City University’s law school is telling international students on its law masters programmes to apply for jobs with US firms or go in-house because recruitment practices at English firms favour UK candidates, the Gazette can reveal.

Professor Alan Riley, director of the LLM programme at City University law school, said international students who had completed undergraduate law courses abroad were at a disadvantage when applying to English firms because their application systems were geared towards those with English qualifications.

He also pointed to deficiencies in online application systems – which often require A-levels to be input without any means of entering comparable foreign qualifications – and said human resources departments at English firms had a ‘huge amount of responsibility’ for the difficulties faced by the international students.

Riley warned that English firms would lose out on top talent. ‘Fundamentally, we are all responding to similar problems and the application of the law is the same. There is a failure to recognise this.’

He estimated that the law school had 80 to 100 foreign qualified students on its LLM courses last year, and expects to have 100 on board by the end of September.