U.K.
Legal training system failing law students
The government's decision last week to scrap training grants for would-be legal aid lawyers was as inevitable as it was sad, and was all the more pointed for coming the day after the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) named law firms as the highest-paying graduate employers.
Legal aid firms are not paying that much but hundreds of law students have been able to take their first steps in such practices thanks to the grants scheme. Last week, however, the Ministry of Justice said that while the grant scheme was "a laudable idea", its time had passed: "Many firms offer training contracts without being funded by a grant. And there are alternative routes into practice, for example through the paralegal route."
Such blithe confidence about the future of legal aid doesn't hide the fact that things are far from rosy for law students. The AGR research also revealed that law firms expect to have 12% fewer vacancies, against an average of 6.9% across graduate recruiters. But this is not stopping law schools churning out thousands of aspiring lawyers.
The most recent Law Society statistics show there were an ever-growing 14,482 full and part-time places on the legal practice course (LPC), the postgraduate course that all would-be solicitors are required to pass. Not all the places were filled, however, and in total 9,337 students were enrolled on the LPC, of whom around 80% either pass or are referred, meaning they failed part of the course but can resit.
While the number of places on the LPC has exploded over the last decade, increasing by nearly 70%, there has been only a 20% rise (to 5,809) in the number of training contracts for them to go on, a figure that is falling in the recession.
The legal training system is clearly getting badly out of kilter. In a capitalist market one would expect to see an excess of supply over demand, but we are getting to the stage where the law schools are simply pumping out too many students - and it is a feature of recessions that law becomes popular because it is (wrongly) seen as a safe career option in a difficult jobs market. At a cost of around £12,000 for the year-long LPC in London, before living costs, it can be a very expensive mistake. Last year the Law Society launched an information campaign to warn people considering a career in law as to the risks.
There are some frightening statistics about law students' debt and the fear of some - as expressed last week in a speech by David McGrady, the new president of the Institute of Legal Executives - is that the law will revert to being the preserve of those who can afford to qualify.
In the 1990s, I met students who had applied unsuccessfully for hundreds of training contracts before giving up on a legal career, and eventually the Law Society tried to freeze the number of LPC places. But it had to back down in the face of legal threats from training providers that the move was anti-competitive. This is why the Solicitors Regulation Authority, whose responsibility the LPC now is, has no plans to intervene, although it is piloting "work-based learning", which would enable students to qualify as solicitors without a formal training contract.
In this vacuum, it is perhaps no surprise that the College of Law, the leading provider of the LPC, is pushing the idea that students should qualify as solicitors after completing it to remove the bottleneck of available training contracts. This would mirror the position in other countries, most notably the US, where lawyers qualify after finishing their studies. Solicitors would then require additional authorisation to undertake "reserved legal activities" (those limited aspects of work that by law only qualified lawyers can undertake).
By contrast, the barrister side of the profession, where there are similar problems, is taking action. Following the Wood report in 2008, the Bar Standards Board is piloting an aptitude test for prospective bar vocational course students, which will test analytical and critical reasoning, as well as fluency in English, with the aim of ensuring that only those with a realistic chance of finding a pupillage (the barrister equivalent of a training contract) start the course. They will also be required to have a first or second-class honours degree.
This is a complex issue that also throws up diversity issues. As students progress from university all the way to qualification, the proportion who are women and/or from ethnic minority groups declines, although it is still far higher than those groups' makeup of the population as a whole. Then there is the difficult question of LPC graduates taking paralegal roles, sometimes on a vague promise of getting a training contract later, but as Kevin Poulter wrote recently, this is leading to claims of exploitation. Perhaps the College of Law's proposal would help in this regard.
Might the answer be to make it easier for law firms to take on trainees by ending the compulsory minimum salary they are required to pay (£18,590 in central London and £16,650 elsewhere)? This has repeatedly survived calls to be scrapped because it is seen as preventing exploitation and also promoting diversity.
What would help is acknowledgement of an emerging scandal. At the moment, there is insufficient recognition that the legal profession is sucking in too many students and spitting too many out, poorer for the experience in every sense of the word, before they have had a chance to prove themselves.
(Published by The Guardian – July 13, 2010)