The Role

You will have the opportunity to be involved in one or more of the tasks listed below.

Research team:

• Undertaking and assisting colleagues to undertake research into legal issues relevant to our work, including welfare benefits, family courts, housing rights and employment.
• Recording findings, keeping records and accounts of the management of projects.
• Investigating and evaluating sources of data for empirical projects.
• Utilising statistical software to support empirical studies relating to law and policy.
• Supporting statistical analyses on social science data sets and report findings.
• Compiling or updating databases and datasets when needed.
• Carrying out literature reviews.
• Reviewing and contributing to writing academic publications and other policy reports.

Legal information team:

• Reviewing information categories and making recommendations for the Advicenow website in line with our inclusion criteria.
• Reviewing the information available from a particular provider against Advicenow’s inclusion criteria and making recommendations for the Advicenow website.
• Producing a checklist summarising a legal process.
• Contributing to the development of a new Advicenow guide as a panel member.
• Developing a new ‘know-how’ including top tips and possible solutions in collaboration with a member of the Advicenow team.
• Administrative tasks, for example, searching for email addresses for contacts or working through Google analytics looking at ‘no results’ searches.
• Updating of the Advicenow Information Service and Help Directory.
• Editing and publishing material onto the Advicenow and Law for Life websites using the content management system.
• Creating social media posts
• Monitoring or researching changes in the law.
• Monitoring Google analytics and/or other evaluation processes.

You can hear the experiences of previous Law for Life LinC interns here

We’re looking for:

Shortlisted candidates will meet all of the essential criteria, and are likely to meet several, if not all, of the desirable criteria below.

Essential

• Student on Warwick Law School degree course.
• Knowledge and interest in the broad range of legal and rights issues affecting the UK public.
• Enthusiasm for the development of information to increase public knowledge and understanding of the law and rights.
• Excellent writing skills in plain English, including the ability to pay close attention to detail and to summarise complex information and communicate clearly to a wide audience.
• Strong IT skills, including a thorough working knowledge of Microsoft Office software, especially Excel, and an ability or willingness to update websites.
• A self-motivated and flexible approach to working independently within a small team.
• Good organisational skills, including ability to organise workload, take responsibility for particular areas of work, work on own initiative and meet agreed deadlines.
• Good verbal communication skills, including a pleasant and friendly telephone manner.
• An understanding of the difficulties faced by disadvantaged people and communities in achieving access to the law and justice.
• An understanding of equal opportunities issues and a commitment to equal opportunities in all aspects of your work.

Desirable

• Experience of the not-for-profit advice or community sector.
• Attendance on the PLE Module at WLS.
• Experience of using specialist research software such as Endnote, SPSS and Nvivo.
• Experience in conducting interviews.
• Experience of report writing.
• Experience in qualitative analysis.
• Familiarity with Access databases, ideally including design/development as well as use.
• Experience of advice or information giving.
• Experience of updating and editing website content.
• An ability to administrate, manage and regularly update social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter with the intention of increasing Advicenow and Law for Life’s reach.

Eligibility 

All current and past volunteers with Warwick LinC programmes (Strategic Social Justice Clinic, Immigration and Asylum Clinic, School Exclusions Project, etc) and undergraduate students who have completed the Public Legal Education Module are eligible to apply.

You must be based in the UK whilst working as an intern on this project.

Please note that if you are a postgraduate student on a tier 4 student visa, you will only be able to work 20 hours a week on this internship.

How to apply 

To apply you will need to submit a single document (ideally a pdf) containing:  

• A short CV  
• A covering letter (no more than 500 words) explaining what you believe you can contribute to the internship and what you hope to learn from the experience. 
• The application task set out below. You will also need to include this as part of the single document file.   

Deadline to apply: Please submit your application/s to:WarwickLinC@warwick.ac.uk before 12 noon on Friday 7 June 2024. 

Candidates selected for interview will be informed by Friday 14 June 2024. Interviews will take place on the morning of Thursday 20 June 2024.

If you have any questions about this opportunity, please email: Rosie Narayan, Widening Participation Officer: warwickLinC@warwick.ac.uk

Please note: LinC Interns will be expected to submit a short reflective piece of writing by the end of September summarising their internship experience. 

Application Task

As a key part of our research and evaluation process, Law for Life needs to obtain feedback from the people we help through the range of services we provide. This is not just about their satisfaction with Law for Life and the specific service they’ve used, but also to help us evaluate whether we have helped them to achieve better outcomes in their legal issue and if that has helped them improve their legal capabilities.

As part of the application process, please answer the questions below – the task should take approximately 1.5 hours (including time to look at the Law for Life website: www.lawforlife.org.uk).

Your answers should be expressed in bullet points rather than an essay (1 or 2 sides of A4. Maximum of 2 pages). Draw upon any knowledge and experience you have of using research skills in a community setting.

Task: You are designing a short service user feedback survey of people using one of our Advicenow guides (you can choose which one -https://www.advicenow.org.uk/advicenow-guides). This would be situated at the end of the guide and would be online. There is already a link at the end of all Advicenow guides for people to complete detailed feedback surveys but these are generic to all our guides. What we are hoping to do is to ask people to complete a much shorter survey (max 5-6 questions) that is specific to particular guides and encourages more people to respond and provide us with valuable information about how the guide has helped them

• What do you need to take into consideration when designing this survey?
• What audience do you think this should be aimed at and how will that affect the questions you ask?
• What sort of questions are most effective in online surveys?
• What challenges are you likely to face in obtaining feedback from Law for Life service users in this way?
• Please tell us about any experience you have to date that you think would help you in obtaining feedback from service users. (This can include experience from within or outside your degree course.)