Please provide your comments to my Personal statement for admission to LLM program.
I have chosen LLM program
After my years of continuous efforts to improve my English, I was able to read English books by the time I attended law school. My first legal thriller book in English was the popular novel, The Firm, by John Grisham, that I read during my 2nd year of law school. As I did not know much about law firms, I was amazed to learn how lawyers of the firm worked around the clock and how they handled their work so admirably professional.
During my last year of law school, I chose to do my externship at a small law firm of my country, Mongolia, not only due to my curiosity and interest to law firms, but also hoping that I would be able to gather experience in various fields. This time, I saw how a Mongolian law firm actually worked as compared to the one that I had read in the book. It seemed to me that individual lawyers were working in cooperation with each other in order to make their law firm attractive for clients. My long-term professional goal has become "to establish my own successful law firm" after the 4 months of externship.
I decided to continue my study of law in the U.S. when I was writing my bachelor's thesis, the next semester of the externship. Since the topic of my thesis, "XXX", has not been studied sufficiently in Mongolia, I had to research resources from other countries. Most of the books, researches and cases I used were written by scholars from the U.S. I found that the topic that almost has not been studied in Mongolia, was studied and interpreted from many different perspectives in the U.S for many years.
Although I was longing to study in the U.S after my graduation of law school, I decided to start my professional career instead, in order to make use of the skills and knowledge I learnt during my 5 years of study. Then, I started working as an associate at a leading law firm in Mongolia, to get one step closer to my goal to start my own law firm.
While I've been working at the law firm, advising both local and international businesses, I've faced the necessity to further study business law in internationally recognized level. Simple example is that, I had to find a solution for the management of a JV with 2 shareholders with equal shareholding, while drafting a shareholders' agreement some time ago. Unfortunately, the issue was not regulated in Mongolian laws nor researched in Mongolian books or research articles, which made my research complicated. After consulting with one of the firm's partners, I later found out that the problem was internationally recognized as "deadlock" and several solutions are commonly used to resolve the issue. As a result of experiences like this, I wanted to further study business law topics I regularly handle, from global perspective.
As Mongolian economy expands, business issues have certainly become more complicated and more international, that consequently making lawyers with international grasp of business law in great demand. Unfortunately, the business law courses taught in Mongolian universities are inadequate in reflecting up-to-date business law issues emerging these days to the program as well as in preparing the students for today's business world. Now that I have already gained some experience advising clients from local perspective, I believe that I'm ready to study what business lawyers around the world should be aware of.
The reason I have chosen LLM program offered by XXX School of Law among others is the program's ability to tailor the curriculum based on my interests, which will give me a chance to study business law topics that I have grown interest during my professional experience. My plan for the course is to study business law aspects that are hard to further study in Mongolia.
My plan after completing the LLM program is to work as an in-house legal counsel of a Mongolian prominent business for several years. My experience in advising both local and international businesses as an external counsel and my international grasp of business law that I'm planning to obtain during my LLM study would surely be useful for me to effectively take care of a business's legal matters from the inside and give valuable directions for managing a business of a substantial size.
Based on my experience closely working with international law firms at my current work, I've observed insufficiency of Mongolian law firms as compared to international law firms, in terms of their management, professionalism etc. I believe it is not due to the skills of the lawyers, instead the fact that there is no long history of law firms in Mongolia. Considering the size and development of Mongolian legal industry, I think there is high prospect for a new law firm to grow in Mongolia, if there is a right approach and good lawyers. I'm more than confident that the knowledge, skills, network and business law practice that I'll gather through the LLM program will become the most valuable investment and asset to achieve my professional goal. I'm certain that I have the right skills and experiences to well represent the lawyers of my country in the LLM class of XXX School of Law.