Technology law postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in technology law began with a very ordinary problem. Working shifts on my university's IT service desk, I spent a lot of time explaining to students why they could not simply have a copy of someone else's lecture recording, or why a shared drive password could not be handed over to a flatmate. The answers I gave were practical, but behind them sat questions about ownership, consent and accountability that I later met again in my degree, dressed in different language. That overlap is what I want to study properly.

My LLB gave me the foundations: contract, tort, public law and a final-year option in intellectual property, which I enjoyed most because it forced me to think about how legal categories designed for physical goods behave when applied to code and data. My dissertation looked at transparency obligations where decisions are made or assisted by automated systems. I compared the information rights in the UK GDPR with the practical difficulty of explaining a model's output, and read work by Lilian Edwards and Michael Veale arguing that a right to an explanation may be weaker and more procedural than public debate suggests. Writing it taught me to be sceptical of both the claim that existing law is hopelessly outdated and the claim that it already covers everything. The more useful question is usually which obligation, on whom, and enforceable by what route.

I have also tried to see how these issues arrive in practice. For two years I volunteered at a free legal advice clinic, where my role was to take notes during interviews, keep the case records in order and prepare files for the supervising solicitor. I did not give advice, but I learned how much of the clinic's work depended on careful handling of sensitive information, and how often clients' problems involved technology incidentally: a tenancy dispute conducted entirely over messaging apps, or evidence that existed only as screenshots. Later I spent a week shadowing the commercial team at a regional firm. I mostly read files, sat in on two client calls and summarised a set of software licence terms for the trainee who was supervising me. What struck me was how much of the work was drafting around uncertainty, allocating risk for events the law had not yet clearly resolved, particularly on data processing responsibilities and limits of liability for service failures.

Outside study I help run a small community coding group for teenagers at a local library, mainly setting up laptops and troubleshooting. Explaining why we ask for parental consent forms and why we do not upload the group's photographs anywhere has been a plainer education in data protection than any textbook chapter.

Postgraduate study attracts me because the issues I find most interesting are the ones my undergraduate degree could only touch: platform liability and intermediary responsibility, the interaction between competition law and data concentration, cybersecurity and cross-border enforcement, and how intellectual property is adapting to generative systems. I would like to write a dissertation on whether contractual allocation of risk in software supply agreements can bear the weight that regulation increasingly places on it. I am also keen to work alongside students from computer science and policy backgrounds, since my own technical understanding is that of an informed user rather than a developer.

In the longer term I hope to qualify and practise in commercial technology work, advising organisations that are trying to comply with rules they find genuinely confusing. My clinic and service desk experience suggests that translating obligations into something a non-lawyer can act on is a large part of the job, and it is the part I want to be good at.