Changing Paths: Law as a Second Career - CUHK LAW JD Programme

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Designed specifically for graduates with a first degree in other fields, the Juris Doctor (JD) programme offered by The Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Law (CUHK LAW) enables a change of direction and opens up a host of new career opportunities.  

Each academic year, the programme attracts around 1,000 applications and admits roughly 130 students to the two-year, full-time mode and around 65 to the part-time mode. The latter usually takes 42 months, but can be extended if necessary, making it possible to fit classes around other work and family commitments. 

For applicants, the main requirements are a good non-law (or non-common law) bachelor’s degree plus a high standard of English. Many applicants have five or more years’ professional experience in areas like banking, financial services, government, engineering, the airline industry, pharmaceuticals or medicine – and are keen to take on a new challenge, for personal and career development, or a change in career. 

“The JD is ideal for people switching into law as a second career, who want to qualify to practise in Hong Kong,” says Professor Lutz-Christian Wolff, Wei Lun Professor of Law and Dean of CUHK LAW. “This is a high-quality programme taught by first class professors for elite students. It is intellectually challenging and lets individuals develop themselves.”   

The JD offers core courses covering Hong Kong’s legal system, ethics, jurisprudence, legal research and writing skills. Students who intend to apply to the PCLL (Postgraduate Certificate in Laws) programme will take additional 11 PCLL-prerequisite courses such as tort, contract, land law, administrative law, company, commercial and criminal law. They then finish the JD by taking eight electives chosen from a wide range of subjects including family, employment, mediation, international and constitutional law. Students can also choose topics like China business, law of international business transactions, data privacy or ethics taught in specialized Master of Laws (LLM) programmes at CUHK LAW. 

In recent years, legal work has become increasingly technology-based. This creates new substantive law challenges where, for instance, cases can involve self-executing smart contracts concluded “in the cloud”. There is the skills aspect too, with much more of the day-to-day legal work now done by artificial intelligence (AI). For example, due diligence exercises are nowadays often AI-based rather than done by checking through box files. All lawyers need to learn and adapt accordingly. To respond to this development CUHK LAW has recently introduced a new JD course on legal technologies. 
 

“It is emerging as a major issue,” Wolff says. “So, we are reinforcing our LegalTec teaching capabilities while at the same time many colleagues are doing substantial research in this field.”