Commercial law postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in commercial law began with a problem question about a delivery of the wrong grade of timber, and it has kept its hold because the subject is mostly about ordinary disputes of that kind. In my LLB, contract and company law were the modules where I worked hardest and did best, and both left me wanting more detail than a three-year degree can give. A master's is the sensible next step: I want to study sale of goods, security interests, agency and international trade properly, rather than in the compressed form a general syllabus allows.

My dissertation looked at how the rule against penalty clauses affects small business contracts. I read the Cavendish Square Holding v Talal El Makdessi judgment closely, along with commentary on the shift towards asking whether a clause protects a legitimate interest and whether the remedy is out of all proportion to it. What interested me was the gap between the doctrine and practice: many small suppliers use fixed charges for late collection or cancellation without any clear sense of whether they would be enforceable, and the cost of finding out is far higher than the sums in dispute. Writing the chapter on standard form terms taught me to be careful with my own claims, since it is easy to argue that a rule is unworkable without evidence of how often it actually bites. My supervisor pushed me to narrow the argument to two sectors, and the work was much better for it.

Alongside my degree I have worked weekends on the customer service desk of a hardware and garden store, which is where most of my practical understanding of commercial relationships comes from. I deal with returns, warranty questions and complaints about deliveries, and I have had to explain to customers, calmly and repeatedly, what the store will do and why. It has made me notice how much of consumer and commercial protection depends on whether anyone at the counter knows the policy, and how quickly a reasonable person becomes unreasonable when they feel they have been dismissed. I also learned to read our supplier paperwork out of curiosity: the delivery notes and the terms printed on the back of them are the first primary sources I ever handled.

For two years I was treasurer of my university's board games society, which had about ninety members and a small but real budget. I rebuilt the accounts into a single spreadsheet, chased the union for a room booking refund that had been overlooked, and put together the annual grant application. We finished my second year with a surplus for the first time in several years, which allowed the society to buy replacement copies of games that had been played to pieces. It was modest, but it taught me that financial records are useful only if someone else can follow them, a lesson I expect to matter in company and insolvency work. I also volunteer at a community advice drop-in, taking initial details from visitors before they see an adviser, where accuracy and confidentiality are the whole job.

I am particularly keen to study secured transactions and international sales, areas I met only briefly as an undergraduate and which seem to sit at the centre of how businesses actually raise money and move goods. I would like eventually to qualify and work in commercial practice, most likely advising smaller companies, where clear advice about routine contracts makes a practical difference. A master's would give me the depth, the research discipline and the comparative perspective I currently lack, and I am ready for the reading it demands.

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