Commercial Awareness

Maybe you have heard of the famous case of the caterpillar cakes. Marks & Spencer (M&S) launched legal action against Aldi, claiming that its ‘Cuthbert the Caterpillar’ cake infringes its trademarked ‘Colin the Caterpillar’ cake1 and one of the most important issues is whether Aldi’s product is so similar to that of M&S to confuse customers.

Or maybe you know that a new European Super League is planned to rival or replace the UEFA Champions League2 triggering a series of legal issues such as abuse of power and violation of anti-trust law through competition reduction.

Either already knowing or not, keeping up with the latest commercial developments in the world is important for everybody, regardless of their current or future jobs. In this article I will present some effortless but interesting ways to develop commercial awareness.

Classic methods

1. I recommend subscribing to newsletters since they summarise the main commercial issues in a digestible way and include interesting additions as well such as news from other countries, popular topics and concepts’ explanations. This step works for each industry, but for the legal one particularly you can try:

• The Week

• Commercial Law Academy

• LawCareers.Net

• Bright Network

• Legal Cheek

• The daily news in brief

• Finimize

2. An easy way to get informed and educated on various topics while doing other activities is to listen to podcasts. My top 3 are:

• The Commercial Awareness Podcast

• Thinking Commercially (Bright Network)

• Brain Food for General Counsel (Pinsent Masons)

3. A more demanding method focuses on researching the most significant players in the legal industry. Finding out as much as possible about legal firms, governing organisations and important businesses is the perfect starting point when trying to understand how the commercial world operates.

Captivating methods

4. Social Media can be one of the greatest tools for developing commercial awareness involving both day-to-day fun activities and learning instruments and it doesn’t require more effort than the one normally done for following an account or a hashtag. Social media exhibits numerous benefits for this purpose such as allowing you to follow (trainee) solicitors and other students that are usually excited to share their experiences and to offer tips on applications and further research. Another advantage is that you can really understand the life in a law firm because firms have a strong virtual presence and show all the aspects related to their culture from involvement with pro bono cases and curent deals, business plans and initiatives, to the selection process and ways to get involved.

5. Reaching out to other professionals in the sector, and asking teachers or the academic tutor for help are incredible useful ways to learn about the legal industry while finding a mentor. Mentoring is sometimes crucial for making decisions that help reaching goals because it comes with experience, more knowledge and good intentions.

6. Get involved. By either joining legal societies, participating in groups and discussions or attending legal events, we perfect our commercial awareness. At the same time, we upskill different sectors like time management, communication and networking abilities.

Since this is not an exhaustive list, we would love to know your ways to learn about global businesses and the latest commercial issues in the comments. Good luck!

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1. https://www.legalcheek.com/lc-journal-posts/savecolin-or-freecuthbert-the-case-of-the-caterpillar-cakes/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Super_League