Commercial law postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every Monday at the timber merchant where I work, I print the aged debt report and start with the oldest invoice. One morning last winter the top line was a builder who owed us for forty square metres of decking boards and had stopped answering calls. My manager asked whether we could simply collect the boards. I knew our terms of sale contained a retention of title clause, but I also knew, from my dissertation, that the answer depended on whether the boards were still identifiable or had already been screwed into somebody's garden. That gap between what a standard form promises and what the law will actually enforce is the reason I want to study commercial law at postgraduate level.

My LLB gave me a solid grounding in contract, property and company law, and I graduated with a 2:1. My dissertation examined how far a seller's reservation of ownership survives once goods are mixed with other materials or processed into something new. Starting from Aluminium Industrie Vaassen v Romalpa, I traced how later cases such as Borden v Scottish Timber Products and Re Peachdart treated attempts to extend title into manufactured products or proceeds, and why courts have often characterised these extended clauses as charges that fail for want of registration. I enjoyed the precision this demanded. A single word in a clause could decide whether a supplier stood ahead of other creditors or joined the queue of unsecured ones. I concluded that many suppliers rely on wording that protects them far less than they assume, and I tried to set out practical drafting points rather than only criticising the case law.

Working in credit control since graduating has made this concrete. I chase overdue accounts, set up payment plans and prepare files for our external solicitors when a customer enters administration. I am not giving legal advice, but I do read the terms we trade on, and I have seen how rarely anyone checks whether a customer actually accepted them. I suggested we add a signed acknowledgement of our terms to new trade account forms, and my manager adopted it. It was a small change, but it came directly from understanding why incorporation of terms matters.

These experiences have pointed me towards areas I want to study in depth: sale of goods, secured transactions, insolvency and the regulation of credit. I am particularly interested in how English and Scots law differ in their treatment of security over moveable property, since many of our customers trade across the border, and I would like to understand the reform debates on that subject properly rather than at the level of a single footnote. I also want to look more closely at commercial dispute resolution, because so many disagreements I see are settled long before litigation, and I am curious about how contractual mechanisms shape those outcomes.

Outside work I coach an under-11 netball team on Thursday evenings and on Saturdays help my mother run her stall selling secondhand books at a local market. Neither has much to do with law, though coaching has taught me to explain rules simply to people who would rather be playing, and the stall keeps me patient with customers who haggle over fifty pence.

I am applying for postgraduate study because I want the depth that a single undergraduate dissertation could not provide, and because I hope to move into a legal role advising businesses on how they trade and how they protect themselves when things go wrong. I bring a careful reading habit, practical familiarity with how commercial terms work day to day, and the discipline to keep a demanding course alongside real responsibilities. I would welcome the chance to test my ideas against rigorous teaching and against fellow students from different legal systems.