Reading time: four minutes

I used to get slightly irritated at the mention of commercial awareness. To me, it seemed like an esoteric buzzword, reserved only for those who had been strategically attentive to the trends and updates of different business industries over the years.

I quickly realised that commercial awareness is a skill that doesn’t come pre-packaged, with a clear manual or guiding syllabus. At its core, commercial awareness is a mindset, a viewpoint you begin to adopt mainly out of personal initiative, through progressive discovery and clinging to your areas of interest. It’s about getting your foot in the door and steadily making your way into the commercial territory.

For more on commercial awareness, check out our dedicated hub.

A matter of questions

A frequently repeated piece of advice is to listen to reputable podcasts, develop the habit of staying abreast with current affairs and gain work experience that enhances your understanding of working in a commercial environment. Practical experience, in particular, can be an eye opener, allowing you to see how legal knowledge intersects with real-world commercial dynamics.

Read this LCN Says for podcasts and influencers you should follow to boost your commercial awareness.

Additionally, regularly reading news stories engages your mind, encouraging you to be critical and creative with the information you absorb. For example, consider how industries adapt to economic challenges, respond to regulatory changes or recover from corporate failures.

Another way of improving your commercial awareness is to create an ad hoc, custom-made financial glossary. If you have an appreciation for words and are curious to see how their common usage deviates in legal and business contexts, this can be a useful and engaging exercise. It forces you to understand the technical jargon that businesses and lawyers use to describe financial structures, corporate relationships and market trends on your terms. 

Through my journey, I realised that the ultimate objective of most businesses, as coarse as it may sound, is to generate money. Commercial awareness boils down to understanding this central aim and the interlinked systems that support or hinder it.

The underlying skill, then, isn’t just absorbing information but learning how to ask pertinent and useful questions:

• How do clients generate their revenue?
• What risks threaten their financial success?
• Where are the opportunities to create additional value?

The more you cultivate an interrogative spirit, the more you’ll find yourself looking for answers in domains you may have previously overlooked. Over time, you’ll have built a continuous trail of knowledge and an analytical foresight that’ll help you better navigate unseen commercial scenarios.

Case Study: NMC Health v EY

This mindset becomes particularly relevant in a case that I recently came across that has been listed among Essex Court Chambers’ top 20 high-profile cases due in 2025: NMC (in administration) v EY,  which is set for trial between April and October 2025.

It’s refreshing and assuring to read about a case and be able to identify and navigate some of the legal subjects behind the facts. Not only is the case commercial awareness on full display, but NMC (in administration) v EY has elements of civil law, touching on company law, contract law and tort law, which until a year ago, prior to my law conversion course, I’d have been fairly indifferent to. On the contrary now, because of a newly gained level of knowledge, an affinity sparked by curiosity naturally emerges.

NMC Health was a healthcare operator that collapsed in April 2020 after long-running fraudulent activity by its managers and original shareholders was exposed. The administrators of NMC are now suing EY and its auditors, for an alleged audit negligence claim in the performance of its duties. NMC Health specifically claims that EY failed to access the company’s general ledger for seven years, which would’ve plainly alerted the auditors of the then ongoing fraudulent transactions; leading to the $2.4 billion lawsuit. 

On the company law front we’re dealing with issues of insolvency, so I hypothesise there may be a rundown of provisions taken by NMC Health administrators. Administrators are insolvency specialists who take control of a company’s affairs and assets, assessing the company’s financial position to respond to its creditors and other stakeholders. 

In tort law, NMC Health is pursuing claims in professional negligence and vicarious liability, holding a third party, EY the employer, accountable for the alleged negligence of its employees.  The claimant (NMC Health) must demonstrate that EY’s actions breached its duty of care. Notably, the Caparo test which emerged from the Caparo Industries Plc v Dickman case is now central in English law, a key authority to ascertain whether a defendant had a duty of care in negligence cases, also stemmed from a case involving faulty auditing by accountants.

So now, just by association with the topics I’ve learnt about in my studies, the case has become of relevance and interest to me, even though ordinarily I’d not be concerned with the auditing profession or insolvent companies. 

Reading present-day litigation cases is an ulterior way to build up the financial glossary and start random searches that spark your interests. Before you know it, you can detect parallel commercial behaviours, leading with incisive questions that’ll prove that you may, perhaps, be commercially more aware than you thought!