Legal education as vocational preparation?:
Perspectives of newly qualified solicitors
Andrew Boon, University of Westminster
Avis Whyte, University of Westminster
Funded by the UK Centre for Legal Education
December 2002
Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
UK Centre for Legal Education 6
Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
Contents
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................... 2
Executive summary ................................................................................................... 3
1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 5
2 Methodology ....................................................................................................... 7
3 Reasons for choosing law ................................................................................. 11
4 The initial stage................................................................................................. 15
4.1. Law degree ................................................................................................... 15
4.2 Common Professional Exam (CPE)/Graduate Diploma in Law ................... 17
5 The Legal Practice Course................................................................................ 19
5.1 General ...................................................................................................... 19
5.2 Course culture ............................................................................................ 20
5.3 Transactions ............................................................................................... 26
5.4 Skills ........................................................................................................... 27
5.5 Evaluation and relevance to practice .......................................................... 31
6 Work experience prior to the training contract ................................................... 33
7 The training contract ......................................................................................... 37
7.1 General ...................................................................................................... 37
7.2 Choice of training firm and acquiring a contract .......................................... 37
7.3 Trainee and trainer expectations of the training contract ............................ 39
7.4 Structured training ...................................................................................... 41
7.5 Unstructured training .................................................................................. 45
7.6 Supervision during the training contract ...................................................... 46
7.7 The contract as preparation for post-qualification ....................................... 51
7.8 The training contract in hindsight ................................................................ 53
8 Professional Skills Course ................................................................................ 57
9 Views on and experience of current trainees..................................................... 59
10 A critique of legal education and training as vocational preparation ............... 61
10.1 The learning of skills ................................................................................... 61
10.2 The impact of specialisation ....................................................................... 64
10.3 The continuum............................................................................................ 67
10.4 Access, opportunity and careers................................................................. 70
10.5 On being a lawyer ...................................................................................... 72
10.6 Ethics ......................................................................................................... 77
11 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 79
Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 81
UK Centre for Legal Education 1
Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the UK Centre for Legal Education (UKCLE) for the grant to
conduct the research on which this report is based and particularly to Karen Hinett,
UKCLE Educational Developer, for her encouragement and assistance. And we
thank all the solicitors who generously gave their time to help with this project.
For further information contact:
Andrew Boon
Avis Whyte
School of Law
University of Westminster
4 Little Titchfield Street
London W1W 7UW
E-mail: A.Boon@wmin.ac.uk
Whytea@wmin.ac.uk
Note
This report is part of a series of research reports produced by the UK Centre for
Legal Education (UKCLE) – for further details see
www.ukcle.ac.uk/about/publications.html.
Law teachers are welcome, and indeed encouraged, to photocopy or otherwise
reproduce any part of this document for their own use, but UKCLE and the authors
would ask you to acknowledge the source.
Further copies of this report may be downloaded from
http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/research/boon.html
UK Centre for Legal Education
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
Tel: 024 7652 3117
Fax: 024 7652 3290
E-mail: ukcle@warwick.ac.uk
Web: www.ukcle.ac.uk
UKCLE is the subject centre for law, part of the Higher Education Academy
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
Executive summary
1. Participants in the study were subject to a range of influences in their decision to
study law, including parental pressure and the desire to improve employment
prospects (particularly the latter in the case of students who studied the Common
Professional Exam/Graduate Diploma in Law).
2. Recollections of degree level education were often hazy, including, for example,
why particular modules were chosen. There was little criticism of the content of
degrees, but indications that teaching methods were passive and that students
were acquiring habits of strategic learning, for example relative uninvolvement
during the course and memorisation and regurgitation in examinations.
3. Non-legal first degrees are sometimes directly helpful in legal work and may be
the genesis of a legal specialism. CPE students might feel deficient in legal
knowledge compared with law degree students.
4. Some participants were enthusiastic about the contribution of the Legal Practice
Course (LPC) to their development as lawyers, particularly in relation to their
confidence to tackle practical tasks. There was a general feeling, however, that
„skills‟ and transactional work were not sufficiently focused to respond to the
demands of specialisation. Some participants felt that the LPC focused on the
wrong skills or the wrong level.
5. There was approval of teaching materials for the LPC and of active learning
methods, but this may diminish the impact and influence of LPC teachers.
6. The volume and rationale of assessment methods used for the LPC were
questioned, especially the level of assessment. Particular criticisms included
setting assessments at too low a level and the use of open book examinations.
This was seen as a flawed attempt to recreate practice settings.
7. Many participants‟ experience of work placements was not positive. At an
appropriate point, work placement experience is valuable in deciding whether
legal practice will suit someone and what kind of firm to join. It may help to secure
employment, particularly if approached strategically.
8. Participants often accepted an offer of a training contract as a route to
qualification. The type of firm was, however, important to subsequent career
development and often this was not appreciated at the time.
9. Experience of the training contract is highly differentiated. It varies from
unstructured to highly structured, and candidates were often ignorant about what
was on offer. Unstructured training experiences are often associated with having
a caseload and were usually better appreciated with hindsight as assisting in
producing independence, self sufficiency and confidence.
10. Unless firms are aware of what training has been done, particularly the coverage
of the LPC, they are unable to help trainees to „fill in the gaps‟ in their knowledge.
11. Legal education provided inadequate preparation for some of the skills used in
the office. In particular, legal research was not taken seriously in law degrees,
leaving too much for the LPC to do.
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
12. There were mixed views as to the value of the Professional Skills Course. There
is a view that the outcomes do not warrant the cost to firms in trainee time and
expense.
13. Participants thought that current trainees were no better or worse than they had
themselves been.
14. We conclude that specialisation does pose very specific problems for legal
education. This may suggest a need for much closer attention to key intellectual
skills, such as analysis, and practical skills, such as research and writing, rather
than context dependent skills such as interviewing. Assessment should reinforce
the importance of these.
15. While learning skills engender confidence, specialisation renders the notion of
transferable practice skills problematic. There is an issue regarding the specific
stage at which specialist skills are learned. If learned in education there is a risk
of irrelevance, and if learned in practice there is a risk of incompleteness.
16. Pre-training contract specialisation carries risks, because entrants often end up in
unpredicted areas of work.
17. There is an issue regarding the extent to which legal education does and should
represent a continuum, with integrated stages and similar methods, as opposed
to sequential stages with different methods.
18. There is perceived to be a need for better information about legal careers, about
being a lawyer and for a more sustained treatment of ethics.
19. Much of the training contract appears to be used ineffectively, but participants
were usually fully active by their final seat.
20. Through a focus on skills and transactions legal education is preparing students
more effectively for practice, and the training contract should reflect this by
providing more opportunities for taking responsibility, including the opportunity of
having a caseload.
21. A good experience of the training contract involves a mixture of kinds of activity,
including watching more experienced staff, discussing matters with more
experienced staff and doing one‟s own work.
22. There was not a lot of support for the continuation of the Professional Skills
Course, and those who found it useful thought that the material should be in the
LPC.
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
Smaller classes at the degree stage. That's the only suggestion I would make.
Legal practice course, I don't think I'd make any suggestions because it
worked well for me. And then, when it got to the training, I'd say, “listen to
your trainees that phone up crying”. (PF9)
1 Introduction
This project explores, through in-depth interviews, the experiences in legal education
and training of newly qualified solicitors. The issues are important because legal
education and training is currently a contentious issue between powerful forces.1
There are proposals for a reformation of the three pre-qualification stages of the
process, currently covering a six year period. There are numerous suggestions for
adjustments to the existing system and alternative methods of preparing lawyers.2
The voices of those participating in legal education are largely absent from debates
and consultations. This report attempts to remedy this.
Legal education and training is now seen to comprise four stages; academic,
vocational, training contract and continuing professional development requirements.
This project is concerned with the first three of these stages. It includes the initial
stage, which can be a qualifying degree in law, lasting three years full time, or a law
conversion course for graduates in other disciplines, called a Common Professional
Examination or Graduate Diploma in Law, lasting one year full time. The compulsory
component of the qualifying law degree takes (QLD) between one and a half to two
years to cover on a degree course. Conversion courses usually take a little longer
than a conventional academic year to accommodate the extra material. The report
also covers the vocational stage of training, the Legal Practice Course (LPC) and the
training contract.
This research was conducted during a period of considerable turbulence for the legal
profession. Changes in the market for legal services, including increasing levels of
specialisation and government attempts to drive down the cost of legal services,
have raised questions about the future of professionalism. Issues of access to the
legal profession have raised questions about the length of legal education and its
cost to potential entrants. Specific questions have focused on each stage of legal
education including:
What do the three years of the law degree add to the preparation of lawyers?
Is a one year course adequate preparation for entrants to the LPC?
Are a one year vocational course and a two year apprenticeship the best
vocational preparation for lawyers?
Does the LPC have the right content and balance?
Do the stages of legal education and training form a continuum?
1
This is an area that has hitherto been negotiated between the profession and the academy. Recently,
the government may be seen to be playing a more significant role, formerly through the Lord
Chancellor‟s Advisory Committee on Education and Conduct and latterly by continuing pressure on the
legal profession to justify its remaining privileges, including the control of education.
2
The Law Society of England and Wales has launched two consultations on legal education in the past
two years, the last of these in collaboration with the General Council of the Bar of England and Wales.
The first proposed a mechanism for reviewing the whole framework of education and training using the
benchmark of the skills and knowledge required of a newly qualified solicitor. The second proposed
changes to the professions‟ requirements for law degrees. This determines whether law graduates are
eligible to proceed to vocational training. At the time of writing both consultations are ongoing. Both
evoked a considerable reaction and the second a particularly strong reaction on certain issues from
university law schools.
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What implications, if any, do changes in the legal services market have for legal
education?
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2 Methodology
The project developed out of research conducted for the Law Society of England and
Wales into entry into the legal profession.3 The main focus of the work was
quantitative, but a small qualitative survey within the project explored the experiences
of newly qualified solicitors entering the profession. It was decided to extend this
study by adopting a specific focus on legal education and training. It is this work that
is reported here.
The choice of a qualitative methodology for the first study was mandated by the
terms of the original research grant. For the second it was a methodology of choice.
The theoretical justifications for this are well known. Qualitative methods contribute
distinct possibilities to the familiar aims of research; to provide context, diagnosis,
evaluation or planning. While positivist research methodologies reduce reality to
simple propositions, qualitative work treats reality as multiple, constructed and
complex. The aim of qualitative research is, therefore, understanding of complex
phenomena rather than generalisation about phenomena.4 The participants in this
project are ideally placed to assist in delivering these goals in a study of legal
education and training.
At the time of interview the participants are generally 11 years from the start of their
academic legal education, and eight years from the start of their vocational training.
This sometimes renders their recollections vague. However, having now qualified as
lawyers, it also means that they have a recent overview of the whole process of
education and training, including the training contract, and some experience of what
it is like to work as a qualified lawyer. Their impressions offer a rare exploration of
relatively recent experience by those in a unique position to comment on the
relevance of education to practice. Their insight on relevance is not narrowly based,
for, as will be seen, these participants work in a wide range of organisations, firms
and corporations.
In 11 years there have been some changes in education and training. Higher
education has been subject to some pressure to make the curriculum more relevant
to the world of work through both „benchmarking‟ and various other initiatives.5 These
pressures will inevitably have seen results, at least to some degree. These are
probably patchy across law degrees.
It should also be noted that the participants in this study entered the vocational stage
of training in 1993, the year in which the new vocational stage course, the Legal
Practice Course, was introduced. This course was a very significant change from its
predecessor, the Law Society Finals, and involved staff in working with „legal skills‟ in
the framework of simulated transactions. It is clear that the methods of working
introduced by the Legal Practice Course have been refined since that time and some
of the criticisms of the participants in this study must be viewed accordingly.
However, the process of legal education and training contains substantially the same
stages as they experienced.
3
Duff E, Shiner M, Boon A and Whyte A (2000) Entry into the legal professions: the law student cohort
study year 6 (London: Law Society), and Boon A, Duff E and Shiner M (2001) „Career paths and choices
in a highly differentiated profession: the position of newly qualified solicitors‟ 64:4 Modern Law Review at
563.
4
Lincoln Y and Guba E (1985) Naturalistic inquiry (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage)
5
See, for example, Boon A (1990) „Enterprise in higher education: a new agenda for institutional
change?‟ 24:1 The Law Teacher at 14.
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The research set out to consider legal education and training from the perspective of
recent recruits to full status professionalism. While a topic checklist was used in the
interviews, the intention was that questions be relatively open ended. The issue of
the relevance of legal education and training to legal practice was not intended to be
the dominant theme. It is perhaps not surprising that it became so, given the
standpoint of the participants. Within the broad categories established by the topic
checklist, the salience of each issue for participants is reflected in the attention they
receive. In this report we have organised the more important material to give an
impression of the range of views the participants hold. This, obviously, is not a value
free activity. We have our own views on these matters, including a view that legal
education and training requires development in order to make it more effective.
However, our views have been informed and developed by the process of research
and the opinions of our participants. From the material included here others will be
able to make alternative constructions and conclusions.
Fieldwork was conducted in a tight time frame. 22 in-depth interviews were carried
out between December 2001 and May 2002. They were then transcribed and
imported into a Nudist database, where they were coded according to themes with
concurrence and disparity noted. The interviews were semi-structured in nature;
asking participants to reflect on each stage of their legal education, from academic
through to vocational stages, and to give their opinions about each of these stages.
Within the broad headings provided by the stage of education and training there were
no detailed subsets of questions. Participants developed and expounded their views
with minimum prompting. As the research developed and themes began to emerge,
particular emphasis was given to ascertaining what the interviewees actually did in
their traineeships to find out how well their legal education prepared them for „real life
in the office‟.
Having screened each potential interviewee, the sample was selected so as to
(broadly) reflect the demography of the solicitors profession taking into account
gender, type of firm and geographical location. In the event we interviewed 10 males
and 12 females. The majority of participants are in their 30s, the remainder in their
20s and four in their 40s. In terms of qualifications, the most participants,
approximately two thirds, studied for the LLB as their first degree. The final third took
the CPE route as their method of study.
The interviewees came from a wide variety of firms, from a practice established in the
1700s to one set up only two years ago, from large commercial to sole practitioner
and from specialist litigation to general high street practice. They were fairly evenly
spread in terms of geographical location. An overview of the sample is set out in
Table 1. The code denotes 12 female participants, using the abbreviation PF
followed by their number. The 10 male participants are denoted as PM followed by
their number. All participants were asked to identify their ethnicity in accordance with
the new ethnicity categories introduced in the 2001 Census, and all but two classified
their ethnicity as White/British.
Of necessity all participants successfully accomplished the Legal Practice Course.
The majority did so after completing straight law degrees (12 qualified with a LLB and
one with a BA in Law), and two did so after completing a Joint Honours degree. The
final seven interviewees took the Common Professional Exams before moving on to
the LPC.
The participants provided their own descriptions for type of firm/organisation in which
they currently work. The region in which the firm/organisation is located accords with
the current Government Office Regions (GORs) established across England in 1994.
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The London region is further subdivided into NUTS (Nomenclature of Units for
Territorial Statistics) regions. Most interviewees were located in London (six) and the
West Midlands (five), with an even number in the East of England and the North
West (three each) followed by the South East (two), the North East, Yorkshire and
the Humber, and Wales (one each).
The table overleaf provides a profile of the research participants.
