund the work of the Business Law Clinic.

Getting involved

The Business Law Clinic currently offers project-based work for Essex Law School students in their final year of undergraduate studies at Essex Law School, or those enrolled in one of the commercial-oriented LLM programmes. Eligible students will be contacted directly to apply.

If you're an organisation interested in being involved with the Business Law Clinic, contact the Director Andrea Fejos at afejos@essex.ac.uk.

Interview with Ashanna Ambrusey,
BA Criminology with Criminal Law

What are you enjoying the most about your project?

Being able to learn more about the development of artificial intelligence which is being utilised by law firms and new emerging roles within the legal industry, such as legal operations.

What practical skills are you learning from your clinical experience?

I was able to improve my legal research and written skills during this experience. I also developed my collaboration skills, by working with others and setting each other deadlines which were appropriate and reasonable. 

What is the most rewarding part of being a part of the Business Law Clinic?

The most rewarding part of being a part of the Business Law Clinic, is being able to have full responsibility of the research you conduct and having an input in how the newsletter should be completed. Being able to have a full say in everything which is done, whilst working within a team was beneficial for both my communication skills as well as collaboration.

How do you think the Business Law Clinic will help your professional and/or educational development?

The experience improved my commercial awareness around how technology is impacting the legal industry, where I was able to use examples I had written about in applications and interviews for graduate roles.

What is one reason you would recommend the Business Law Clinic?

I would recommend the Business Law Clinic, to develop your legal research and organisation skills. The clinic helped me to be commercially aware and be able to put my research into the practical skill of newsletter writing. The clinic also helped my organisation skills, as I learnt how to balance my deadlines and working part time alongside this.

Our recent work

The report on our activities for 2023-24 (.pdf) provides more information on the projects.