Postgraduate degrees are multiplying and mutating into niche streams in response to market demand for specialised and transnational practitioners, but is experience in the job just as good? Stephanie Quine reports 

Lawyers and non-lawyers alike take up postgraduate legal studies for many reasons.
Some want to specialise in their professional practice more, some want to move across field, some want to move into highly-specialised academia or research careers.

Professor Jenni Millbank, the Higher Degree Research Director at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), has seen a diverse mix of people pass through the postgraduate doors at UTS.

“Some people in practice have an issue that’s niggled at them for years and years and they really just want to do their PhD to explore that issue really thoroughly,” says Milbank.
Others, she says, do their masters degree and think, ‘This is super interesting as well’ and just keep going.

“We have some people who have come fairly directly from undergrad studies. Some have moved in and out of legal careers and this is way of getting back to law. We have several non-lawyers in our PhD cohorts … we have a developing expertise in legal history and we have quite a number of historians doing PhDs in law, using law as a kind of historical archive or a site of inquiry as historians,” she says.

Postgraduate legal students don’t have to have an undergraduate law degree, particularly in specialised fields, like health or historical law.

“It’s just a different mode of investigation,” says Millbank.

But students fresh to law do need some equipping to deal with cases, statue and the basic legal framework, and that’s where most universities’ law for non-lawyers bridging programs come in.

Specialised skills, practical programs
Over the last 25 years, there has been a powerful trend towards specialisation in legal practice.
According to labour market research performed by academics at the University of Canberra’s (UC) law school, in 1990 law firms had something called ‘company law’ and over the last 20 years, that broad-based legal practice has subdivided into fragments of company law, finance law and other fields.

Associate Dean of Law (Research) at UC School of Law Don Fleming says the shift of resources from the public to the private sector, and a “starving” of university funding levels in Australia, has affected the capacity of institutions to offer specialist legal education.

“It means that a lot of the expertise that you need for these kinds of courses now rests with the practitioners and the large firms. Universities like Melbourne, Sydney, UNSW or counterparts in other states located in the CBD can run specialist masters courses channelling the expertise of the practitioners in the city,” says Fleming.

In January this year, UC merged its faculty of law with its faculty of business and government in order to build specialised capacity for the future and take advantage of its location.
“Government and law is the business of Canberra,” says Fleming, adding that because the government is increasingly looking at funding universities thorough their research outcomes,

UC saw a fusion of intellectual and practical links in these faculties as an opportunity.
Almost all of the practitioners studying postgraduate with the College of Law (COL) are doing so to either move into a new area of practice or become a specialist in a particular area, says Angie Zandstra, the Director of Applied Law Programs at COL.

COL graduates of the masters in family law and commercial litigation receive advanced standing if they apply to become an accredited specialist in NSW or Victoria.
“We have a number of practitioners who have gone on successfully to become accredited specialists … or move into a new role or to market themselves or their firm as one with a particular expertise,” says Zandstra, adding that postgraduate education is “more popular than ever” at present.

“Because our programs are very practical and taught by practitioners, we are seeing them increasingly being listed as desirable criteria in job ads, mainly because employers know what knowledge and expertise the candidate possesses.”

The COL offers four masters programs in the areas of family law, commercial litigation, in-house practice and wills and estates. Each program can be taken at masters, graduate diploma or graduate certificate level.

“Each program is designed and developed with the assistance of an advisory committee of very experienced practitioners – judges, barristers and solicitors – who ensure … applied assessment that replicates what happens in practice. Each program is taught by a team of lecturers, all experienced practitioners,” she says.

Crisis of confidence
Earning a postgraduate degree takes commitment, which can be both daunting and challenging.
Time will always be the biggest barrier for any busy professional who wants to undertake further study. It requires some personal sacrifice, says Zandstra.

The intellectual stimulation and satisfaction that comes with studying, particularly at a postgraduate level, however, can make the commitment worthwhile.

At UTS, the most recent intake of postgraduate law students is completing PhDs on subjects as varied as ‘the legalities and consequences of children born with disabilities through IVF processes’; ‘the convergence and divergence of intellectual property and competition policy in the digital environment’; and offensive language prosecutions.

“I think any good PhD research program brings in students who match well with the faculty,” says Milbank, adding that UTS Law School will “only take on people if we have a good core supervisor” that can offer relevant expertise.

A supervisor herself, Millbank says the defining challenge for every PhD student is “what is my question?”, and that the first year is the key to their success.

“The first year is what I call ‘the rummaging around year’, where you think and you think and then you read and you read and you read and you get really confused. If, at the end of that year, you have narrowed down your question to a fraction of what you thought it was initially going to be, then you will complete in time, you will get through it,” she says.

“But if you have found you want to ask a completely different question, then it’s going to take you another year or two.

“I think a PhD for anyone does involve a crisis of confidence, because it’s a big and lonely task … but a very rewarding one.”

Increasingly sophisticated technologies are also making it easier for students to study and interact with the faculty, supervisors and peers more frequently.

Millbank is the associate supervisor of students in London and Melbourne and says she talks to those students just as often as local students under her supervision

“You just have to be more organised about setting it up,” she says.

Law faculties around the country now use webinars and online portals to deliver course content and interact with students. COL courses are offered online, with a one-day workshop for each subject supplemented by webinars throughout the semester.

In the last two years, UTS has built office spaces for its PhD students so they have somewhere to sit, work, print their work and interact with each other outside the library.

This has been an important development in building a culture around research students, who often keep to themselves, says Millbank.

Global students
In 2010, the Government committed $135,000 in funding to an ongoing project of ‘internationalising the Australian law curriculum for enhanced global legal education and practice’.

This has been identified as a priority to prepare law graduates for practise in a global context and enhance recognition of Australian law degrees. It is intended that the project should also contribute to increasing professional mobility, assist with the export of legal services, and increase the number of international students studying in Australia.

UC is home to many international masters’ students on government scholarships from countries including Saudi Arabia, Nepal, Vietnam, Bhutan and Indonesia. Most of them are lawyers in their home countries, coming to get expertise in the common law system.

"It’s kind of a case of the university upgrading [the student’s] skills required for modernisation in their societies,” says Fleming, who supervises an Indonesian student looking at several instances of human rights abuse in Indonesia and asking how the Indonesian legal system has coped with them.

“There are other Indonesian students here sharing the Indonesian challenges in modernisation and in reform of their government systems in the context of the Australian systems, which doesn’t mean they’re going to copy us, but they’re learning from us. We’re working as academics and I think the better policymakers make this a two-way street. We can learn from them as well,” he says.

For Australian trained lawyers and barristers, Fleming believes high levels of specialisation can be achieved without a research or masters degree.
“For those really successful, bright young lawyers working hard in practice or government, getting expertise in work is at least, if not more, important as having a masters degree.”