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Table 1: Interviewee profiles
code gender age ethnic origin qualifications type of firm/organisation region (GORs)
PF1 F 30s White/British Joint Honours LPC general litigation firm South East
PF2 F 30s White/British LLB LPC rights litigation firm London: Inner London East
PF3 F 30s White/British LLB LPC high street firm West Midlands
PF4 F 40s White/British LLB LPC high street firm East of England
PF5 F 20s White/British BA Law LPC specialist litigation firm London: Inner London East
PF6 F 30s White/British CPE LPC criminal firm Yorkshire and The Humber
PF7 F 30s White/British CPE LPC private practice North West
PF8 F 30s White/British LLB LPC commercial firm West Midlands
PF9 F 20s White/British LLB LPC high street legal aid firm West Midlands
PF10 F 30s White/British LLB LPC general practice West Midlands
PF11 F 30s White/British CPE part time LPC general practice (legal aid) South East
PF12 F 30s White/Other Joint Honours LPC large commercial firm London: Inner London West
PM1 M 30s White/British CPE LPC commercial and private client firm London: Inner London West
PM2 M 20s White/British LLB LPC criminal firm North West
PM3 M 40s White/British CPE LPC specialist sole participant North West
PM4 M 20s Asian/British LLB LPC commercial firm West Midlands
PM5 M 30s White/British LLB LPC private practice East of England
PM6 M 30s White/British LLB LPC in-house media and entertainment Wales
organisation
PM7 M 30s White/British CPE LPC in-house transport organisation North East
PM8 M 30s White/British LLB LPC high street general practice East of England
PM9 M 40s White/British CPE LPC in-house media and entertainment London: Inner London West
organisation
PM10 M 30s White/British LLB LPC in-house insurance organisation London: Outer London East
and North East
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3 Reasons for choosing law
Participants offered a mixture of motives for choosing to study law, including family or
other influence, employment prospects, interest and motivations towards public
service.
Entrants are influenced by a range of factors, individuals or media, in their attitudes
towards law. Parental influence, for example, may be positive, or at least not
negative, to law as a subject or career. There are also differing degrees to which
participants are affected. There is a continuum of influence and a continuum of
impact or affect. At the extreme, there are those who are so influenced that their
decision to study law was not actually their own decision. For example, one
participant who had studied a degree in Law and French said:
I wanted to carry on with the French but I didn't necessarily want to be a
teacher, so I wanted to get a degree that let me go into a number of different
things with it really.
Q: WERE YOU FOCUSED ON LAW AT ALL?
Well, I wasn't at that stage, I was just basically bullied by my parents that law
was a good thing to do, but at that stage I had no real intention of going into
law, to be honest.
Q: SO, ESSENTIALLY YOU'RE STUDYING A DEGREE IN LAW TO KEEP
YOUR PARENTS HAPPY AND TO KEEP UP WITH THE FRENCH?
Yes, basically. That's sad, yes. (PM8)
Another had rejected a law degree in favour of English, because for law “you had to
do things like thinking and working and not reading nice books in bed all day”. She
was, however, pushed to do a CPE after her English degree by her mother, “who
found it very alarming that that you do a degree that didn‟t have a job that you do”
(PF11).
Another kind of influence is example. One participant had wanted to be a
paratrooper, but, being asthmatic, decided to follow his father “who sort of enjoys his
work” as a court clerk (PM2). Two others had fathers who were accountants. While
these participants accepted the value of a professional career, they wanted to do
something other than accountancy (PF7). Work colleagues influenced two other
participants, one a colleague at a Saturday job and the other a colleague in full time
employment (PF3 and PF4).
Employment prospects were a factor in the decision of other participants. There were
different reasons expressed for choosing law among those who wanted a
professional career. One reason is that law is perceived as a transferable
qualification, allowing a student an opportunity to defer career decisions (PF12).
Another is the wide choice of fields of law it is possible to work in:
What I liked about law is that there are so many different aspects to law, you
know, I could be a criminal lawyer, a commercial lawyer…banking or
international trade and then there‟s the whole personal injury, the clinical
negligence, employment. There just seemed to be so many different fields to
choose from, I felt I‟d find one that suited me. (PF7)
Others had started other careers and found that they did not want to stay in them. An
extreme example is a science graduate who described going to work for an
environmental waste company:
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You got into work and you had to wear a lab coat, you had to wear glasses all
the time you know to protect your eyes, gloves, and in certain areas you had
to wear an aqualung…because the chemicals in the air were dangerous and
you couldn‟t risk breathing them in and so you couldn‟t go into that part of the
warehouse without wearing an aqualung and I thought to myself well okay,
you know, I‟m reasonably intelligent, I don‟t think this what I want to do with
my life even though the money is good. I‟d made my mind up in all honesty on
that first day I started that job that I wasn‟t going to spend my life doing that.
(PM4)
This participant described how motor cars had pointed him towards a career in law:
In the front end of the car park were always these series of cars parked all in
a row, two jags, Mercedes and a BMW and I used to drive past every
morning, afternoon and evening and I thought to myself, well those people
can‟t be doing bad if they‟ve got cars like that parked outside and, you know, I
stopped one evening to have a look what kind of business it was and it was a
firm of solicitors. So I thought, blimey, you know, they sit there in their white
shirts behind their desks all day and they make that kind of money to have
that kind of car. And so I thought, I‟ll give it a whirl. (PM4)
Other participants had an intrinsic interest in law at some level. One participant had
studied law for a BTEC qualification, passed law O level and was encouraged to do a
law degree by the firm where she worked as a legal executive (PF9). Another said:
I thought I knew I wanted to be a solicitor. I‟d done some sort of work
experience with a local solicitor and spent time in court and that sort of thing.
And I thought that the law degree was an easier way to do it than, you know,
doing another degree and then converting. And I was quite interested in the
sort of academic side of law anyway. (PF5)
Relatively few participants expressed public service motivations for studying law.
Only this participant both did so and remained in an area of work with an obvious
public service orientation:
And I suppose this sort of idea of justice and doing something useful and all
that sort of thing, which is why I‟ve ended up not doing City law but in a firm
like this, where most of our clients come from quite deprived areas of South
London. It‟s a way of sort of mixing working with people like that and, you
know, an academic job as well. (PF5)
Others, despite expressing public service motives for studying law, were in
commercial organisations. An in-house lawyer said:
I know that sort of in my late teens it was always I wanted to be a lawyer, you
know, in the sense of helping people who were disadvantaged… not
commercial law at all, which is obviously what I've ended up doing. It was
always from the point of view of wanting to help people and obviously you got
paid reasonably well for doing that and now you're sort of a respected
member of the community…doing my articles things like family law and stuff
wasn't what I expected… you were a counsellor rather than a lawyer. So it
wasn't like you see on American TV where you're in court everyday fighting
for somebody. You were basically listening to somebody moaning about
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something and that's how it felt a lot. So, I just didn't turn out to be as
sympathetic as I'd expected. (PM7)
Another commercial lawyer said:
I was going in wanting to help people and do general good. I was going to get
innocent people off criminal charges and help people through painful divorces
and get them compensation for their nasty injuries from those awful insurers.
And company commercial sort of things didn‟t interest me at all. Commercial
things generally didn‟t interest me at all. (PM10)
The motives of students who had studied the CPE were usually more directly
concerned with employment. For most, a CPE was associated with having chosen a
non-vocational degree for love and now needing to find work. Having been „indulged‟
by parents in this choice there was sometimes associated parental pressure. For
example, one participant said that her ambition had been to “go and work in a ski
resort and stay there and maybe marry a millionaire. But Mum and Dad were not as
optimistic as me” (PF6). A pre-occupation with obtaining employment was not,
however, the only reason to study a CPE. One man was working in a law firm without
legal qualifications and felt that he would always be a second class citizen unless he
was a solicitor (PM3).
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4 The initial stage
4.1. Law degree
4.1.1 Content
Most law degrees offered in the United Kingdom are qualifying law degrees (QLD).
This means that they comply with the professional bodies‟ requirements for
progression to the next stage of training, the vocational stage. In the case of solicitors
this is the Legal Practice Course.6 The Seven foundations of legal knowledge
comprise the core of a three year course and often represent seven twelfths of the
law degree. In addition there is a list of multi-disciplinary perspectives and skills that
must be incorporated in a QLD, either as part of this core or as separate subjects.
Providing the core is present, and these other requirements are met, students may
achieve the remainder of their degree by studying any other material.
Most law degrees provide other legal subjects to make up the balance of the
curriculum, either as compulsory subjects or as options under the particular degree
scheme. However, provided the core is studied and passed, the balance of material
could be in any other discipline, hence law and languages, law and economics and
law and politics degrees. Since polytechnics became universities in 1991, acquiring
degree awarding powers, validation and quality assurance mechanisms have been
standard throughout the higher education sector and vested in universities. Oversight
of the sector was assumed by the Quality Assurance Agency in the late 1990s, but
law as an undergraduate discipline has not been subjected to inspection since the
early 1990s.
Despite the domination of the degree by the core, it is assumed that degrees in
different institutions have a quite different flavour. For example, it may be that,
generally, teaching in old universities is more theoretical and multi-disciplinary and
that in new universities more practical.7 This may be because staff recruitment to new
universities was more likely to be from those who had taken the participant route than
an academic route.
Most higher education institutions in the United Kingdom offer a law degree because
it is popular with students, enjoys high disciplinary status and is delivered at low cost.
Law degree students are a diverse group; they come from a wide range of
backgrounds, reflecting, to some extent, this institutional diversity.
The participants in this research had very different starting points in studying for a
law degree. They ranged from full time students at Oxbridge to part time evening
students at a modern university. Understandably, the challenges they faced were as
different as their dominant memories. For example, a part time evening student
recalls:
I turned up each week, and Leamington to Wolverhampton is a fair
drive…looking back at it…I‟m surprised I stuck it out. We used to finish the
lecture at 9 and then drive back, I used to get home about ten-thirty…yeah it
used to take me an hour and a half but I just thought it doesn‟t matter how
6
These requirements are set out in the Joint statement on the completion of the initial or academic
stage of training by obtaining an undergraduate degree issued by the Law Society and the General
Council of the Bar in 1999.
7
Halpern D (1994) Entry into the legal professions: the law student cohort study years 1 and 2 (London:
Law Society)
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boring…the topic, it doesn‟t matter how boring or uninteresting I find it, if you
revise you can always pass the exam and I did. (PM4)
Impressions of university years are equally individual and diverse throughout the
participant group. There was relatively little criticism of the content of degrees and
some support for the degree experience. One participant said “the things I learnt on
my degree, well the basic law concepts I suppose were useful” (PM4). Another saw
little justification for requiring equity and trusts:
Unless…you are going to do land law or probate, I really don‟t see the point in
having to put people through that. It was just a completely pointless
experience. (PF7)
Similarly, memories of options were often clouded. Some participants struggled to
remember the options they had chosen, let alone why they chose them:
I did sex discrimination and the law. I've got this feeling that I might, I know I
said I didn't probably do any matrimonial or employment before I went to LPC,
I've got a feeling I might have done some employment but I can't sort of say a
hundred percent certain but I suspect they would have been all sort of
litigation based as opposed to property. (PF8)
A popular response to the question about motivation was that, having not decided
whether to practise, or, having decided to practice but not in which area, participants
chose the options that interested them:
I can't remember now, I think things that I thought would be interesting
because I never had any, you know, burning desire to be any particular sort of
solicitor, I didn't know what I wanted to specialise then so I think things that I
thought would be interesting. Well, I did - no, I can't remember. (PF10)
Others had a clear idea of an area of practice in which they wished to specialise and
they chose subjects for this reason. This was perceived to be easier for those hoping
to work in commercial practices. A participant who was aiming at high street practice
said:
I have done some clinical negligence work so I suppose ultimately the law
medicine and ethics created some kind of interest there. But I mean really it
was, as to the sorts of the subjects we studied in that then it‟s something that
you very rarely actually put into practice I think. Well not in a High Street. I
mean if you‟re in a specialist clinical negligence firm then maybe, but in a
High Street firm I don‟t think you would ever get that sort of - well you never
know but… (PF3)
Predicted careers often did not materialise, and other subjects, sometimes disliked at
the time, proved more useful.
This is the ironic thing, I absolutely hated property at university, decided not to
do the commercial property option during LPC and now I do commercial
property. I was convinced I wanted to do employment and matrimonial, you
know, sort of did the specialist subjects on those and then found out I hated
going to court so I was a bit stuck really. (PF8)
One participant said that the core or foundation subjects had proved more useful in
his work than the options.
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4.1.2 Teaching methods
Even though participants had experienced other kinds of education and training since
leaving university, including the more active orientation of the LPC, their criticisms of
university type teaching methods were muted. An Oxbridge student, for example,
recalls:
Well, I mean, it [law part two] was quite old fashioned really. It was tutorials
and lectures. And the tutorials we had to read certain cases, and then we‟d
have to apply them to scenarios that were then put forward to us. I don‟t think
that the method of teaching was the most inspirational. [A]nd the
lectures…would all depend on the lecturers, some of them were just
absolutely dreadful. And others were very, very good. And the ones that were
very good were those QCs or barristers who were still in practice, who came
up to teach us. People who were actually applying the law practically still, the
younger generation, were definitely better because they talked about law not
in terms of the unreachable, but in terms of practical application. So it was a
mixed bag. Not the most inspiring though. (PF12)
Strategic learning, involving low level activity during the course and „memorisation
and regurgitation‟ for exams, appeared to be a common method of working, accepted
almost as a rite of passage:
It's all academic and you just learn it all for exams and it doesn't relate when
you're at university to anything practical at all, other than sort of the problem-
solving essays they give you which in themselves are academic rather than,
what you're going to do for your client or how you're going to [do it] and again
partly because of the sort of person I am, I think I very much learnt it for that
and then a lot of it has gone...if I could remember all the cases we had to do
now I'd be laughing but I feel like there's a hell of a lot of stuff that we have
learnt at some stage, or been taught at some stage, that just doesn't stay with
you. (PF10)
Fortunately, some students recalled an example of an inspirational teacher at
university, someone who inspired them with a vision of the potential of law. But what
participants perceived they retained from the university years was basic legal skills
and awareness. It was generally recognised that, in addition to the basic skills of
legal study, a law degree provides an opportunity to work at greater depth than a
CPE. The dominant impression, however, is that with hindsight, these participants
desired more experience of applying the law in practical situations as part of their
academic studies.
4.2 Common Professional Exam (CPE)/Graduate Diploma in Law
The proportion of entrants to the profession who are CPE graduates has been
steadily rising. 8 Experiences of the CPE were so mixed that participants might have
attended totally different courses rather than different institutions. Some participants
described a relatively relaxed experience. One suggested that staff on the CPE
course attended were “very lax about making us do essays and stuff so I went to all
the lectures and mugged it up at the end of the year” (PF11). Another said it was not
demanding, “being spoon-fed in a sort of kind and caring sort of way” (PM1). But
8
According to Law Society (2001) Trends in the solicitors profession: annual statistical report (London:
Law Society) only 58% of newly admitted solicitors were law graduates compared to a decade ago,
when 65% of newly qualified solicitors had law degrees. The percentage of newly qualified solicitors with
non-law degrees has jumped from 10% in 1991 to 21% in 2001.
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
most, like this student, found that “it‟s fine, it works…you need a good body of factual
knowledge”. Others seemed to have a different experience, with “more library,
research and book work than I was used to” (PM7) and having to learn “70 to 80
cases a subject…parrot fashion”, working long hours, getting ill and remembering
little that was memorised (PF6). This participant argued that the CPE should have
used:
an open book exam because you were learning things which you would never
have to rely on because there would always be the books there. Legal
Practice was a real shift from the CPE, open book, very practical based,
enjoyed the course. Hated the CPE, enjoyed the LPC. (PF6)
Because of specialisation CPE students find that their first degree might be more
useful in legal practice than marginal legal studies. For example, a participant with a
first degree in sociology and psychology said that this was highly beneficial in her
work:
It [psychology and sociology degree] has helped in the criminal side of things.
