Construction law postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

For two years I sold cement, lintels and drainage pipe across a trade counter in Salford, and I learned more about construction contracts there than I expected. Groundworkers would come in mid-morning complaining that a main contractor had refused a variation, or that payment had gone quiet because a payless notice had arrived a day late. I was studying my LLB in the evenings and at weekends, and I began to notice how often these conversations turned on questions I was reading about: notice periods, certification, the difference between what was agreed and what was actually built. That overlap is why I want to study construction law formally.

My degree gave me a solid grounding in contract, tort and remedies, and I did best in the modules that required close reading of clauses rather than broad theory. My dissertation examined the enforceability of liquidated damages provisions in construction contracts, with particular attention to how courts have treated the penalty question since Cavendish Square Holding v Talal El Makdessi, and to the problem of what happens to accrued liquidated damages when a contract is terminated before completion. Writing it made me realise how much the law depends on the commercial architecture of a project: who bears delay risk, who certifies, and how many parties sit between the employer and the person holding the shovel.

Because I had no access to placements or vacation schemes, I set myself a small project instead. Adjudication enforcement decisions and Technology and Construction Court judgments are freely published, so over about eight months I read and summarised around sixty of them, recording the contract form where it was identified, the grounds of challenge, and the outcome. The pattern that struck me was how many challenges rested on natural justice or jurisdiction rather than on the substance of the dispute, and how consistently the courts declined to reopen adjudicators' errors. It was an unglamorous exercise involving a spreadsheet and a lot of late evenings, but it taught me to read judgments for procedural detail and gave me a working familiarity with the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 and the payment regime built on it.

Since graduating I have worked as an assistant to the contracts administrator at a groundworks subcontractor with about thirty staff. My tasks are routine: logging site instructions, chasing signed daywork sheets, assembling records for interim applications and making sure our applications and any responses are dated properly. Routine or not, it has shown me that most disputes begin as poor record-keeping rather than legal disagreement. I have seen a claim for extra excavation weaken simply because nobody photographed the ground conditions. I also help my father with the bookkeeping for his minicab licence renewals, which has made me patient with forms and deadlines.

An LLM would let me move from pattern-spotting to proper analysis. I am particularly interested in the standard form contracts, especially how JCT and NEC allocate risk differently and what that means when programmes slip; in delay and disruption claims and the evidential problems of concurrent delay; and in security of payment and the reasons adjudication has largely displaced litigation for smaller disputes. I would also like to study the developing regulatory framework following the Building Safety Act 2022, since the subcontractors I work with are already changing how they document their work because of it.

Afterwards I intend to qualify and practise in construction disputes, ideally in the North West, or to work in-house on contract and claims management. I know the reading will be heavy and technical. Having got through a law degree around shift work, I am prepared for that, and I would rather study a field I already argue about at the trade counter.