Legal and compliance

The jobs it covers

4 occupations sit in this profession, on the government’s own classification. Each one is a page: what the work involves, what you decide, and how you are measured.

How you get into it

Two routes that barely resemble each other. The graduate route is long, expensive and competitive. The legal executive route qualifies you while you work, and it is the one most people in this family who did not go to law school actually took.

Legal secretarial and paralegal work is where the second route starts, and it is a genuine start rather than a holding pattern.

Compliance is entered later and sideways, usually from inside the industry being regulated rather than from law.

Who employs it

Private practice serves many clients and bills by the hour. In-house serves one organisation and is judged on whether it stays out of trouble. The pace and the pressure are different in kind.

Financial services, healthcare and energy carry the heaviest regulatory load and employ the most compliance people because of it.

Local government, the courts and advice charities are the other substantial employer, and the work there is closer to the public than anything in private practice.

What to expect

It is the most credentialled family in this list. What you are allowed to do is defined by what you have qualified to do, which makes progression legible and slow.

The reading and the drafting are the exposed parts. The judgement about what a rule means when it meets an actual situation is not, and that is what seniority buys.

Compliance grew out of legal and now pays comparably in regulated industries, without the qualification ladder in front of it.

The professional body

Other professions