If I went into commercial practice it wouldn‟t. Criminal side of things is
understanding why people‟s backgrounds affect how they turn out, the
psychology, a bit about, you know, what makes people become criminal,
crossing the lines, escapism. [F]or me personally, that‟s what interested me
about sociology, why people are like what they are and why people do certain
things and how your background affects how you are. And I think now, doing
what I‟m doing, it goes hand in hand because…I‟m dealing with people who
haven‟t had certain privileges…it‟s not everyone, obviously some people are
just bad. But I think it has given me a greater understanding of why people
commit crimes. For me it was the perfect degree really to do what I‟m doing.
(PF6)
Another participant said:
Well, for example in my first year PQE, I was doing commercial work but the
two years after that I did multi-party action work and I represented [a class of
injury victims at a public enquiry]. There was an awful lot of microbiological
and genetic information that was coming out from all the different experts and
so I was sent down there by my firm, so that I could go some way to
understanding the evidence that was coming out and being able to relay it in
a form that could be chewed off and understood by the lawyers back at the
law firm. Now, because in my first year at university I did physiology and that
kind of thing, I have a relatively good understanding of human anatomy and
that‟s all proven very useful in the work I do now because, obviously, if you
get a claim coming in saying that someone has broken some bit of their body
or some internal organ or other has been damaged, at least I know vaguely
which direction I‟m heading in. (PF7)
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5 The Legal Practice Course
5.1 General
The Legal Practice Course (LPC) marked a radical change from the Law Society
Finals course (LSF). Although the LSF had begun to introduce students to the forms
used in law offices, it was not perceived to be a practical course. It was typically
examined by unseen examinations and was widely criticised as inappropriate
preparation for professional practice. In addition to addressing these criticisms, the
LPC followed the Bar Vocational Course that had recently been revised by the
Council for Legal Education. A model for the LPC, tried and tested in Vancouver,
British Columbia, which had also been influential in the design of the Bar Vocational
Course, was adopted. Unlike the undergraduate degree a detailed template was
provided for the LPC. Providers had to put their course through a Law Society
validation process explaining in detail how it would be delivered. This was to be
followed by an annual visit from a Law Society panel to ensure that the template was
observed, and that levels of resource and standards were being maintained.
The course was based on training and assessment in five core practical skills;
drafting, research, advocacy, interviewing and negotiation. Students were to conduct
„transactions‟, involving realistic scenarios, including form filling and other routine
preparation. These activities would provide realistic experience of the case, which
would link with work on the skilled activity to form the focus of classroom activity. The
difference between the Legal Practice Course and similar courses elsewhere was
that it introduced a substantial body of new substantive material. Students studied a
compulsory core of Civil and Criminal Litigation, Business Law and Practice,
Conveyancing and Wills and Probate. They then had a selection of options provided
according to the expertise of the institution at which they studied. The core area
notionally took around 20 weeks and the options 10 weeks. A further six weeks were
allowed for assessment. The total period of 36 weeks was substantially longer than
the Vancouver course and a degree course.
In addition to a new curriculum and new teaching and learning methods, new
assessment practices were adopted. The skills were to be assessed on the basis that
a student passed (competent) or failed (not competent). Knowledge components
were to be assessed in the context of practical exercises and in „open book‟
examination formats. It was rumoured that some tutors at institutions that had taught
the Law Society Finals course were unhappy with the change. For others, the new
methods of working would have taken some time to get used to. The perceptions of
students in this survey, typically passing through the first year of the course, may
have been affected by these factors. Some undergraduate degree courses offered
courses involving activities similar in nature to those on the LPC. These students
might be more attuned to the demands and expectations of the LPC. Other students,
probably the majority, came from institutions where the style of education and
training offered by the LPC was unfamiliar and, sometimes even, anathema.
The LPC attempted to foster the working habits of solicitors and the culture and ethos
of a solicitor‟s office and habits of „active learning‟. Apart from the teaching and
learning methods employed, the Law Society encouraged providers to dedicate
space to LPC students, including „base rooms‟ which groups could treat as „their‟
space for small group work. The Law Society insisted on high levels of resource
provision, such as computing. They insisted on a ratio of full time staff to students of
12.5:1, so that students might receive intensive tuition, supervision and assistance.
Unsurprisingly, this made the LPC an expensive course. Since there was no
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government subsidy for the course, the full cost was borne wholly by students. This
made the LPC somewhat contentious, particularly when, during the 1990s, the issue
of access from less disadvantaged sections of the community became an issue.
5.2 Course culture
The course structures, contents and teaching and assessment methods adopted by
LPC providers were variations on a theme, heavily influenced by the Law Society.
There have been various changes made to the structure since the course was
launched and the experience and confidence of providers has increased so that, as
one participant put it “there was all sorts of debate about how good it was and so on
and so forth, and it‟s been constantly modified, and I think it‟s getting better and
better” (PF12).
5.2.1 Content
The generalist content of the LPC was also an issue for some participants, since
much of the curriculum was irrelevant, depending on which area of the profession
participants joined following the LPC. A large common core inevitably means that
information relevant to particular fields must be left out. For example:
I mean in my field I could have done with a lot more help learning about
quantum, how to assess damages and that would have been very, very
helpful but that‟s quite a specialist thing now really. (PF7)
A participant who went to a City firm said:
Everyone was doing conveyancing, but it was private conveyancing which of
course I was never ever going to do in practice. I had to do the sort of
criminal, we had to do wills and probate. Now the relevance to me, going to a
City firm was, I mean, zero. But they had to cater, of course, for people who
were not just going to big City firms, but also going into high street practices.
So you know, and I think there was a lot of that going on, but we didn‟t notice
it, we were just glad not to be spoon-fed, and to actually have to think and do
practical work and so on. (PF12)
Participants tended to accept the necessity of the LPC as vocational preparation.
Despite the workload that some participants complained about others thought that
more care should have been taken to stress how important detail is in legal practice:
Little things like drafting witness statements. You have to take a really spot on
witness statement… there just wasn‟t maybe enough emphasis on how
careful you have to be with phrasing things and really, really being very
concise to the point of [pedantry], that you have to do in practice…not just for
witness statement but for everything and being as clear and concise as you
possibly can. And here I think the catch phrase is always pithy, you have to
be pithy. (PF7)
Others felt that the stress on the interpersonal dimension of work as a lawyer
received insufficient attention:
Just dealing with partners and things like that, you know, can just be really
difficulty from being a massive problem with your everyday life and you just
don‟t have an inkling of that when you are training. (PF7)
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Support for the content of the LPC was perhaps more fulsome from general
participants than from specialists:
I actually went to a general high street practice first so for me the LPC was
quite useful because you do sort of lots of different subjects on the LPC and
ended up doing lots of different subjects in my training so in other words I did
family, I did employment, I did a bit of commercial, I did some property so in
that respect, and also I was very much thrown in the deep end because it was
a smaller firm, and I actually found the LPC to be useful for me. I know that
people who go to commercial firms don't necessarily find that and they find
that a lot of the subjects they did at LPC they've never ever needed to use
since. So I think it depends what kind of firm you go into really. (PM7)
Others found parts of the LPC useful. For example, a student who returned to the
LPC having worked in a firm at every opportunity since she was 16 said:
Law books, looking them up, revisiting things that I should have remembered
from my law degree. That was quite interesting. And the accounts parts, and
ethics, because you don‟t tend to learn that do you? Day to day in a law firm,
you need to sit down and read it. So that was quite interesting, but the rest of
it I found a bit sort of boring. (PF1)
The overwhelming message regarding the content of the LPC, however, is that it
provides an insufficient degree of specialisation. For example, a participant
commenting on the Business Law and Practice core subject on the LPC said:
I just thought that commercial work was very different to what we'd learnt
because I thought that the commercial course that we had done was more
towards large commercial firms, such as PLC clients or whatever. And,
obviously, in a high street firm they were more local businesses, they weren't
even limited companies, there was a lot more partnership situations whereas
a lot of the law that we'd done on the business law module was to do with
limited companies. So I found that not as helpful. (PM7)
Another said:
I just had a very normal upbringing, a very average upbringing and my
parents didn't have shares or investments or anything like that so all of that
was alien to me and I think on the LPC course would have been the time to
introduce that to me. And I suspect that would apply to a lot of people but
obviously it can't be too detailed or technical because it has to be built up and
you'll pick up a lot when you get into practice but I think to teach the LPC
student to be able to read a set of financial accounts, a balance sheet and a
profit and loss account would make like a thousand times difference to the
start of their career. (PM7)
While this particular plea is partially for general education, the rationale of the LPC
options is to prepare students for specialist areas of practice. The first problem is that
option selection is often for irrelevant or unrealised reasons. Thus, options were
chosen because they were thought to be potentially useful for the area of practice the
participant intended to go into, usually incorrectly (PF1, PF11) because the training
firm requested (PF5) or to appeal to particular kinds of firms (PM8: legal aid firm,
PM6: general practice, PM7: high street firm) interest (PF7: “environmental…it was
quite politically correct”) or because friends chose them (PM4).
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
The second problem is that the options are not sufficiently detailed to be of much
assistance in practice:
And then there was an optional final term. And I, again I enjoyed the work we
did then, but it was just sort of dipping your toe in. And I don‟t think I‟ve come
out from those lectures thinking I now understand exactly what it would be like
to be a lawyer in those fields. Certainly environmental law I think we had
about five lectures in total, and got a tiny little book. When you look at all the
other work that we‟d done, and you think “Well it‟s got to be more than that”.
Then I did employment law and again it‟s the same, sort of two or three
lectures and then you‟re sort of left on your own to revise for a paper. And it
was a completely different way to the way we had been working in the proper
core subjects where we really had gone into things in depth and we had those
skills lectures as well that went on in the background. (PF1)
I did tort, and I really enjoyed tort at university, and then I did a personal injury
option at Law School, which was very brief but still quite useful I suppose.
And that‟s what I‟ve ended up doing now… certainly the university tort course
was very useful for a sort of good grounding in the actual law. But Law School
less so, just because it was very brief what we did. (PF5)
In real life and with the sort of slightly diverse and esoteric practice that I have
here, that basic layer of knowledge is not going to get you very far at all,
because we don‟t have a basic conveyancing practice in this firm. It‟s more
sophisticated clients doing more sophisticated kind of work. (PM1)
5.2.2 Teaching methods
The guiding philosophy behind LPC method was „active learning‟. Lectures and large
groups were discouraged and participation by all members of a class encouraged.
Many participants noticed a marked difference between the Legal Practice Course
and their degree course. Reactions to this were mixed. Some were positive:
We were put into classes, and we remained in those classes throughout the
year. And we would work together. Actually, we would sit at tables of four. So
rather than the lecture, where a whole bunch of material was rambled up and
we scribbled furiously… there were much more discussion scenarios, we
were encouraged to ask questions, we were encouraged to work through
problems. In a way it was a combination of what we‟d had at Cambridge,
which was the lecture and the tutorial; this was sort of all thrown into one. It
was a much more practical approach. And the material itself was constantly
based on practical examples, and trying to make it relevant to everyday life
and the real application of the law. (PF12)
I liked the way the classrooms were set out so you were in your table of four
and they moved you round, I think every six weeks or something. Really
enjoyed the classes, very much wanting people to participate and
speak…Before the class, there was plenty of time to do the work which
needed to be done so there wasn‟t this, you‟re in class nine „til five then
you‟ve got to do all the work at home…it was quite relaxed in a strange
way…there were no sort of real exams, I mean there were written exams but
part of that was your course work. And we just did so many different things it
just wasn‟t pure lecturing, there was the interview techniques and all of that
type of stuff. I really, really enjoyed the LPC. (PF6)
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
In my tutor group there was nine people and it was very intense but you had
all the support you needed. They knew you were flagging on something, you
couldn't hide from it, it was picked up and dealt with and, you know, those
mornings that I would go in, if there was anything I didn't understand then,
you know, they'd be there at 8 „o‟ clock in the morning to go through anything
on a one-on-one basis as well. So it was a hard course and it was a hard year
but I came out of it feeling I'd learnt more in that year probably than I'd done
in the three years of my degree. (PF9)
Some participants did not have fond memories of working in teams:
Research - I didn't like being paired off, that was really annoying because we
would be forcibly paired off with people and on most occasions I was paired
off, I was paired off with someone I would rather die than trust them… So I
ended up doing the entire thing anyway. So it was a bit pointless sending us
off in teams because there was no way I was risking my results on what they
were going to find. (PF11)
Others found difficulty adjusting to the culture of the LPC, particularly when they had
been used to didactic methods on degree courses:
When I first did the LPC it bothered me that I had to do small group work
because I wasn‟t used to it. I was used to lectures and being, you know,
talked at really. And then all of a sudden there you were being asked if you
had an opinion on things, and you think wow… it was nice. But the first few
weeks I thought “no, I don‟t want to have to express an opinion, I‟m used to
hiding at the back of a lecture hall and sleeping”, you know, not having to say
anything. (PF1)
So; I think as well because my first degree was English, having something
that was classroom based and task based and, “Answer this question.
Answer!” It was a bit of a culture shock. (PF11)
Others, while more used to activity and participation, found the distinctive social mix
on the LPC difficult:
I suppose I was quite better prepared for it than a lot because I‟d been used
to doing the seminars and the speaking and you know the presenting to
people at university, at (modern university). So I was probably better prepared
for it than some people. But I suppose I felt a bit intimidated because there
were very, very rich girls there who went to nice schools and everything and
whose daddy owned a bank or daddy was a General or something like that.
So I suppose I felt a bit intimidated by that. (PF2)
5.2.3 Teaching materials
Teaching materials for the LPC were also a change from those with which
participants were familiar. Whereas degree materials were often disparate and
uncoordinated, LPC materials were usually concentrated in a single manual, with
focused legal text, practical context and forms and precedents under one cover:
I preferred the LPC because the books were quite good in giving you
information as to the basics of what you wanted and need to know fairly
clearly, without going into too much detail I suppose but, at least it gave you a
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grounding so you would know where to look if you wanted something more
detailed. (PM6)
A CPE student, however, found the sudden switch to a practical orientation was a
little premature:
In the second year [i.e. having come from the CPE to the LPC] you could
have done a bit more black letter law, and that would have been an
advantage, but that‟s not a disaster. Because one‟s going to learn more and
more in practice as you go along anyway. (PM1)
5.2.4 Assessment
The assessment regime of the LPC was distinctive for a number of reasons. For
instance core subjects were assessed by examination, whereas options were
assessed by a variety of methods including coursework or performance of skills. This
produced demands that were perceived as disparate:
All the core subjects were all done in one go from September to January,
exams in February, so it was a lot to cram in those, if I remember rightly were
there four cores, four core subjects and then from February to the Summer
were two optional subjects and so the year is totally imbalanced. The first half
where you did your core subjects was really crammed…and the second half
was so airy fairy I went to India for four weeks. (PM4)
A further distinction was the amount of assessment. With pervasive, core and
optional subjects and skills performances to assess there was a high volume of
assessment. For practical and pedagogic reasons, assessment points were usually
located proximate to the conclusion of teaching of the particular area. Therefore,
assessment was continuous throughout the year:
It was the first where I'd done a course where you had to do the work when it
was set and it was constant, everything I'd ever done before, especially I think
because when I did the CPE I did that part-time over 2 years, they didn't
make us do, they set us essays. If you didn't do them they just said, “Oh,
alright then”… So I'd always, before the LPC, done stuff you could do nothing
all year and then work like a demon at the end of it and you'd do just as well.
