Dispute resolution postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in dispute resolution began with a practical observation during my LLB: most of the cases I read about had already failed at something before they reached a judgment. By my second year I was more curious about the settlements that never became case law than about the appellate reasoning we were taught to admire. That curiosity shaped my final-year dissertation, in which I compared the courts' encouragement of mediation in civil claims with the way commercial parties build their own escalation clauses into contracts. Reading Halsey v Milton Keynes General NHS Trust alongside later decisions on costs sanctions made me realise how carefully the law has had to balance encouragement against compulsion, and how unsettled that balance still is. I want to study dispute resolution at postgraduate level because I now have questions about process design that a general law degree could not answer.

Alongside my degree I read widely outside the syllabus. Fisher and Ury's Getting to Yes gave me useful vocabulary for separating positions from interests, though I found its optimism harder to apply once I started dealing with disputes where the parties will continue to live next door to each other indefinitely. Reading on arbitration, particularly on the tension between confidentiality and the development of consistent principle, has pushed me towards questions I would like to examine in a dissertation: whether the privacy that makes arbitration attractive to commercial parties limits its usefulness as a system of rules.

For the past eighteen months I have worked as a complaints officer for a housing association. The work is administrative rather than legal, but it has taught me a great deal about how disputes actually behave. I handle written complaints and neighbour nuisance cases, which means drafting responses that will be read by someone who is angry and who has often already decided that no one is listening. I have learned to set out what I can and cannot do early, to record what was agreed, and to resist the temptation to soften a refusal so much that it reads as a promise. I have also seen how often a dispute about noise or parking is really a dispute about respect, and how a formal process can either acknowledge that or make it worse.

A more personal experience sharpened the same interest. Last year I helped my uncle prepare paperwork for a small claims dispute with a kitchen fitter. My part was limited to organising invoices, drafting a chronology and explaining the pre-action steps he was expected to take. What struck me was how much the structure of the process did on its own: once he had to state his case in order and in writing, his complaint became narrower and more answerable, and the matter settled before a hearing. That is not a story about advocacy, but it did show me that good process can do work that argument cannot.

My hobbies have contributed in a smaller way. I host a weekly board games club at a community centre, where I spend a fair amount of time explaining rules to people who disagree about them. Negotiation-heavy games have made me notice how differently people behave when they expect to play again next week, which is closer to most real disputes than a single transaction is.

I would like to develop a rigorous understanding of mediation, arbitration and negotiation as systems, and to write a dissertation on the use of internal complaints procedures as a first stage of dispute resolution in the social housing sector. In the longer term I hope to qualify and to work in a role where designing and running fair procedures is the substance of the job rather than an afterthought.

Review this personal statement

Latest reviews