News | Wednesday, 3rd July 2013

Placements with ITV Legal

Business and Law student opportunities

ITV plc has teamed up with Manchester Law School and the Business School to provide work placements with ITV Legal, for law student Laura Marsden and business student Marcus Klasse. The students won through a competitive process to secure these prestigious positions.

Catherine Shephard, subject leader in corporate practice at Manchester Law School said: “I was delighted when the Legal Director at ITV, agreed to offer these placements to Manchester Law School.

“We share the belief that a business should be able to value lawyers as a resource to help it achieve its strategic vision. Lawyers need to be approachable professionals who understand how the business works, can identify and solve problems and communicate those solutions effectively.

“We set the students the task of identifying how a good in-house lawyer should communicate with other business professionals. We were very impressed with Laura and Marcus, both in terms of their ideas and how they communicated them.”

Work ready students

Barry Matthews, Legal Director at ITV, said: ‘I’m delighted to partner with MMU. Its approach to legal education is laudable. More courses need to adopt a “preparation for practice” approach to ensure students are properly prepared for the application of law in the real world. Marcus and Laura were a pleasure and exhibited what we want in our employees – an inquisitive mind coupled with the ability to collaborate.”

During their placements, Marcus and Laura spent time in various departments including ITV Studios Legal and Online, Interactive, On Demand and Brands Legal. They said, ‘We thoroughly enjoyed our experience. Everyone went out of their way to make the placement as diverse and engaging as possible, and it provided an invaluable insight into ITV's business’.

In an innovative move, Catherine and Barry decided to open the competitive process not only to corporate practice and media students at Manchester Law School, but also to corporate finance students at the Business School.

Gavin Brown, senior lecturer at the Business School, said: “My corporate finance students who go on to become business professionals will need to know how to get the best from their lawyers, and our law students will need to win work from business clients. This idea of forging closer links between business and law students, at an early stage, is one which we hope to continue.”