It depends: what practice taught me about the gap legal education too often skips

‘It depends.’ The phrase, so frequently used by legal practitioners, initially unsettled me. I had come to law from roles in the UK Civil Service, public relations and government policy, where professional identity was externally defined by clear expectations. Law introduced something fundamentally different: a profession built on uncertainty. By my final year, I had learned that its most consequential lesson concerned not what the law permits, but the distance between permission and change.

For my final year of LLB studies, I occupied two professional worlds. By night I worked on a group policy research project for a real client through the Open Justice Project. By day I was the sole policy officer for a UK Overseas Territory, drafting territory-wide policy and supporting legislative change in line with human rights frameworks. The role also spanned large-scale projects including a global health crisis response to a hantavirus outbreak, the creation of an on-island telecommunications service in under 100 days, and an EU Commission-funded food and water security project.

Each ran on the same fault line. In policy work, legislative permissibility is rarely the decisive question; whether an institution will implement a measure consistently, within existing structures and resource constraints, almost always is. Only the second determines whether anything changes for the people a policy is meant to serve. The distinction was not abstract to me. As my voluntary role as Lay Advocate at the Public Solicitor's Office on Ascension, I resolved disputes through negotiation and relationship management rather than formal legal process alone, learning that outcomes often turned on interpersonal realities that black letter law never addressed. On the same island, I once observed a judge, disagreeing with the applicable law, clear a defendant on that basis alone, which taught me that the  law as written and the law as applied are not always the same thing. Sommerlad (2007) argues that professional identity is constructed and contested within institutional contexts, shaped by those with power over one's professional environment, a concept I had absorbed through practice long before I understood it analytically.

Our Open Justice project supported Student Action for Refugees, a charity working to improve displaced students' access to higher education. My contribution centred on legal research into home fee status frameworks across the UK's devolved nations, and on translating our findings into a public-facing eligibility tool. During a stakeholder Q&A session, the questions moved precisely where my instincts anticipated: not towards whether access was legally permissible, but whether institutions would implement supportive policies consistently within existing constraints.

I recognised this at once. I worked within it every day. What the clinical setting offered was not the insight itself but the chance to observe it operating within my own analytical work, in a structured academic frame. My preparation had prioritised precision and legislative coherence and had devoted less attention to the institutional reality through which policy is delivered. The Q&A exposed a consistent analytical preference; one I could only see clearly when practice and study were held against each other.

This is where studying reflective and policy theory by night, while living its subject matter by day, proved unexpectedly powerful. Each context exposed what the other took for granted.

Moon (2004) argues that self-assessment deepens when practitioners interrogate the gap between felt experience and external reality rather than smoothing it over. Practice had given me implementation awareness as instinct, applied fluently but rarely examined. The clinical project supplied the reflective distance to convert that instinct into something articulated and deliberate. This mattered because professional values, as Stuckey (2007) observes, ‘provide the bases from which preferences arise and on which all decisions are made’; making a tacit preference explicit is what allows it to be defended, taught and applied with intent rather than merely enacted.

The conventional framing treats implementation as subsequent to legal analysis: first establish what the law permits, then separately consider whether it will work in practice. My experience across both worlds convinces me this sequence is mistaken. An analysis that establishes permissibility while setting institutional reality aside has answered the easier half of the question and left unaddressed the half that determines access for displaced students.

Hess (2002) observes that traditional legal education teaches that ‘tough-minded analysis, hard facts, and cold logic are the tools of a good lawyer,’ leaving little room for the operational and relational dimensions of practice. Yet thinking like a lawyer, as Davis and Francois (2005) argue, involves ‘managing relationships, emotions, and ethical challenges’ alongside legal reasoning. Implementation awareness belongs squarely within that broader account. It is not an adjunct to legal analysis but a constituent part of it.

This is precisely the gap clinical legal education can close. A textbook can affirm what the law permits. Only a real client, a real stakeholder and a genuine question about constraints can demonstrate that legal permissibility is where analysis begins, not where it ends. The virtues Longan et al. (2019) identify as central to legal professional identity, public spiritedness, practical wisdom and community awareness, are not learned from doctrine alone; they are formed through engagement with the conditions in which law actually operates.

Many Open University students are already working, so we have an understanding of the practical aspects of real-world workflows and can often avoid the mistakes that theoretical knowledge alone might miss. That is an asset the traditional student doesn’t always bring, and clinical work is where it becomes visible and usable. The honest answer to whether the law delivers justice is, and always was, ‘it depends.’ Practice taught me that. Clinical legal education taught me how to articulate it, and why it belongs at the centre of how we form legal practitioners rather than at the periphery.

Stephanie Sherrin

Stephanie graduated with First Class Honours in July 2026 in her LLB from The Open University, studying law by night while working by day as the sole policy officer for the Ascension Island Government. This involved drafting territory-wide policy and supporting legislative change in line with human rights frameworks. With a background across the UK Civil Service, international public relations and government policy, and experience as a Lay Advocate at the Public Solicitor's Office, her work is driven by advocacy and access to justice Stephanie is due to start her LPC LLM in September 2026 and has recently taken up a role as a paralegal with a view to qualifying as a solicitor.

LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniesherrin/