Corporate law postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in corporate law began with a dull-looking document. In my second year I was asked to summarise a listed retailer's annual report for a seminar on corporate governance, and I found that the section on directors' duties read very differently from the pages on strategy. The board described long-term investment in suppliers; the remuneration report attached most of the chief executive's pay to three-year share performance. I wanted to know which of those documents actually shaped decisions. That question has directed my reading ever since.

My LLB gave me the grounding to pursue it properly. I took company law and insolvency in my final year, and my dissertation examined whether section 172 of the Companies Act 2006 imposes any meaningful discipline on boards, or whether its breadth mainly gives directors room to justify decisions they have already taken. Working through the case law on ratification and the reflective loss principle, and reading the Law Commission's earlier work on shareholder remedies, taught me to be careful about the gap between a stated legal standard and its enforcement in practice. I argued that the section functions largely as a disclosure and framing device rather than a litigable duty, and that derivative claim procedure is the real constraint on its reach. I was awarded a first for the dissertation and finished with a 2:1 overall.

Because vacation schemes and City placements were not realistically available to me, I made my own project instead. Over eighteen months I followed six companies across different sectors, reading their annual reports and, where I could, listening to AGMs online or reading the published results of member votes. I kept a spreadsheet recording auditor changes, remuneration policy votes with significant dissent, and any shareholder resolutions. The pattern that interested me most was how rarely substantial opposition changed anything formally, and how often it appeared to prompt a consultation letter or a revised policy the following year. It was a small, low-cost exercise, and I am conscious it proves nothing statistically, but it gave me concrete material to test academic claims against and showed me how much of corporate governance operates through soft pressure rather than adjudication.

My paid work has been ordinary but useful. Two years on a customer service line taught me to explain contractual terms to people who were frustrated and short of time, which is a better preparation for legal drafting than it sounds. For the past year I have worked as an administrative assistant at a small accountancy practice, preparing files for company accounts and confirmation statements. Seeing directors of family companies wrestle with filing deadlines, loan accounts and the practical meaning of separate legal personality has balanced my reading, which had been dominated by large listed companies. Most companies subject to the Act are nothing like the ones in the textbooks.

A master's in corporate law would let me study the areas my LLB could only introduce: takeover regulation, corporate insolvency and restructuring, and the comparative question of how far board accountability depends on ownership structure rather than statute. I would like to write a dissertation on the practical operation of the derivative claim permission stage, building on my undergraduate work with a closer reading of the reported decisions.

In the longer term I intend to qualify as a solicitor and practise in corporate or restructuring work, ideally with mid-market clients rather than only the largest. Before that, I want a year of serious, structured study of the subject I have been teaching myself around shift work.

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