(PF11)
There were varied responses to the volume and pressure of work created by
assessment. One participant thought that:
Incredibly, incredibly hectic, far more exams in a year than I‟ve ever done
before. A huge variety of skills that were tested, you weren‟t just doing your
straightforward three-hour papers; you were doing all the practical stuff as
well. The most enjoyable bit was just the sheer variety and the fact that you
were looking at things very practically and you were saying, “right, okay
practical skills time, how would you talk to this person, how would you treat
this problem, how would you negotiate this out etc, etc, etc”. (PM5)
Another thought that:
The emphasis was more quantity rather than quality. Because we had so
much work to do, so many materials to carry round with us it wasn‟t a fun
experience. I didn‟t enjoy it. (PF2)
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
A possible explanation is that, precisely because of the volume, assessment
appeared to be somewhat perfunctory:
Advocacy was fine except for watching yourself on video which is horrible…it
would just be bail applications and pleas in mitigation sort of stuff so you
could do a speech and that would be it. (PF 11)
Yet another, surprisingly, found the workload less than their law degree, saying:
I didn‟t have to work nearly so hard. And that meant that I had time to
socialise…I had a year of sport and drinking. (PM10)
Another point of contention was the different style of assessment prevalent on the
LPC, which often attempted to replicate „real life‟ contexts. The desire of providers to
make assessment realistic and practical sometimes conflicted with other assessment
aims, for example testing depth and breadth of knowledge. One participant recalled:
It was quite an esoteric VAT point which, you know, is not the easiest thing in
the world to explain to people who know about it, and we dumbed it down and
I think virtually the whole class did and we got marked down for it and we
said, well hang on, you know, you‟ve ask us to write a memo to Joe Bloggs,
we‟re assuming it‟s Joe Bloggs, and the examiner said, “Well no, sorry, what
we actually wanted you to do was to tell us all you know about VAT”. And that
is the problem when we try to combine theory and practice… Joe Public
doesn‟t want chapter and verse; he wants the answer, he doesn‟t want the
workings. And I think that was the problem with the LPC; it tried to be
practical but at the end of the day a lot of the questions were just basically
saying, just tell us everything you know about it. (PM5)
Another point of difference was in examination practice. While formal examinations
were retained for the LPC, providers often attempted to mitigate common criticisms
of the traditional format by adopting practices such as permitting candidates to take
materials into examinations. This was not always seen to be a benefit:
I actually find open book examinations…as difficult as having to go in with just
everything in your head…maybe because when you know you‟ve got the
book you think “Oh well, I‟ve got the book”, you know, but actually it‟s not that
easy, you‟ve still got to have it in here [pointing to head]. (PF4)
Others found the rationale for open book examinations adopted by some providers,
that they were a more realistic assessment of the skills of practice, to be
misconceived:
And I don‟t think actually that‟s very helpful because as lawyers we don‟t
know everything, that‟s why we have libraries, that‟s why we have resources.
And I think to try and, even getting people to take books into exams, I think
that‟s rather an uncomfortable half way house…Well, you think “well hang on,
how realistic is this, I‟m in the law firm but I only have my manual. I‟m not
allowed to look at a library. How can this be a practical based examination?”
It‟s a farce, it‟s not an exam because you can bring in effectively the answers
or the area of law that you‟re being examined on but it‟s not a fair assessment
of your research and recall capabilities because you‟re using a text. (PM5)
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Finally, the fact of assessment was useful in relation to the skills activities, because
“we were encouraged to take them very seriously, I mean we had to because we had
to pass them, so there was no goofing around” (PF12).
5.3 Transactions
While familiarity with the transactions encountered in practice was seldom perfect,
the focus on transactions was perceived to be beneficial. It had engendered either a
degree of recognition of the kind of area or problem involved, familiarity with the
basics of deconstructing the problem or confidence to tackle a practical matter:
I felt that I knew the basics of, you know, what to do and the basic types of
court forms that I should fill out and how to draft the basic types of
documents, applications and orders and this kind of thing. (PF7)
I mean obviously I‟m not saying that it, it‟s never going to cover every
eventuality etc. But at least it gave you some, for instance in conveyancing at
least you did feel that when you went into a conveyancing seat you had some
kind of clue as to how these things proceeded. (PF3)
When you're in practice and you're just given a file and it's like “here, so-and-
so wants to buy a house”, and you just don't know where to start. But, I
suppose if somebody then puts a contract in front of you, you think, “Oh yes,
I've seen one of these before”, so it was a good basis. Obviously, it was
nowhere near sufficiently detailed to be able to go, “OK, fine, I'll just draft this
contract” but it was a good basis from which to work. (PF8)
I was despatched to go and do probate for my first six months and the first
thing he handed me was an IHG201 and I thought, “oh shit, why did it have to
be one of those”, it's the worst thing that we had to do at law school and there
it was… But we'd done it and to that extent certainly I found the forms that
you were given to do looked like the forms you'd been doing at law school…
my first day I was given…a little estate…he sort of said “you go off and see
what you think needs doing”. So, I sort of looked at the [1HG201] form [and
thought], “right, I think we need, oh, we need an interest statement” so I think
I spent the first two hours trying to dictate a letter to the bank asking for an
interest statement…I had a reasonable recollection of all the stuff about trust
powers and so I could normally wing it and there was a certain amount of
winging it but frankly you were explaining stuff to clients that they'd never
understand. (PF11)
I think we did leaseholds in about two weeks, which perhaps needed a bit
more detail. But you could do something if you knew what the procedure was,
you knew what a transfer was, you knew what an exchange was, you knew
how to exchange, so you could probably get through that on your own. (PF1)
In some cases participants had entered practice with a commitment to using
procedures learned on the LPC but, with hindsight, saw these enthusiasms as
inappropriate:
I wanted to scare people with notices to admit facts and everything…[laughs]
only people who are fresh out of law school do notices to admit facts…They
probably did sort of think “is she mad, why on earth would we admit it?”…I
just thought it would be a good thing to do. (PF11)
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There was also some criticism of the failure of the transaction methodology. One
participant felt that the LPC had not delivered it effectively and that it needed to
reflect the conditions of work in the area that students aspired to work in. Yet another
felt that he had arrived in his training firm without the levels of confidence that the
designers of the LPC had hoped for:
I knew nothing about the structure of the contract, the training contract. I had
the personal skills and I had obviously gone through the ropes for that and I
had some of the work knowledge but I‟d never run a file and it would be really
good actually, if at the LPC, they gave you a file to run. A mock conveyance
where somebody in the faculty is your client, it‟s a fictional conveyance, open
a file, write them client care [letters. Also] get people in the profession to
assist more in preparing the practical exercises. I wouldn‟t necessarily go for
people from the big five, ten, fifteen, twenty London based firms. They will
take on enormous amounts of people but I still think that the vast majority of
people who practice law in this country work for sort of medium sized firms.
(PM5)
Finally, another participant felt that the emphasis on transactions was not relevant
because the procedures of practice are easily discoverable with „common sense‟:
Well family‟s so wishy washy isn‟t it, a lot of it‟s common sense. I mean if you
see a parent who wants contact with their child, you fill in an application, send
it to the court and you're sort of led by the court through the case. You don‟t
have timescales that you really have to work to, other than those that the
courts impose on you, so you know what they are. No, I‟ve found family very
easy because it is so flexible and it is so much common sense. (PF1)
5.4 Skills
The distinctiveness of the LPC lies in the practical skills students are introduced to.
Some of these are personal (research and drafting) and some are interpersonal
(interviewing, advocacy and negotiation9). Some of the skills, for example
interviewing, have general relevance:
It gives you the confidence. You‟ve got something behind you whether you
worked in a law firm or not already. You know something, you can fall back on
something and say, “I know I have to shake this person by the hand and sit
them down”, for example, rather than “what do I do, where do I even take
them?”, which you might think. I know it‟s a bad example, but you know?
(PF1)
[Interviewing] was really useful actually, just sort of taking you through
the…starting and opening questions and then going to closed questions and
making sure you‟ve got all the information, that was something that was really
useful on the course. (PF5)
God, I remember when I was a trainee, first seat, you know, second day, the
phone rings and it's a client… you‟re so scared you can‟t speak. And having
some form of practical experience was actually quite useful. (PF12)
I think it was actually good experience because when we actually came to
actually interview a client it was, “Oh, here we go again” and you're not
9
Negotiation was dropped as a required skill in 1997.
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
suddenly sitting there thinking “I've never done this before, where on earth do
I start?” (PF8)
One participant reported some double-edged feedback on the product of the LPC
from a principal in his training firm who had said that:
We weren't technically as good as the LSF candidates but we have a lot more
confidence in terms of interviewing clients, things like that, because we'd
actually done role playing… we were probably told less technical information
than the LSF candidates. But overall I haven't had a problem, I mean it hasn't
caused me a problem since, you know, you just pick it up in practice. (PF8)
One student thought that the skills training should have emphasised different aspects
of solicitors‟ work:
I don't know, I suppose it's the one part of the job that does come with
experience is handling people. It might have helped to have a bit more focus
on handling people I think actually in the LPC… Because again it's all very
well learning it all academically but the hardest parts of the job are the
stresses you get from clients being unreasonable or not listening, things like
that. (PF10)
You still can't really prepare yourself for a complete nutcase coming into your
office and someone who is particularly aggressive or particularly difficult but it
does help you to concentrate your mind on what are the relevant issues and
what you've got to get in your mind before you see the client and so, yes, it's
good. (PM8)
Others found the skills emphasis on the LPC lacking in some respects. One
participant felt that the LPC did not offer real preparation for work as a solicitor,
saying that it “started to, it didn‟t give you enough of a flavour, I don‟t think. I still think
a lot of reliance is put on the „go and get work experience‟ route” (PM5):
What I didn't find very helpful is, and there's probably an argument both ways,
but I never found these sort of simulated interviews particularly helpful, and
videoing you doing interviews and things like that because, by their nature,
they're contrived situations and I don't think they're particularly realistic. (PM
7)
Another felt that the skills training on the LPC was rudimentary and that “the LPC
could have given me some sharper skills” (PM9). This could be seen as a plea for a
higher degree of specialisation, although how far skills are transferable, and have
been successfully transferred, is sometimes difficult for people to assess:
Some of the sort of business negotiations skills, I don't know how much it
helped in practice, to be honest, but I suppose it did make you sort of think,
“Well, can I give on this one, or, shall I hold back on this one?” and I suppose
it's just all negotiation and where you concede and where you think you can
get more if you don't concede on a point…the sort of things that we were
negotiating were just quite different to what I've done in practice. It might not
be for somebody else but these were business agreements, that was all
business law, and of course I do commercial property. But it's hard to tell
because, it might have had an effect and I just hadn't realised. (PF8)
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Another yardstick for the usefulness of skills is the extent to which they are used in
an employment context. Some participants found that the opportunity for advocacy
did not justify its inclusion in the LPC core skills:
Even as a litigator, I didn't see the inside of a court room very often, save as a
trainee doing family work or on case management conferences. Almost
everything else went to counsel—in part because I was dealing with
complicated applications or because it was cheaper to send junior counsel
alone to make an application than it was to go myself. That said, many
litigation solicitors' will have had a different experience. You will also be aware
that some City practices are training their solicitors for higher advocacy rights
so that they can keep advocacy work in house. I suppose some of this is
workload and capacity related. I had a heavy workload and so was often
happy to be able to avoid having to prepare for these things and then leave
the office for the time it would take for applications. My friends who did
criminal or family law did a lot of advocacy in practice. I am not aware of any
other litigators who did. (PM10)
Yet others took a more comprehensively negative view of the usefulness of the skills
taught on the LPC:
The negotiation was a complete waste of time for practice, the advocacy was
of hardly any use because you have so few opportunities to use it, I mean I've
subsequently qualified as a solicitor advocate but I've had hardly any
opportunities at all, in fact, none, to appear in court on my hind legs. So much
for going into practice. (PM9)
Despite the large measure of approval of skills training on the LPC there remains a
measure of doubt among participants. The criticism is largely on two levels. The first
is that simulation is not like real life and that the skills derived from experience of it, if
any, are artificial. The second is that, before experience of practice, it is unrealistic to
expect students to bridge the gap between simulation and real life:
It can never prepare you for the first time you appear in front of a District
Judge who hates trainees, etc. And he‟s just adamant he‟s going to catch you
out whatever he can do. But at least it gives you some idea, some clue as to
how to prepare for these sorts of things. (PF3)
The LPC if I remember rightly when it came to the actual nitty gritty of
practice, there is nothing like what we learnt on the LPC and in fact even the
two years being a trainee solicitor is nothing like it didn‟t prepare you as a
newly qualified solicitor. So yeah, my experience, my view is that it‟s no
relevance. You pass; it‟s just a means to an end really, you‟ve got to pass the
course. (PM4)
I don‟t think anything could have quite prepared me for dealing with the other
side and how you‟ve got to get down with them, I don‟t mean by offending, but
you‟ve got to relate to them on a very base level and that was quite a shock
and going to the Police station was a huge shock and the pressure you‟re
under. The advocacy, because you can‟t do anything until you‟re qualified and
all of a sudden you have your certificate and you can go into Court and it is
this huge learning curve, because for the first time you‟re hearing yourself
speak and all that side of it was really, really stressful. And, again, nothing
prepares you for the advocacy side of matters, it doesn‟t matter how many
mock trials you do and you‟ve videoed it, nothing prepares you for it. (PF6)
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Normal clients that are going to get divorced or something like that and
weren't upset about it, like matter of fact, then yes, that was fine. It was I
suppose the more difficult clients or the clients that had got a lot to lose or
something had happened that they didn't want to happen, there was no
training for dealing with them. (PF9)
The last thing a client wants to know is that you're their first client ever and
that you're not really very experienced. So the main problem was trying to
keep it away from the client, the fact that I was as raw as I was really. And
there were a few difficult moments when you've got the client shouting at you
and when they've guessed that you don't really know what you're doing but
then the support is there if need be for your boss to take over that file if things
have gone wrong. So yes, I mean that's when you learn to stand on your two
feet a lot more and you experience your first nightmare client who is having a
go at you. That's what I think should be part of the training really because…
the firm has got to be able to see whether you can cope with it and you've got
to see whether you can cope with it so it had to happen at some stage really.
(PM8)
One student found the problem more basic, one of „placing‟ practical knowledge
without any awareness of practice:
I didn't find it easy to relate what I could remember doing to the job. The
books were very helpful because they're quite clear and they're quite
reasonably brief and having the books to refer to when you were in practice
was helpful. But it's just the fact that it really doesn't mean that much to you
when you're doing it in a classroom, never having tried to do the job I think. I
don't think, I don't suppose any way is perfect but I'm wondering whether it
might have been better to do that in blocks as you're going through your
training. (PF10)
Going back to the LPC, I would have paid more attention and tried harder if
I‟d have known then how important it was going to me but I suppose for most
people they don‟t use the advocacy. (PF6)
The issue, therefore, is whether a „practical course‟ can prepare professionals for the
challenges of real life.
