Why alumna Laura Clement donates to Edinburgh Law School
Wed 12 March 2025
Laura Clement grew up in Glasgow, studied in Edinburgh, and then moved to London, where she qualified as a commercial property lawyer. In 2012, she went on a client secondment and has been working there ever since. Currently, she is in-house counsel for a FTSE 250 company in the food and catering sector. “I’m still a lawyer and I still use my Scots law degree because I cover the whole of the UK, Ireland, and the Netherlands,” Laura adds.
Laura graduated from Edinburgh Law School with an LLB in Law and French in 2003. “I started giving to the University pretty soon after I left” says Laura. She started a monthly donation to the University and has been donating ever since. For her, it felt like the logical next step – “it’s the same sort of thing as giving to charity,” she said, “and I think once you give, because it’s only a very small amount every month, unless you have a big lifestyle change, I think it’s the sort of thing that you just keep doing.”
Laura has been a monthly donor for 16 years. “It’s not even something I’ve ever really thought too much about,” she says, especially since her dad, also an alumnus of the University of Edinburgh, instilled into Laura the merits of giving from an early age. “It’s not really had a major impact on me, but when I think about how it all adds up, it’s a nice amount and it will have made a difference,” Laura adds, “it makes me feel like I’ve helped in some way which is good and was kind of my motivation.”
Monthly donations like Laura’s play a crucial role in helping students access opportunities that wouldn’t have otherwise been available to them, and Laura recognises that. “I don’t think we are ever going to get a diverse legal profession unless there is some help, so we have to make sure that we are enabling people from all backgrounds to have that chance.”
Laura also appreciates being able to see the impact that her donations have. “Sometimes, you’ve got no oversight of where your money goes or what happens to it. But, with the University, you get that correspondence and you see where your money is going and who it’s helping,” she says, adding that “keeping that sort of communication alive for people to see exactly where their donation is going is really good.”
Creating opportunities that diversify the legal profession is something Laura is very passionate about, and she urges other alumni to support this as well. “You’re not going to miss it, it’s like giving the price of a couple of coffees on a monthly basis”, she says, but the result can be impactful. “We can help keep Edinburgh diverse, which is what we all enjoyed, and we can help others experience what we experienced,” she concludes.
Thank you, Laura, for your continued support and investment in legal education at Edinburgh Law School.