Meet the Mentor: James Slater

Finito World meets one of our legal experts in advance of our Amal Clooney Christmas issue

You were raised across France, Spain, and the United States. How has that international upbringing influenced your understanding of legal systems and enabled you to connect with students from diverse backgrounds?

A cosmopolitan upbringing and learning two languages on top of my native English provided excellent preparation for meeting new people and engaging positively with cultures different to my own. Living in various countries and frequent travel also taught me that differences between people are often matters of style not substance, enabling me to find common ground with colleagues and students. This means I have embraced a mindset that absorbs difference to create a more nuanced understanding of my fellow humans and their ways of doing things. This extends to legal culture as well. For example, I was able to study EU law in French at L’Institut d’Etudes Europeens in Brussels successfully during the year abroad of my undergraduate degree, despite the difference between my common law background and the civilian ethos of EU law.

After training at Clifford Chance, what motivated you to transition into academia, and how does your practical legal experience inform your approach to teaching?

At the heart of any good career decision is understanding your personality and skill set. I realised that I had enjoyed school and university for a good reason: academic inquiry and reading are my greatest passions. I also realised that I loved the art of communication. A career that reflected what I loved doing, was intellectually challenging and which suited my temperament was my path to personal fulfilment. This lesson has proven an invaluable tool in my mentoring of students over the years, as I am able to recognise the temperament and skill set of my students and guide them towards career choices that maximise their chances of success and fulfilment.

Having worked extensively with mature learners and those switching careers, what key traits have you observed that help such students flourish in pursuing legal or professional paths?

A strong work ethic, perseverance, and courage are the key traits for such students. Mature learners are juggling multiple responsibilities, including demanding full-time work and family life.  Studying after a hard day’s work requires single-mindedness and fortitude. It is for this reason that mature learners have excellent work ethics and time management. The other key trait is the recognition that the skill set acquired in one career can be transferred to another, often with an element of re-imagining. For example, I have seen many police officers transfer their police experience and skills to a successful career in law, and not necessarily in criminal justice. If I was hiring, I would consider those who have studied on a part-time distance learning or hybrid course excellent recruitment material.

What advice do you offer someone entering law “late” or switching from another field—especially in terms of leveraging life experience to succeed?
 

Don’t imagine that you are an impostor, or that you will have to be lucky, or that someone is hiring for unconventional reasons. The workplace belongs to the best candidate at whatever stage they enter a profession. Those entering late and from another field have enormous virtues and capacities, not least experience, wisdom and huge suite of soft skills. I always say to those who come to the profession later and from another field: ‘You deserve to feel confident and to have faith in your ability!’.

Supporting international students often requires different guidance than for domestic ones. What are the most common career-planning distinctions you help them navigate?

Understand the jurisdiction they will return to and cater your guidance to that jurisdiction and culture. The path to qualification after an English law degree takes many different forms when students return to the various jurisdictions that share our common law legal culture: I have made it my business to understand those differences and provide support and encouragement to international students who are pursuing this path.

With an LLM from Harvard and a PhD from Birmingham, how did each academic environment shape your view on employability and professional readiness?

Harvard Law School is a highly challenging environment academically and, as Scott Turow describes so vividly in his memoir ‘One L’, it is personally very demanding and often intimidating! The Harvard JDs are incredibly motivated and hardworking, and it brings home to need for the strongest of work ethics and the highest standards of diligence and intelligence to succeed professionally in the legal profession. A PhD sets the foundations in the main for an academic career and brings home to the need for thorough research and intellectual imagination and rigour. I am constantly using the soft skills I acquired during my PhD. I was also lucky to have a supportive supervisor, who can make all the difference.

Can you share a mentoring success story—someone you guided into an unexpected but fulfilling legal or policy role?

I believe the core goal of HE is to bring the most talented people together with the career that both requires and harnesses their talents. The barriers to this happening generally take structural and cultural form. Greater and wider access to HE has alleviated the impact of these barriers considerably. I encountered a part-time law student who lacked formal academic qualifications at secondary level for various structural and cultural reasons but proved an outstanding law student. I encouraged this person to contemplate a career in law in City law firm, providing practical and emotional support. This person qualified with a top City law firm by demonstrating single-minded determination and overcoming inhibitions created by their unconventional academic path. This success story was a powerful testament to the social mobility HE can provide.

Where do you see the largest disconnect between what universities teach and the competencies legal employers expect—and how do you bridge that gap?

The gap should be closed but not entirely bridged: there remains a place on HE for traditional academic inquiry. However, an exclusive focus on academic inquiry will only prepare students indirectly for the workplace. The solution is to make the rigours of academic inquiry work symbiotically with the development of workplace skills. For example, the use of authentic assessment, where academic ideas are executed in a practical way, makes academic ideas come alive through the exercise of workplace skills. Similarly, researching and referencing for the purposes of an academic essay not only deepens knowledge but also fosters the workplace skill of attention to detail, by accurate following of an academic stylesheet, and digital literacy, through the use word processing skills and electronic databases. In turn, the development of these workplace skills empowers students to take responsibility for their own learning, no longer merely passive recipients of knowledge but active pursuers of knowledge.

As law becomes increasingly digital and cross-border, how should young lawyers develop truly portable skills that can span jurisdictions?

To be honest technology is a learning curve for me as much as my students! However, I always encourage my students to engage with technology as much as possible. Also, universities will have to face the challenge of incorporating AI into teaching and assessment in a way that maintains academic standards and integrity and prepares students for the workplace. AI is revolutionizing legal practice, enabling mundane tasks that formerly consumed significant man hours to be executed in a fraction of the time. The best lawyers will understand how to leverage this power: technology will not replace lawyers, but lawyers who understand technology will have a significant edge over those who do not.

In an age dominated by AI, surveillance debates, and global power shifts, how important is an ethical foundation in legal practice today?

More important than ever. Technology is both a tremendous opportunity but also a tremendous threat. Above all client privacy and privacy generally must be maintained. Also, we must ensure that AI remains a tool under human control. The interests and goals of the client remain paramount and must be served by AI.