I relied more on my own sort of nowse ultimately. I think it was less frightening
because I knew to expect it because it had been raised at law school and
we‟d had to practice. So as a concept it wasn‟t an alien thing, you know, “Oh
my God I‟ve got to talk to clients, help”. But I suppose in practical terms the
LPC as it was then hadn‟t really prepared me in any sort of detailed way other
than introduce me to the concept. (PF12)
The skills you are taught are often not much use. A commercial solicitor in a large
firm said:
If [the firm] wanted a specialist advocate they went to the bar…because they
are very profit motivated…they would rather have my nose to the grindstone
earning some extra profits rather than going off [doing advocacy]. (PM9)
Keeping a good relationship with clients is a question of not overpowering them and
understanding their needs:
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It‟s a question of treading the fine line between telling them what they should
know, keeping them informed but not throwing chapter and verse at them
because they are not paying for advice, they are paying for security, you
know, they are paying for peace of mind, problem-solving. (PM5)
5.5 Evaluation and relevance to practice
The LPC was clearly perceived as a very different experience from a law degree, a
fact that may be regarded as a success for the designers of the course. Response to
experience of the LPC was sometimes positive, for example for the participant who
found that the LPC was:
Interesting because it was more like real life than cases which happened in
the 1800s. To me, it was just much more practically based, and the teaching
was second to none. (PF6)
Or:
The legal practice course was really helpful, in fact it was the best year that I
did at university I think, we were really, really small groups at [LPC provider]
and out of the four years at university the legal practice course was the best
course that I think I did. It gave an overview of everything that I needed and I
still use my LPC books now. (PF9)
Even those who made negative comparisons with the degree often saw the point of
the LPC. One such participant said:
It was the sort of, let‟s get this over and done with. But I think actually the
content of it was very good. Because it did change the emphasis from
academic, which is what you should have at that point, you shouldn‟t need the
academic side, you just need to know, what do I do when I‟ve got someone
sitting in front of me? (PF4)
Another said:
I think it would be difficult to make that course one that people really enjoy,
because it‟s just…not that interesting, it‟s things that you need to know really,
rather than want to know. (PF5)
I had enough I think by this stage, and it wasn‟t academic in the sense the
CPE had been and so really it was a question of learn the rules, and follow
the rules, and I knew what the rules were and I knew what I should be doing
but I still found it very difficult to force myself to do it. (PM3)
Others were more unambiguously positive about the value of the practical orientation
of the LPC. One participant, for example, acknowledged that had he gone from a law
degree into practice ”you would just have no clue whatsoever” (PF3). Others enjoyed
the contrast with the initial stage in both content and approach:
Some of the stuff we had to do at university which didn't seem to have any
relevance at all to, or any interest, and just some of it was just mind-numbing,
it was awful some of it, whereas all the stuff at law school was - you know,
most people there wanted to be there because they wanted to be lawyers and
you had, at that stage, an option to do something you were interested in and
everyone was very enthusiastic about the subjects that they had done when
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
they were lawyers themselves, and like everyone just thought it was
excellent… I could get good at this, this is something that is relevant,
something that I'll need and something that you'll need in life situations, even
if you're not a lawyer. It was really interesting stuff and all the sensible role-
playing in small groups and you're not sitting with 200 other people listening
to someone droning on and on and on, you're getting involved in it which is
much more what I like doing really… it was very, very relevant I thought.
(PM8)
There are three obvious ways in which the Legal Practice Course may be considered
practical. The first is the way that knowledge is framed, the second is in the use of
transactions and the third is in the emphasis on skills. Additionally, it may be argued
that teaching methods that encourage active participation are more attuned to the
dynamics of the employment context.
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6 Work experience prior to the training contract
All bar five of our participants undertook some form of legal work experience prior to
signing their training contracts. For some this began with a school placement in a
local law firm when they were teenagers. Others undertook work experience whilst
studying for their degrees and before the LPC, and some, having not secured a
training contract but having passed the LPC, got involved in para-legal work and
outdoor clerking.
It is interesting to contrast a statement made recently by Simran Foote, Graduate
Manager at Addleshaw Booth & Co, with statements made by our participants. Foote
said:
The benefits of undertaking a period of legal work experience should not be
underestimated…life as a solicitor varies immensely firm to firm - the client
base and issues a High Street participant will experience are very different to
those of a solicitor working on international transactions in a corporate
practice. By undertaking some legal work experience you gain a valuable
insight into the many possibilities available within the solicitor‟s profession,
and also have a chance to try your hand at the practical application of the law
to see whether you like it.10
Several participants had undertaken work placements. PM5 spent two weeks work
experience before A levels at a medium sized firm in the east of England. During the
holidays of his academic degree PM6 worked for two weeks in a local authority legal
department, for two weeks in the offices of a large town solicitors firm and one week
with a local high street practice
[A] lot of reliance is put on the “go and get work experience” route…so that
you know what it‟s actually working in a law firm, and I think that‟s where it
possibly falls down because I think you go and get work experience and it‟s
nothing like working in a law firm. (PM5)
[I]f you did go on work experience it is still totally different…you can't suddenly
perceive what work will really be like, even if you're…thrown in and told to do
everything in the office, you [are] just there for two weeks and you…do
different things…[you don't] really get a full picture of how things were working
and understand different cases and definitely didn't understand practical
things like billing and things more of that nature. (PM6)
From analysis of our interviews it is fair to state that both of these viewpoints are
correct, depending on which species of work placement they relate to. We found that
work placements come in two species. The first sees the apprentice making
beverages and mastering the Zerox machine:
I read a lot of gazettes. I went away and researched. I did a huge inordinate
amount of photocopying and I made lots of tea, and from talking to other
people I think that‟s pretty much typical work experience. (PM5)
This type of work experience clearly teaches a participant little about the law or the
legal environment:
10
Foote S (2002) „Testing the water‟ 11 The Trainee at 23.
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I had a fortnight in a High Street criminal practice in a market town, and then
the next year I had a few weeks in odd different firms, but…it didn‟t really give
me much idea at all to be honest…[because]…in the High Street practice, I
just followed one guy around for a fortnight, and it was pretty uninformative. I
had a week in a ten “partnerish” firm…where they just didn‟t have anything for
me to do at all, and I amused myself by catching up with their library filing, but
absolutely nothing else at all. It was painful…I was filling in the loose leaf
Butterworth type books, so I wasn‟t learning anything.
I had a fortnight in a forty or fifty Partner firm…where they put me in the
company commercial department, which wasn‟t something that interested me
at all, and asked me to look at competition law, which I was completely
baffled by.
And then I had another fortnight in a different but similar firm…where I went
into the litigation department of a property conveyancing department. In the
litigation department, I did odd bits of work but never got the chance to talk to
anybody about it, so I had no idea really what was going on; no feedback at
all. (PM10)
The second species give the apprentice hands-on experience, is informative and
challenging. The participant quoted above continued:
And the conveyancing department, I really enjoyed, not because I was
interested in property, but because I was working with a blind solicitor and it
was very useful because I got to read documents and letters to him and then
typed his response to them. So it was as if I was involved, even though it
wasn‟t a subject area I was interested in. That was about the most useful
week of the lot. (PM10)
Others who reported active involvement during their work placement were given
activities summarily described as „mini-articles‟ (PM1), such as legal research,
drafting simple letters, sitting in on client meetings and taking notes behind counsel
at Crown Court. A participant, who at 16 years old completed a two week placement
in a local law firm, went unaccompanied on an adoption hearing:
I did a hearing in those two weeks…I shouldn‟t have done it. But it was an
adoption hearing, and I was told to go to the County Court and issue an
application. I had no idea what it was, it was just like “okay, I‟m really keen”,
you know. And I issued it and thought “that was easy”, and then the Listing
Officer said “well you‟ll have to go and see the judge now”, and so I thought
“why?” I was taken downstairs and the Usher…was there saying “have you
ever done this before”, and I was like “no”, but…really cocky about it in
hindsight. And she was so sweet because she went in and she said to the
District Judge “look, I don‟t know why she‟s here but she is and she‟s been
asked [to get the order] and he heard me and gave me the order I wanted and
everything. It was just amazing.
[W]hen I was a trainee if I‟d been told to do that I would have been scared,
but at that age I didn‟t really understand it. I had never looked into the law at
all and here I was all of a sudden sort of living this life of Rumpole of the
Bailey and I just thought it was amazing. (PF1)
Second species work experience does then give participants some insight into
practice, allowing them to make much more informed decisions about the path of
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their legal careers and to find out whether they are suited to particular types of firm
and particular types of law. For this participant one month‟s work experience in a big
City firm was:
Useful in the context of…being a bit more sophisticated when you‟re choosing
your firm. I had a better idea of what life was like in the City, [the] work that
they do…[the] offices, the kind of people, the kind of clients. And I was
therefore able to take a sort of more educated decision that actually I didn‟t
want to work in the City being a City lawyer, I wanted to do something just
slightly different. So it was a useful…to me from that point of view. (PM1)
A female participant also spent a summer month during the second year of her
degree with a large London City practice where she was assigned to a fee earner
and given tasks to do:
It gave me the opportunity to see what it would be like to work in a City firm, a
commercial environment, and I knew immediately that I wouldn‟t be able to
cope with it. I would have been able to cope with it if I was a single person
with no [family] commitment. But living 70 miles away, seeing the kind
of…hours that had to be worked, what was expected of a trainee, I backed
away from it at that point. But I was glad, I wasn‟t going to go through life
thinking “oh if only I‟d done that”, or “I wish I‟d done something else”. But it
was very interesting. (PF4)
The fear in giving placements second species work experience appears to concern
professional liability issues:
Lawyers can‟t handle work experience people because you‟re frightened to
give them [work] because of the insurance implications. You‟re frightened to
give them anything at all because they might lose it or get it wrong and you
don‟t really know what to do with them. (PM5)
The difficulty is…actually finding relevant stuff for them to do. If they haven't
got the experience to actually work on files then, however, much you want to
give someone who is 20 and who is halfway through a law degree lots of
relevant work, it's difficult to do so because you can't put the clients' files at
risk by letting them advise on anything because you're worried about what
they're going to advise…
I would love it if someone who was at the stage I was at 20 who thought that
law was awful could see how much I really enjoy it now but I can't. Even if
they came and spent two weeks with me I wouldn't be able to give them
anything that shows how good it can be, just because all I would really be
able to give them to do is look at a file…you have to be involved in it…to have
a client caseload and to have a satisfied client and to do it from start to finish
to actually realise…why it is that it can be so satisfying. It's difficult…to
actually give someone quality work and for them to really appreciate how
good it can be. (PM8)
One of our participants suggested a way around this problem. Having experienced
poor work placements himself he now takes his firm‟s work placements under his
wing:
[G]iving work experience people things to do that aren‟t necessarily based
around dispensing advise…about all the holistic aspects of doing it. About the
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way the office works, about the way different things interact, about the way
that partnership works, it‟s a very bizarre concept, you know, rule by
Committee…
There are things you can do with work experience people, practical things. I
mean the first thing I do with mine is give them a time sheet and say to them
“right by lunch time I want to see forty units on there, here‟s how you fill it out”
and…although it‟s all non-chargeable it gives you a really good flavour of
what it‟s like. [A] bit of prescription on what work experience should actually
be, wouldn‟t be a bad thing. (PM5)
The age of the work experience placement is of relevance here. For young teenagers
“it is very difficult to find things that somebody that knows nothing about [the law] can
actually do” (PF10). And often what they really want is office experience:
From time to time…we get an awful lot of school work experience which is
much less helpful anyway and they will spend more time doing stuff like
reception and copying because quite a lot of them…want work experience
they don't want law work experience, they want being in an office work
experience. (PF11)
Older placements, at degree or LPC level, obviously have a commitment to the law
and can be trusted with responsibility. It would be an error to down play the benefits
of second species work experience.11 It is the best opportunity would-be lawyers can
get to decide if a firm suits them and if they suit the firm (PF1). It is also the best
opportunity they have to sell themselves to the firm.12 Of the 17 participants who had
some form of work experience during their legal education, five secured training
contracts with their work experience firm and of these five, three still remain with the
firm.
11
See The Trainee (2002) „Vacation placements: an ABC‟ 11 The Trainee at 21.
12
Ibid.
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7 The training contract
7.1 General
Participants reported a broad range of training experiences, from unstructured
through semi-structured to highly structured training, in practices covering sole
participants, small high street general firms, specialist City firms and large
commercial firms. One participant completed her training contract with the CPS.
Regardless of the overall structure of the training contract and the area of legal
practice a trainee enters, all training contracts have a mutual denominator, the Law
Society Training Regulations 1990. These currently govern the content of every
training contract and, broadly, oblige each training establishment to:
Ensure that trainees gain broad experience of contentious as well as non-
contentious work, with proper training in a minimum of three English legal
topics. 13
Ensure the trainee gains experience in, and an opportunity to practice:
communication skills, support skills, legal research skills, drafting skills,
interviewing skills, case and transaction management skills, client care and
practice support skills. As well as experience in the practice of negotiation
and advocacy and oral presentation skills.14
Provide supervision by a training principal who should be a partner with
overall responsibility for the firms‟ trainees.15
Bearing these obligations in mind and with allegations of trainee ill-preparedness
abounding, we were interested to ascertain what types of activities trainees engaged
in during their contracts, how well their skills training prepared them for work and how
well they were supervised during their contract. But first we asked each participant to
describe the process by which they secured their training contracts.
7.2 Choice of training firm and acquiring a contract
Approximately half of our participants had considerable difficulties finding and
securing their training contracts. Typical tales told of 10s and 100s of applications
being made to a multitude of firms across the country. This difficulty in finding training
meant these participants had limited ability to choose between different types of
training firms and different types of law. They were basically obliged to take whatever
was on offer, as a foot in the door. Illustrative comments include the following:
I was looking more for the kind of firm that was giving me a place rather than
what kind of work I would be doing there… [now] I would be so choosy…but
then…I just want a job. So I…really hadn‟t formulated exactly what I wanted
to do. (PF7)
13
Topics available to trainees will depend on the areas of practice offered by firms, see Training
contract review version 7 at 5.3 „Legal topics‟, available at www.lawsociety.org.uk.
14
Trainees should also be given the opportunity to observe experienced participants in advocacy,
dispute resolution, interviewing and negotiation (ibid, at 5.4 „Skills standards for the training contract‟).
15
Duties can be delegated to the Director of Training or other appropriate personnel within the firm or
other with similar standing (ibid, at 5.6 Training during the training contract‟).
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
[B]ecause I…qualified in the sort of legal…recession there was a surplus of
trainees, it was sort of get a job wherever you could…[A]t the time I would
have taken articles almost anywhere, because there were no articles going.
(PM2)
For those who found the securing of a training contract a relatively easy process
there were three broad means by which they acquired their contracts. Firstly through
family or personal contacts, such as a father who knew a branch crown prosecutor, a
mother who knew people at a large local firm and so on. Secondly as a result of
some form of work experience, and finally through the traditional application
procedure. It is worth noting that there were no real differences here between the
experiences of our CPE participants and those who took law as their first degree.
Common amongst many members of both groups - those finding the procedure
laborious and those finding it elementary - was a lack of detailed knowledge about
what the training firm did and what type of law they themselves wanted to practice.
As candidates participants had few prerequisites for choice of firm. Those they had
tended to be broad and were often expressed in the negative, for instance, not
wanting to work for large law firms, not wanting corporate/City work or not wanting
high street or legal aid work. On reflection, participants were able to recognise this
lack of knowledge:
[A]t the time I didn't have any offer of a training contract, I didn't know…what
kind of law firm or what kind of…law I would be doing or anything. It was all a
bit vague really I suppose because…my mass of knowledge of…the firms out
there and what different people do which I've got today is…totally contrasted
to…what I knew then. (PM6)
It hadn‟t occurred to me then…about the difference between the various
firms, in terms of quality of work, the sort of work that‟s available, what it
means on a day-to-day basis to be working in a High Street firm or a
commercial firm or in the City. I‟ve seen all those things since because of the
route that my career path‟s taken, but the difference is vast. (PM10)
For those who did have a firmer idea of the type of law and practice they wanted this
was invariably due to some form of work experience, a theme we addressed earlier
in this report. For others, the basis of their choice was location and wanting to stay
close to family, or more nebulous reasons such as the „feel of the firm‟:
It just had such a fabulous happy family friendly feel…I like [name of firm]
because the people who were working there seemed very friendly, very nice,
there didn‟t seem the strong sense of hierarchy that existed in the larger firms
that I saw where partners were gods and you were pondlife, blah blah blah.
