Wannabe lawyer relies on street performer past in bid to kick-start law career
An Exeter law graduate has taken to one of London’s busiest commuter hubs in the hope of securing legal employment — as the trend for hustling for training contracts on the street reaches the Russell Group.
Aimran Alif — who did an LLB at Exeter University in 2013 before completing the Legal Practice Course (LPC) and an LLM in Islamic Finance at BPP Law School — was spotted on the concourse of London’s Liverpool Street station handing out copies of his CV to punters yesterday afternoon.
Holding a whiteboard with his academic credentials, an image of Alif was posted on Instagram earlier today by legal diversity network Aspiring Solicitors.
Alif’s sign reads:
LLM in Islamic Finance, Law Degree from Exeter, looking for entry-level job to gain experience. Please take a CV
While the majority of law graduates would recoil in horror at the thought of attempting a similar public appeal, Alif appears to be relying on confidence gained from a past spell as a street performer.
While it’s not clear exactly what his act was, curiously, according to Alif’s LinkedIn, he once “gained a following in Cornwall as a street performer in a Spiderman costume”.
With more than 6,100 students successfully completing the LPC in 2014, and just 5,514 new trainee solicitors being registered with the Solicitors Regulation Authority that year, students left out in the cold are having to seek newer and more inventive ways to bag a training contract.
As a result, Alif is not the first law student to take to the streets, placard in hand.
This time last year, an unnamed De Montfort LLB graduate was spotted at Cannon Street Tube station in the City, holding a sign that read “looking for a career”. Several months earlier, UWE law graduate Bilal Rauf tried a similar trick at Chancery Lane Tube station.