The paper reports the findings of over a decade of pioneering, award-winning fieldwork which has explored how workplace experience, if embedded successfully in different stages of legal education, can accelerate the ‘speed to capability’ and skills development of early career lawyers. The benefits from initial experiments of graduate-level work placements carried out by the authors since 2008 are presented. The paper then explores the findings from almost 10 years of creating year-long work placements for law undergraduates, assessing student skill growth, and the impact of the work placements on degree results and employment outcomes, before and during the Covid-19 pandemic.

We explore the impact of gender, individualism–collectivism on individual’s propensity to trust. The study draws on data from three groups of individuals in the United Arab Emirates: students; (n=370); small business owners/operators (n=324), and employed individuals (n=376). Three main hypotheses are tested. We develop and explore three main hypotheses. Statistical results reveal that females are generally more collectivist and less trusting than their males counterparts. Further analysis revealed that small business/operators are generally more trusting than the other cohorts of respondents. Propensity to trust was also found to be strongly associated with collectivist (rather than individualist) aspirations. Implications for future research and management practice are discussed.