That‟s not really the case here...all the partners are approachable…all of
them we call by their sort of first names, as you would expect, but, you know,
some of them are very senior very important people and when you‟re starting
out as a trainee it‟s nice that they will know who you are, it‟s a sort of small to
medium sized firm, it‟s not one of the large huge firms that I felt I didn‟t really
want to join because they were just too large and impersonal. (PM1)
[T]he atmosphere in the office, it was extraordinarily friendly…people really
knew each other, and we couldn‟t walk three paces—I was given a tour by a
trainee—without being stopped by people. Everyone was enormously friendly,
the trainees knew all of the assistants and vice versa, and I was really struck
by the fact that it was a very, very nice place to work. (PF12)
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When the feel of the firm wasn‟t right, participants only entered the training contract
race half-heartedly. For example, one participant had made applications to City firms
and proceeded to second interview stage, but admitted she was merely “talking that
talk” (PF1), her favours truly lay with a local general practice. Alternatively,
participants excluded themselves from the running altogether because of a conscious
decision that their form wouldn‟t fit:
I know I would never have got into a City firm, I didn‟t think my educational
background was good enough to get into a City firm, not because I‟m putting
myself down but because what they see is on paper. And you know I went to
the comprehensive [and a] Poly‟…it‟s a ground to dismiss you before you
start. (PF6)
[T]he stuff that you would do in a City firm wouldn't have been what I would
have wanted to have done so I didn't apply, and they wouldn't have liked me
very much either, I wouldn't be their cup of tea. (PF11)
Today‟s shortage of training contracts is similar to that experienced by our trainees in
the mid to late 1990s. And the stories for many would-be trainees are the same now
as they were then. Without the luxury of being able to shop around trainees are
grateful for whatever is on offer and tend to settle more.
7.3 Trainee and trainer expectations of the training contract
We probed our interviewees about their initial feelings and expectations at the
beginning of their training contracts. To varying degrees participants expressed
feelings of anxiety and apprehension about what to expect:
[T]he scariest thing about starting [the] training contract was...lying awake the
night before I went in, thinking “I have not idea what I'm actually going to be
doing...all day”. (PF11)
I remember [my] first seat…second day, the phone rings and it's a
client…you‟re so scared you can‟t speak. (PF12)
These feelings didn‟t necessarily extend to their knowledge of the law, as most
reported guarded confidence about being able to “get on and do things” (PM3)
despite not knowing what these „things‟ might be. This confidence came from a
combination of factors; a build up of academic and vocational education, para-legal
and other work experience, plus general feelings of maturity as highlighted by this
participant‟s remark:
[I]‟d had more time working in other firms and I had gone away for six months
travelling and that kind of thing. So I felt a bit more mature maybe than some
of the other people might have done and I just felt I had a good grounding
really in the courses I‟d done. (PF7)
Two of our participants who were given formal induction training on arrival at their
new firms found that this relieved some of their anxieties.
Many of the comments currently being levelled against today‟s graduates allege a
decline in general accomplishment, more specifically a lack of adequate legal
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knowledge, poor analytical and poor language skills.16 When asked for their
perspective on what they felt trainers expected of them, participants who expressed a
fervoured view had trained in high street practices:
[W]hen you start your training contract the general opinion, particularly of the
older partners, is that, „well, you should know that, you've done your course‟,
rather than any sort of, you know, helping it relate. (PF10)
This participant went on to comment that the profession does not put enough money
and effort into training itself properly, that “…it expects somebody else to have done
that by the time people come into the workplace” (PF10).
[Y]ou read in the Gazette and things about firms…trying to criticise the LPC
for students not knowing enough and again I think that's a problem…the
profession and the firms expect somebody else to be doing that [training] for
them which isn't going to happen…the profession has got to do that itself to a
certain extent and at the moment I don't think firms on the whole are doing
that. (PF10)
The small high street practice in which this participant worked had not contracted a
trainee for some considerable time, and the partners saw him as someone they had
employed to do work and bring in money. They didn‟t seem to know or understand
what he had been doing on the LPC. Consequently they failed to know how best to
use his skills and failed to recognise and help fill his information and training gaps:
I don't think he [a partner]…understood that even if you have done the LPC
you're still, you know, doing a training contract and not just
commencing…your work as a solicitor during that time…I got the
impression…they didn't really have any real understanding…about the LPC
and how we differed from…the Law Society finals or anything…if you are
employing someone, even if on a training contract, you…do really need to
have some idea…what he has been doing in the last year or so during his
legal training. (PM6)
From the views expressed to us it appears that some employers expect trainees on
day one to be consummate solicitors. As Bell has commented “[m]any of the skills
requested by employers often seem to describe the fully formed individual who is
fully proficient, rather than the appropriate kind of trainee.”17 There is an argument for
improving education and training so as to meet these expectations, but there is also
an argument for managing these expectations.
16
See, for example, Training Framework Review Group consultation paper (2001) at 2 available at
www.lawsociety.org.uk. Paul Rose, Head of Practice Development at Halliwell Landau, recently stated
that “being called a solicitor implies a certain breath of knowledge…15 years ago, everybody in law had
that breath of knowledge”. Now specialisation at earlier and earlier stages, seems to be the goal, as
quoted by Lewis J (2002) „Finishing school‟ 99:20 Law Society Gazette 16 May at 24.
17
Bell J (1996) „General transferable skills and the law curriculum‟ 2:2 Contemporary Issues in Law 1 at
10. See also The Gazette (2002) „Letters to the Editor: Supporting trainees‟ 99:25 Law Society Gazette
20 June at 18,where an LPC student expressed rage at “a recent advertisement for a trainee who „must
have experience and [be able] to deal with minimum supervision.‟ [Which] reflects the growing
expectation, particularly among small firms, that trainees will be able to work unsupervised from day
one. Generating income for the firm without pestering the busy partners. Applicants are presumably
expected to have gained experience by working for nothing before seeking a lucrative traineeship. Firms
should be reminded that taking on a trainee involves responsibilities as well as benefits.
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
7.4 Structured training
Perhaps predictably none of our participants who trained in larger firms claimed to
have received unstructured training. Those who described their training as less
formally structured or indeed as lacking any structure had invariably trained with sole
participants or in relatively small high street practices. However, the great majority
(16 participants) was given variations on the traditional four seat six month rotation
training.
7.4.1 Seat one
One participant spent her first seat with the CPS, another went to the professional
negligence department, two spent their first seat in company/commercial, a further
two in private client/probate, three went into litigation departments and the final seven
went to property related departments (residential, commercial, real estate and
housing).
At one end of the scale, a participant who started out in a commercial property
department said he was left totally inactive most of the time:
I knew nothing about commercial property. I‟d only done domestic
conveyancing on the LPC. I was given very little work to do, I used to go out
sort of mid-morning, there was a big Tesco‟s nearby, and I‟d go off mid-
morning and buy a newspaper and some chocolate. And it got to the point in
the end where I was reading three broad sheets, and I was even reading the
obituaries…and regularly I would go trotting around the department asking for
work, but there was hardly ever any. And when there was some, it was “well
just do this tiny little bit of this transaction.”18 So I came away without a clue
how a conveyancing transaction worked in practice. (PM10)
At the other end of the scale, a participant whose first seat was in a professional
negligence department was so overburdened with work it reduced her to tears. This
was despite the fact that she had worked as a para-legal, had travelled and felt
herself to be of mature character:
[T]he first partner I was with just massively overworked me and it got to the
stage where I went and saw the training partner and said “look I can‟t handle
this. I‟m in the loos crying every afternoon, this is just horrendous”…I would
just have towers of files around my desk. Just needing things like…it was all
case management direction or make an application on this or draft an order
on that and it was all things like that, there was just so much of it. I could not
physically get through it. If I‟d had enough time I think I‟d have been fine
because I would have gone and looked things up in the library and, you know,
found out how to do things when I didn‟t know how to do them but it was just
the lack of time, absolutely threw me into a panic. (PF7)
At the other points along the scale participants reflected on the fact that “when you
start any seat you're always sitting there thinking „I don't know where to start‟. But
after a while you get used to it.” (PF8). One participant felt ill prepared for her first
seat in civil litigation:
18
He would do odd bits of research on easements or covenants, odd bits of drafting and the occasional
report on title, all seen as “tedious but doable”.
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
It was “here‟s a file, I‟ve got a defence in, over to you”…and it was a bit scary.
Because, even looking through the civil litigation textbooks I was still not sure
where to go with [it], a lot of it is experience isn‟t it? Now you would look back
and say „well it was obvious what I‟d do‟, but…at the time I didn‟t feel properly
prepared for civil litigation. (PF1)
For those interviewees not feeling “exploited on arrival”19 first seats tended to involve
a lot of observation of how things were to be done. For instance, our CPS trainee
spent three to four days per week in court watching people. One trainee claimed that
in his first seat – commercial - he spent three or four months just watching the
partner draft letters and documents and make phone calls, he was “crap at
delegation” so our trainee provided the “passive audience”:
I didn‟t really learn an awful lot. I mean no hard feelings at all, I get on just as
well with the guy and he‟s a wonderful lawyer but he just couldn‟t delegate
and I was very shy about the whole thing, so I‟d never asked at that point. I
felt very much out of my depth and I never asked because I thought well he‟s
obviously hoping I would pick up by watching, learning and reading files and it
just wasn‟t enough. (PM5)
Few of our participants reported extensive client contact during their first seat. For
one this was due to the fact that traditionally the work of the real estate department in
which she first found herself did not offer much face to face client contact. Instead
communication was telephonic:
Trainees often complain they don‟t get enough client contact face to face
when they‟re in Real Estate…But there was a lot of telephone contact with
clients, which is also very good training. Because, like I said, you know, day
two when the phone rings, you‟re absolutely scared stiff. But by the end of the
seat, you know, a client rings and you‟re quite blasé, you know, “I‟ve done
this”. But you learn how to address them, you learn how to communicate with
them. You also learn how to cope with what happens if you don‟t know the
answer to a question, and being able to say on the phone “I‟m terribly sorry I
don‟t know the answer, but if you give me ten minutes I‟ll go and do a bit of
research and get back to you.” And having the confidence to learn to say
that. And so, a lot of client contact by phone, but not physically, not in real
estate. (PF12)
Similarly, another participant spent the majority of his time in the litigation
department, conducting specialist legal research on a large and complex matter, and
thus rarely saw clients: “one would meet them in the first seat only intermittently,
hardly ever. Met them far more later, but that was just due to circumstances” (PM9).
PF10 also had some intermittent client exposure in the property department of her
training firm, when she sat in on client meetings, but had no independent direct client
contact. However, some interviewees did experience more frequent contact:
WERE YOU MEETING CLIENTS QUITE EARLY ON?
Very early on, yes.
AND WHAT DID YOU FEEL ABOUT THAT?
I had no problems. You know, I suppose in a way with residential property I
was very lucky, they were just normal lay people who I could relate to, there
19
Current trainees tell of the same feelings. See, for example, Solicitors Journal (2002) „Trainee
solicitors “used as cheap labour”‟ 146:39 Solicitors Journal 18 October at 920.
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
was nothing too technical about residential property and, yes, I enjoyed
meeting them. (PF8)
One described the odd client meeting he attended as something to endure. As he
was not given the file before hand he merely “sat there watching and listening but not
learning much” (PM10).
7.4.2 Seat two
Three participants spent their second seat in family law departments, three in
litigation departments, two in property related departments, two in
company/commercial departments, two in crime dominated departments and one in
each of the following departments: environmental, wills/probate and personal injury.20
For most of our participants the second seat passed without incident or was a good
deal easier than, or preferable, to the first. PF1 found her seat two more comfortable
because she had some practice of criminal law work through undertaking work
experience. And because she found that she liked the way that she worked in
criminal law:
And criminal…it‟s what I‟d done most of before, when I‟d been…working in
my summer holidays, and that‟s much easier, you don‟t have to commit
anything to writing doing crime, so you can do what you want and it never
gets found out. (PF1)
Other participants found the second seat preferable because they left behind an
inactive first seat for a lot more responsibility in seat two. For instance, PM10 had
spent most of his first seat in Tesco‟s as he was given little to do in the civil litigation
department.21 Consequently he enjoyed being in the family law department, as he
had his own files to run, completed simple divorces and Children Act work, did all his
own drafting - save for heavy ancillary matters - and saw clients independently from
his first week.
For those characterising their second seat as difficult, underlying reasons included
unfamiliarity with the legal field (PF7 had no experience of big company landlord and
tenant work), overwork (PF622) and poor supervision:
When I went to, [the litigation department], I suppose partly I was affected by
the fact that I was just thrown in the deep end, expected to do things without
proper guidance in that seat and I realised I hated going to court on whatever
matter it was. (PF8)
7.4.3 Seat three
The department in which participants most frequently held their third seat was
company/commercial (with seven participants). Three participants moved on to
property related departments, two to probate/private client and the remainder to
crime, tax and competition law.
20
Numbers add up to 15 instead of 16 as one participant could not recollect the order of her seats.
21
See PM10 comment at 7.4.1.
22
PF6 had an easy start to her training contract with the CPS, but this changed when she took up her
second seat on secondment to the environmental department of a large City law firm.
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The company/commercial seat was also the one to cause the most comment.
Despite participants having by now a year‟s legal experience behind them, this seat
seemed to cause them the most stress and/or frustration:
Then I went…to the company department, which was…the closest I ever got
to walking out…I was never keen on company... It was the bibles that you had
to photocopy, etcetera. [O]r they‟d just give you one and say “read this”. And
you could be sat for days there just reading old files. So you felt that
you…weren‟t achieving anything, and you just felt that there was no input
whatsoever. I mean occasionally you‟d get given the odd thing or get to go on
a completion meeting. Or if they had one at the office, I‟d get to set out the
sandwiches. I don‟t think any of the male trainees ever got to set out the
sandwiches. So that was a particularly dire time. (PF3)
[I] then went into the commercial part…I found the work very dull and again
you‟re put under so much pressure as a trainee.
OF WHAT SORT?
Just like volume of work, especially when the big deals are on. (PF6)
I hated it [company commercial] with a passion…the work bores me…I prefer
work that involves people. The work didn't interest me in the slightest, the
attitude of the company commercial lawyers I really can't stand at all.
WHAT IS IT LIKE?
Their attitude?
YES.
Their area of the law is the most important…[everyone else]…is just doing
stuff that doesn't matter. When they've got big deals on they have to finish
them at whatever time of night it is, they have to stay up all night, it couldn't
possibly be done the next day. It's just really, you know, it's just image. I
hated it. (PF10)
Interestingly, all three of the above quoted participants went on to work in fields of
law with high client contact (PF3 specialises in personal injury work, PF6 in criminal
law and PF10 in family law). Of the remaining four participants who spent seat three
in company/commercial one had no strong opinions either way, while another found it
interesting, although essentially all he did was “sit in a corner and keep quiet” (PM3).
And the third, although based in the commercial department, spent the majority of his
time in doing property work instead (PM10). The final participant declared an initial
reluctance to enter the company/commercial department because he was more
interested in high street type work, however despite working with a highly stressed
partner given to outbursts, he was able to attend client meetings, asked to amend
articles of memorandum, to draft minutes and to complete company forms:
I enjoyed the whole thing much more than I thought I would. At the end of it I
wasn‟t sorry that I‟d done it, I was quite happy to have done it I think.
Whereas at the beginning I would have done anything to get out of it. (PM10)
7.4.4 Seat four
Three participants spent their final seats in property related departments and three in
litigation departments. The remainder were reasonably evenly distributed in family,
private client, commercial, financial services and personal injury, and one participant
returned to the CPS. Understandably by this final seat our participants had
embedded themselves into their legal environs and felt more able to cope, even
when faced with huge workloads. For example, PF3 spent her final seat in the
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
personal injury department, where she was presented with the entire caseload of a
legal executive who had taken ill and then left to “get on with it”:
I got handed his whole caseload…his four filling cabinets…So after having no
PI experience whatsoever…it was just a case of sinking or swimming and
luckily I just swam. And, you know, thoroughly enjoyed it. (PF3)
No one reported inactivity in their final seat, and most seemed to take on more
responsibility than in previous seats:
[T]he financial services seat…in many ways it was my last and best. I had a
lot of responsibility, drafting, liaising with counsel over a settlement in
connection with a big case and we had to…settle allocation of responsibilities
between different parts of this major financial company which had essentially
gone bottom up…so I had a lot of responsibility and I was doing some general
research there as well. (PM9)
Three participants qualified into their final seats, PF1 into family, PF3 into personal
injury and PF8 into commercial property.
7.5 Unstructured training
[T]here weren't any specific seats as such, it would just be a question of,
depending what work came through, doing that basically…I'd say to be
honest it wasn't sort of really very well thought out or structured in any way.
(PM6)
Participants experiencing unstructured or loosely structured training drew a similar
graph - from inactivity to overwork - to that drawn by participants trained within a
formal structure. So again we had comments such as these:
Well I started on the second of January so it was the first day back after
Christmas and they weren‟t a City firm there was no kind of induction process
for trainees or anything…And I just started, turned up and…sat in his
[principle] room for a year. He was running round the place like a headless
chicken. And, so it was quite a long time before he sat me down and you
know asked me to do anything. So I think for the first few days basically I just
sat and read through files. Like his most complex, complicated big money…I
just sat and read them and ploughed through them. And then gradually he‟d
start offering me to do things. (PF2)
One of the partners was very busy and sometimes he would sort of, well, sort
of forget about you. Or, times would go by and he wouldn't really be too
involved in training you…you really had to make the effort to contact him
really, I mean I know he was fairly busy, whatever, during the day but
sometimes you sort of felt time would go by and, you're sort of forgotten.
(PM6)
Contrasted with comments from a trainee contracted to a sole participant whose
training experience was so poor in terms of work overload and bullying that she
called in the Law Society:23
23
See further MacCallum V (2002) „Huge increase in bullying calls made to TSG helpline‟ 98:39 Law
Society Gazette 9 August at 4, Solicitors Journal (2001) „Stress and bullying: all in a day‟s work for a
trainee‟ 145:32 Solicitors Journal 17 August at 761.
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I didn't really have any training, it was basically a sink or swim scenario, it
was, you know, “do this”, and if you said you didn't know how to do it then it
would be…like “look in the bloody books” and things like that…I was there to
make money for him…I went there as a fee-earner basically and it was just
“get on with it, earn me lots of money” and, you know, “don't come and see
me if you've got any problems, sort them out yourself” and that was his
attitude…He was horrible. He was a bully. He would swear, he would throw
things across the room, screaming, shouting. I phoned up the Law Society
crying several times saying „what do I do?‟ It was awful…I didn't think I had a
very good training at all because it was the bullyboy tactics and it was, it was
just awful, going in on a daily basis and going home nightly crying to my mum.
So it was horrible. (PF9)
Unstructured or less structured training more moderate than these examples seemed
to provide participants with a myriad of legal work. Consequently they obtained a
fairly wide background of knowledge that made them adaptable to future legal
practice. Even those participants put under tremendous pressure during their training
admitted that, in retrospect, it stretched them and made them self sufficient. The
trainee that called the Law Society said that the experiences from one particularly
large case - that at the time she felt swamped her as it needed specialist advice but
was left to her - provided very good grounding that she still uses to this day; “I can
say everything that happened on [that] case, I used again but it didn't help at that
time and I just felt as though I was being swallowed up by it all” (PF9).
7.6 Supervision during the training contract
Equal numbers of trainees sat in with their training principal as sat in offices alone or
with other staff members, such as fellow trainees or secretarial support staff. As one
might expect, the degree of supervision given to each trainee depended on the
commitment and character of the training principle:
Some took an interest and others didn‟t, so it varied upon the type of work
and whether or not you are interested and if the partner you are sat with, as to
whether or not they enthuse you. (PM3)
[I]f the person you‟re working with is nice and amenable it gives you an
opportunity to ask questions easily and quickly. And stops you wasting time
trying to reinvent the wheel.
BUT SUPPOSING THEY‟RE NOT NICE AND AMENABLE.
Well I mean they just have to put up with it. Well then you sort of, you wait for
a better time to ask your question, or you go and ask someone else. You
know, use your initiative. (PM1)
The prospect of sitting in with a principal often made trainees apprehensive; one
“always thought that would be a bit grim actually” (PF5). Another said:
I was very conscious of doing any work or making any phone calls or anything
like that myself with the fee-earner there listening. Because it's quite daunting
really I think because you don't know if they're listening, you don't know if
they're thinking you're doing the wrong thing or, you know, going to shout at
you. (PF10)
My first year I sat in with the Solicitor and I found it very difficult. I found it very
difficult to use the dicta-phone to begin with anyway because I had no
confidence, but when you‟re sitting there with somebody alongside you that
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
can hear what you‟re saying and who‟s obviously experienced…the letters
improve from when you begin. [But] I found myself kind of hand writing them.
(PF4)
Others thought it was beneficial to sit in with the principal:
I mean that was just the best way, and that‟s one of the reasons why trainees
are in …as much as possible, with senior assistants and partners. Because to
listen to somebody with all those years of experience…and often the partner
will have a speaker phone, so you know what the client‟s saying and what
issues are being thrown up, or how questions are being formulated. And then
you hear how the partner handles them. There was one partner in particular,
one of our senior partners in litigation who I sat with, who‟s an absolutely
lovely man and just the most brilliant brain…I mean he was just brilliant. I
could just sit and listen to him all day, he was fantastic. And watching him
you‟d think “oh God that‟s how you do it. I would never have thought of that,
but wow that‟s how it‟s done”, and that was brilliant.
SO FOR YOU THAT WAS A BETTER WAY TO LEARN?
That was an excellent way to learn. (PF12)
Slightly less effusive, but nonetheless a firm supporter of sitting in with your
supervisor, this assistant solicitor commented that:
I was in the same room as the partner or the supervisor, in every seat. [It‟s
preferable] for the obvious reasons, you can learn a lot by watching other
people work, i.e., how your boss handles clients on the telephone or deals
with issues…it‟s perfectly sensible if you are a trainee you sit in with the
person who‟s supervising you. In 99% of the case that‟s the way it works
here. (PM1)
What was generally called for was a happy medium:
I think it would be useful to have a happy medium. Because in some ways I
think it was good to sit in their interviews…I think you learned probably more
that way. And sitting in on interviews and…going to court and following
people around, you‟ve got to learn those skills by seeing how other people do
it. But then ultimately…you‟ve got to be given the space to put them into
practice yourself. And again that depends on the type of law, because
obviously certain types of law you can be let loose at a fairly early stage,
whereas others, I mean obviously if you‟re dealing with a really big corporate
client you‟re not going to be able to do that. Whereas…if you‟re dealing with a
criminal on a fairly petty matter then there‟s nothing to stop you taking a
statement from them. I think it‟s a happy medium, because it‟s nice to be
given your own office and be given a space to get on with things. Because
personally speaking…not that I ever had that, but I think I‟d find it quite
daunting to sit in with a partner the whole time. So I think it‟s quite nice to
keep a happy medium. But it‟s not to be forgotten about, because, as I say, in
certain departments I can go for days without seeing a partner…And there‟s
only so many times you can go and knock on somebody‟s door and say “have
you found anything I can do”. (PF3)
I think it‟s better for [trainees] to [have] their own space as well, it‟s quite
hard…But going along to court, sitting in on interviews, that‟s good. Because
it just lets the trainee see what‟s expected and gives…them a bit of
confidence for when they‟re in the hot seat. (PF4)
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Supervision ranged from highly formal:
SO WHAT WAS THIS PARTICULAR BOSS'S MEANS OF SUPERVISION
AND CHECKING THAT YOU GOT THE WORK DONE?
He was much more formal, I mean he would sit there and dictate memos to
me whilst I was in the room which I'd get back typed up four days later rather
than just speak of me about it…then, you know, I'd try and speak to him and
he said “put it in a memo” so then I'd dictate to my dicta-phone something
back to him whilst he was sitting there and he'd get that four days later, so it
was all very bizarre but he likes everything done in paperwork, he doesn't like
communicating very much but he is a very good lawyer but just different
communication than most people. (PM8)
To fairly informal:
[In the family seat] I had kind of forced supervision where I needed it, but
generally I did what I thought. And that seemed to be fine, and I got a lot out
of it. What the clients thought might be another story of course… if I‟d been a
different sort of person I think the lack of supervision and “here‟s the files off
you go”, it would have been panic. But that quite suits me, I‟m quite well
suited to the “let‟s not have much supervision, do what you think and we‟re
here if you need help”. (PM10)
Those who professed to having had good supervision were asked to describe what
made it so. Commonalties included mutuality of the supervision process, so for the
trainer periodic checks on progress and for the trainee, an opportunity to raise any
concerns or make suggestions:
[T]here would be…every three months, reviews with your supervisor to check
that you‟re doing okay, that you‟re working hard enough. And for them to get
feedback from you in case there were different areas of law that you wanted
to…see or work in. And for them to sort of, you know, see how things could
be made better. (PM1)
Additionally, good supervision meant that the supervisor would make time to explain
things thoroughly, keep the trainee involved, give good feedback and instil trust and
confidence in the trainee:
[I]f you feel that your boss isn't going to jump down your throat if you get it
wrong then you feel more confident about doing your best anyway really.
(PM8)
The impact supervision can have on future specialism is debatable. An associate
who trained with a large City firm stated that the treatment she received from the
litigation partner who was meant to be supervising her made a permanent difference
to the way she thought about litigation:
[H]e's very disorganised, technically he's not very good and he would just
dump on you and consequently I hated it, I didn't have sufficient supervision,
you know. I got given something, “oh, can you just serve the winding up
petition on this company” and, “oh, I'm off on holiday”, so I'm like going “OK,
how do I get this company into liquidation…where do I start?” No guidance,
nothing, so, I had to go round asking other people and I was meant to get this
petition into court and everything by the time he'd come back and of course
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being a trainee it took me about a week and a half to draft the thing to start
with so I really wasn't too happy about that and that was pretty much sort of
representative of the whole of that six months. And I mean it did make such a
big difference to how I thought of litigation…I just didn't have enough
supervision to enjoy it, which is a shame because I think I still find it
interesting when I hear about it.
DO YOU THINK YOU WOULD HAVE OVERCOME THIS DISLIKE FOR
LITIGATION HAD THE SUPERVISION PERHAPS BEEN A BIT BETTER
AND YOUR EXPERIENCE OF THAT SEAT BEEN BETTER?
I think it probably would have done because a friend of mine, started saying,
“oh well, you should have looked in such-and-such a section of the Green
Book”, and I'm going “the Green Book?” “Well, yes, you read that whenever
you go to court”. “Do you? Oh right.”
SO HE DIDN'T EVEN GET THAT FAR IN YOUR TRAINING?
No, I mean I had no idea there was a book on court procedures…I think my
conclusion with the seats I'd done was residential property I enjoyed but I
didn't want to get into residential because there's no money in it. Private client
was potentially boring. Litigation, well, that wasn't even a consideration. So it
was sort of like, well, what's left, and it was commercial property. (PF8)
Another participant told of his commercial property seat, where he had very little
supervision because he was given very little work, learnt nothing and was
consequently “bored rigid”:
I think going in I sort of thought maybe, property would be interesting because
I‟d really enjoyed it on the degree. And although it wasn‟t high on my list of
things to specialise in later, I thought I would, you know, enjoy the seat, but by
the end I hated it, and I certainly didn‟t want to do anything related to it again.
(PM10)
Yet meticulous training doesn‟t necessarily enamour a trainee of a field of law. One
associate received punctilious supervision during her probate seat, but it was wasted
on her as she claimed she would “rather die than do probate” (PF11). Furthermore,
the impact that poor supervision and treatment has on a trainee can fade quickly.
This same associate is currently a family law participant:
I have to say I thought the last thing in the universe I wanted to do was family,
I didn't do family on the LPC, I only picked family when I was a trainee
because it was the best of the seats that was on offer at the time and the
nearest to what I wanted to do [personal injury] and just six weeks in just
thought “this is the one, this is it.”
WHY?
Ironically because it was hell…The woman I was working for was just a
monster and her sidekick was a monster, they were just evil, evil bastards,
they really were…[E]very trainee that I knew that worked for her hated and
feared her so much that they wouldn't go near her office, you would do
anything rather than ask her a question or, you know, come to her for help.
And I spent time, literally trying to hide what I was doing because, she would
just have such a go, whatever I'd done…She deliberately gave me cases she
didn't know what to do with. The Married Women's Property Act, I don't know
another family lawyer that has done a Married Women's Property Act case,
none of us had the faintest bloody idea what law applied to it or anything. So
she gave it to me as a trainee in her second seat, on account of I'd obviously
know, you know, having taken all the family law options.
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She did me an appraisal, the first appraisal I'd ever had, it took me weeks to
get over it. I finally got over it…I finally just sat back and looked at…what
she'd said about me, [I] boiled it down, what she had said was I was giving
them sound advice and they liked me but I was very untidy and
disorganised…And it suddenly dawned on me “how would you feel if what
she said was you're giving them crap advice and they hate you but you're
very tidy and organised”. [So] it finally dawned…but I was in despair, I was
just kind of thinking I've come this far and I'm just never going to be able to
practise, I'm useless, I can't do this. (PF11)
This in-house solicitor, however, took a little bit longer than six weeks to get over his
loathing of litigation. He recounted for us the difficulties he experienced with his
litigation principal yet, eventually, he developed an affinity for litigation:
[E]verybody had problems whenever they went in with her [litigation principal]
as soon as I arrived everybody said, “Oh God…don't look forward to the next
six months when you're with you-know-who” and it turned out to be as bad as
everybody told me but, I got through that and I suspect it put me off litigation.
[The] only thing that she ever did was just to shout at everybody and, you
know, I can't really explain, I mean she was just a nasty person, everybody
had the same problem with her…She just couldn't train anybody, she wasn't
able or interested in training anybody. And it's funny when you look back…my
view now is maybe that's because she wasn't very good at her job herself and
was very insecure about that, but obviously at the time she is the one who
knows everything and you know nothing. I mean an indication of the way she
would work is that I would come in at about eight fifty or something, she would
arrive at nine, my phone would ring and she'd say “get the effing hell down
here” and that's how it started, and every day was like that. And I mean after
a while that particular morning phone call runs over you because it's just
happening every day but that kind of thing is how she was and it was
constantly like that.
DID YOU FIND YOU ACTUALLY LEARNED MUCH IN THAT SEAT?
No, I didn't. The only thing I did learn was advocacy because she wouldn't do
her own advocacy, she refused to do it. And this is what would often happen,
you would be called down at nine ten and have a file thrown at you and told
you've got to be at court at ten „o'clock and that's how she worked, but
obviously that means you have to learn very quickly…I didn't learn anything in
terms of substance. I learned how to sort of work on my feet, you know, in
dire situations and be embarrassed in court and get used to
that…sometimes…the judge tells you off and that doesn't bother me now
because I had that awful time when I was a trainee. But, you know, I didn't
learn anything and certainly it put me off that area of law completely.
It was obviously this woman who put me off it, because…I just didn't
contemplate qualifying into litigation because at that stage my intention
probably was to stay there at the firm and I just didn't contemplate working for
her so I didn't really put the same effort into litigation that I did into commercial
and commercial property. I actually qualified in property later and did property
initially…[Eventually] general boredom with property and wanting to do a few
more areas [lead him in-house] I started to think that maybe because of the
articles…with that particular lady, maybe I'd not done areas of law because of
that And going in-house kind of gave me the opportunity almost to do my
articles again because I do all the different areas…and the litigation is my
favourite part of it, believe it or not, so it does all come full circle. (PM7)
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From the experience and opinion of our entrants to the legal profession it is safe to
conclude that „to train the best only the best should train‟.24
7.7 The contract as preparation for post-qualification
A number of our participants doubted whether, for the day to day challenges and
pressures of „real life as a lawyer‟, any education or training could properly prepare a
person. Particularly with regard to the stress, the relentlessness of billing chargeable
hours (PF7), the repetition and the consequent boredom:
[I]n many ways I‟m a bored, deskbound administrator doing legal aid work. It‟s
got so much red tape…And in many ways I don‟t think that your legal training
can prepare you for that really…ultimately I think a lot of things about being a
solicitor aren‟t; really things that you can learn. It‟s just you‟ve got to be
practical and you‟ve got to accept that a lot of it is really dull.
Those of our participants who did feel that their academic and vocational training
gave them the tools to become confident and competent solicitors25 tended to do so
because they qualified into the area of law in which they had spent their „best‟ seat as
a trainee. Thus on qualification they simply continued doing what they had already
been doing. One continued with commercial property work (PF8), another continued
with family law (PF11). An ex-trainee put it this way:
I loved my training contract…I think I certainly learned a lot. When I qualified
as a Solicitor I didn‟t notice the change, and I didn‟t worry about “oh! crikey
I‟m now responsible for signing letters, and if I give advice I could be sued on
it” and things like that. You know, that day just came and went for me
because I was already doing it. (PF1)
Another participant, who spent his training contract at a small high street practice, felt
adequately prepared for his post-qualification move to the commercial property
department of a large law firm:
WHAT WAS [IT] LIKE, COMING FROM YOUR HIGH STREET FIRM [TO A]
LARGE FIRM?
[T]he clients that I was dealing with were bigger, they were PLC clients or big
limited companies as opposed to small High Street businesses.
WAS THE WORK DIFFERENT IN ANY WAY?
Yes, because in the high street…when I was doing commercial property it
could be, anything, it could be buying, I don't know, a chip shop or it could be
just doing the corporate support for somebody selling a little car garage, it
was very different and I was also doing some residential property, to assist
their department so it was much more of a mixed bag. Whereas in [name of
firm] I did development properties; you even specialised in the type of
property that you did. And I was doing development for big house builders like
Wimpey and Henry Boot and those kind of people…So you had less clients
24
Philip Wood, Head of Know-how and Education at Allen & Overy, as quoted by Griffiths C (2002)
„Mighty Mouse: how do global firms cope with the increasing complexity of training requirements?‟ 15:44
The Lawyer 5 November at 29.
25
As a point of comparison, according to a lifestyle survey, over 66% of trainees believe their current
training will provide them with a strong basis for qualification; see Hays ZMB (2001) Trainee solicitors
lifestyle survey conducted in conjunction with the National Trainee Solicitors Group, at
www.zureka.com/surveyprint.htm.
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because they were big clients who gave us a lot of work. So you developed a
relationship with 10 or 12 big clients as opposed to having 100 people who,
you never really speak to after you've done the deal. (PM7)
Those who felt unprepared for the transition to qualified solicitor presented a number
of reasons for this. These reasons usually involved the fact that the participants had
little experience of the field of law in which they found themselves post qualification.
Sometimes this was due to the specialist nature of their training. For example, the
participant who trained with the CPS felt “completely unprepared for [her] first job”, in
a busy high street criminal firm:
I haven‟t experienced the defence side because it‟s such a different side of
life because you‟re never near criminals when you‟re prosecuting. The
nearest you get is with the police; [a] completely different perspective. (PF6)
Generally, the lack of preparedness was primarily put down to inadequate training:
[M]y training contract was very office based and on the occasions I was out of
the office, it was because of litigation work basically…[For the PQE job] I was
doing [civil/commercial] litigation, ninety five per cent of the time.
HAD THE WORK YOU'D DONE UNDER YOUR TRAINING CONTRACT
PREPARED YOU.
Being honest, no. [A]t the beginning…it was fairly strenuous because, the
person before me I think had left two months [previously, I had] to catch up
with the files. And because my training hadn't really sort of given me that
good an experience, at the beginning it was quite difficult, to catch up with
different clients and get on top of things. And also because the work was
more complex as well so, yes, at times it was fairly stressful. (PM6)
Regardless of inadequate preparation during training this interviewee felt confident
enough to take a gamble on his first PQE position:
I didn‟t learn an awful lot with my training contract…it was a beneficial
experience but I didn‟t feel I was trained, I felt that I trained myself…[for my
first job after the training contract] I ended up in this firm in [the East of
England]…I went to…apply for a job there as a commercial property lawyer.
And I had really done no commercial or property work of any great substance,
other than watching other people dictate letters and draft documents. And that
was literally it, I‟d never drafted any documents, I really had not done an awful
lot of practical hands on work. And I took a gamble, I took a gamble that I was
clever enough to basically learn on the job…and I was lucky in that I knew I
had a flair for it and I just worked like hell during the day to do the basics,
read lots of other people‟s files and picked up points from how other people
had done it and read all night to brush up on my knowledge of the area. I
mean, I knew the areas and I knew the theory but I had just not done a lot of
practical work. (PM5)
Another participant was less confident in her ability to cope:
I didn't come away at the two years feeling confident that I'd, you know, had a
structured training and I was competent to be a qualified solicitor and
confident to be a qualified solicitor.
[WHY?]
I don't know, I don't know whether it was just the nature of the job that there is
always going to be things you're learning and you're always going to be
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getting more confident…like now when we have our department meetings
we'll discuss…details of problem cases between us and learn things from
each other all the time. So I suppose part of the nature of the job is that you're
never going to know it all, which isn't particularly reassuring when you're just
starting out. (PF10)
From our participants‟ perspective, the training contract gave them the opportunity to
experience working in different areas of law before having to make a final decision
about the area in which to specialise. As LPC graduates participants often felt they
already knew what their chosen speciality would be, having enjoyed the subject
during the LPC. However, once they experienced that field of law in practice their
opinions often changed. To varying degrees these ex-trainees felt the LPC prepared
them for what to expect of the law in practice, for example, dealing with clients,
dictating letters, drafting documents and going to court. But they also felt that these
skills take time to develop, and that the training contract provided them with the
opportunity and space to apply and develop these skills.
7.8 The training contract in hindsight
The overriding feeling from the majority of participants was that the training contract
is the place you learn the job and that “learning on the job…is ultimately what it‟s all
about” (PF3):
The training contract is remarkably effective I think in terms of you soak up
the atmosphere of the firm, you understand you have got to get on with
things, you are taught how to do things, if you are good at them you will be
given more to do. It is a bit hit and miss as to how good your training partner
is and how good the principals are, but nevertheless I think that's the time to
learn the detail. And if you are interested in it you will pick it up. (PM3)
Those who remember their training with fondness, as a beneficial and worthwhile
experience, tended to do so for a combination of reasons. Primary among these was
being given early responsibility, being kept occupied with lots to do and being given
support and help or constructive criticism when required. In essence then, a nurturing
working environment is an important ingredient in a rewarding experience. Typical of
the comments made was this from a partner in a general litigation firm:
I loved my training contract, I got a lot out of it, I‟m not sure all of it was
thought about at the top level and I think a lot of it I created myself. But I was
allowed the ambit to do what I wanted; I was allowed to run cases, I was
allowed to go and meet barristers…see clients on first interviews and run
them on my own unless I needed help on them. So it worked quite well and I
suppose there had to be a lot of mutual trust there and confidence in each
other. (PF1)
An associate solicitor who remained with her training firm post-qualification expanded
upon this later point concerning the mutuality of the training relationship. She noted
that there were times when her training was “extremely rewarding” and times when
she found it “extremely frustrating”. And that this was down to individuals; “[s]ome
people are keen on training but…some people aren‟t. And there‟s no way around
that, you‟ve just got to hope that the firm picks their people” (PF3). The person picked
to train the following interviewee was clearly not enamoured of training
responsibilities:
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One day I think I was leaving my desk about six thirty and the senior partner
caught me going home and sent me back to my desk and said my day hadn‟t
finished…So, I think, they did expect you to stay until…half seven every
single night…and I really just wasn‟t into that whole idea…I loved going to
court and doing that kind of thing but I just found the some of the partners‟
attitudes really, really difficult. (PF7)
The expectation of trainees working long hours was not an uncommon story, and
was further highlighted by a participant who, during her training contract with a public
organisation, was seconded to work in a large commercial practice:
[Y]ou‟re put under so much pressure as a trainee. Just like volume of work,
especially when the big deals are on. You know I remember being there quite
a few times at three, four in the morning, I ended up crying at one point
saying “I don‟t know why I‟m here till four in the morning…I think you‟re using
me”…I think it had all boiled up because they‟d left me to walk to my car at
four in the morning in the middle of [a big City]. (PF6)
Another participant tells of a similar experience in one of her seats, but, because of
the nature of the environment and the camaraderie of her colleagues, her memory of
the seat was not an unpleasant one. She was working on the biggest management
buyout the firm had ever dealt with. This basically meant living in the office for two
months, working weekends and, in the final week of closing the deal, only sleeping in
two hour shifts. When asked how she felt about this she replied:
I would never have coped had I not had the work colleagues that I did. We
kept each other sane, I mean because we didn‟t sleep a lot, I think I slept four
hours in 72 or something ridiculous like that. And having colleagues who you
liked, who you could laugh with, we‟d stop at three and play corridor cricket,
you know, for fifteen minutes just to keep ourselves sane. And all those on
the other side, who were also having a shitty time, when we came to closing
at the end of that horrible week, they all showed up at our offices and they
looked just as miserable and tired as we did. But the difference was that we
had a lot of fun, us as a group, and when things got difficult, you know, we
could laugh, and we all had nicknames, and just things to survive. And we‟d
really formed a tight group. And the poor trainees and assistants, they looked
so miserable…they had no fun at all…so they‟d not only had the same shitty
hours that we‟d had, but they didn‟t have colleagues to emotionally support
them. (PF12)
Yet a lack of support in a trainee‟s work environment can have advantages,
advantages that were in reality only appreciated in retrospect. For instance, a
number of participants who reported difficult training contracts said that their
experiences made them independent, self sufficient and confident. One participant
acknowledged that being made during her contract to tackle anything that came
through the door meant she “became a solicitor quicker maybe than if [she‟d] been
spoon-fed everything” (PF4). However, on reflection she reiterated the traditional
trainee lament of being treated like „cheap labour‟,26 a practice this participant feels
too many firms engage in:
I think there seems to be…a tendency with a lot of firms just to have trainees
in, expecting they know all the law and the academic stuff because they've
26
Supra n.17.
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done a degree or whatever and really just using them for cheap labour
without…concentrating on the teaching side. (PF10)
In contrast, another participant saw her treatment as an elevation of her status to that
of a fee earner:
I mean it‟s a relatively small firm and it‟s a very sort of hands on, you‟re really
thrown in at the deep end, you know, just doing things and sort of learning as
you‟re doing them, as you‟re getting them wrong really…there was none of
this time spent photocopying or anything like that, we were sort of treated as
proper fee earners right at the beginning. (PF5)
This difference in perspective may be to do with the nature of the trainees‟ working
environment. PF4 had a chequered training contract history, spending a year with a
sole participant who couldn‟t afford to pay her before moving on to an high street
practice run by two partners who “were very aggressive and had no scruples when it
came to staff” (PF4). PF5 had structured training with a long established specialist
litigation firm where she remained after qualifying.
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8 Professional Skills Course
Under the Law Society Training Regulations 1990, post LPC but pre-admission as a
solicitor, each trainee is required to undertake the Professional Skills Course (PSC).27
The regulations oblige each training establishment to pay the course fees and allow
trainees paid study leave to attend the course. It takes 72 hours to complete and may
be provided externally or in-house. The PSC consists of three mandatory subjects:;
financial and business skills, advocacy and communication skills, and client care and
professional standards. There are also electives that the trainee chooses, and that
expand on one more of the mandatory subject areas.28
Most of our interviewees had only basic and vague recollections about the PSC, with
only one being able to give detailed comment on each of the courses undertaken.
The overall impression seemed to be that the course was of minimum use to them in
practice. Typical comments included: “it didn‟t have much effect on me” (PM7), “I‟m
just trying to remember what was on it, so that answers your question, doesn‟t it?”
(PF10), “to be honest I would say most of them seemed like a waste of time” (PF8), “I
don‟t‟ remember the PSC being terribly relevant to my work at the time that I
completed it” (PM10). Those who did find the PSC useful suggested that the skills it
taught could be better placed at the LPC stage:
I did wonder why the professional skills course couldn't have been put into the
legal practice course somewhere. Again it was all information that I needed
and information that I refer to now, I mean sometimes I'm not too sure about a
practice rule or something then I'll just as much pick up my notes as pick up
the Law Society Handbook. So, yes, it was a good course, I'm glad I did it but
I often did think…why couldn't this have been done in the [LPC]. (PF9)
I would prefer all of the academic side to be finished after the four years,
because you‟ve got…this PSC which interrupts you…I found that a bit tedious
when I was working…once you‟re in a working environment it‟s quite difficult
when [you have] files and [are] under pressure to sort of go off for four days in
a week was sort of quite difficult. So I think you‟re better to deal with the
whole of the academic side of it before you actually start work. (PF4)
The PSC was revised in 1998, and as a result some of the concerns voiced by our
participants - particularly the subject of solicitors accounts rules, which all our
discussants brought up - have been addressed:29
I'm glad to see that they're doing accounts back in the LPC because it was a
nightmare not having the slightest idea about accounts until I did that halfway
through training contract…[H]ow do you start doing probate when you haven't
got the slightest idea how to read your own solicitor's account and it was
absolute Greek to me, I was like, “what?”, [I had] no idea, absolutely none.
That should be taught at the LPC, you can't walk into a solicitor's office and
starting working if you don't understand about accounts. (PF11)
It was the basic solicitors accounting rules, especially on client and office account
monies, which the participants found of use, rather than the detailed bookkeeping.
This was particularly the case for those who trained in smaller high street practices.
27
Law Society Professional Skills Course at www.lawsociety.org.uk.
28
Ibid.
29
For example, solicitors accounts training moved back to the LPC stage in September 1997.
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[T]he rules and…knowing about office and clients accounts, that was
important I think but the actual bookkeeping part of it wasn't very much help to
me, I don't think, but then I suppose if and when you become a partner you‟ll
need to know. (PF10)
But this participant doubted you would need this knowledge even at that stage:
If I had gone on to be a partner in private practice or if I had set up my own
practice, the PSC may have provided an introduction, although I suspect that
I would have either needed much more detailed knowledge or I would have
relied on suitably trained staff and/or one of the software packages now
available instead. (PM10)
Advocacy remains a part of the PSC, and our participants reported its usefulness in
varying degrees, depending on whether or not their workload was contentious or
non-contentious. For instance, this interviewee concentrated on commercial and
domestic conveyancing during her training and thus thought advocacy “was a waste
of time because I knew I didn't want to do it” (PF8):
The advocacy course was excellent fun, and might have been of more use
earlier in our training contracts, but as mine was towards the end of my first
year, and I had already done a good deal of advocacy by then it was more a
welcome escape from the office than anything else…I think that those
trainees who were concentrating on non-contentious seats found it more
helpful, but as they were unlikely to do more than the minimum of litigation, I
have doubts of its relevance to them either. (PF11)
A number of our participants believed that their training firms thought the PSC was
an unnecessary cost to the firm, in terms of expense and loss of trainee time:
[T]he firm when I was doing the training was totally disinterested in, you know,
what that was about and totally disinterested as well…in the fact that I had
examinations or whatever and they just seemed to think…it was just a waste
of their time really having to pay fees for the professional skills course which I
don't think…they really understood they had to…and if the firm wasn't
interested it was slightly demoralising really. (PM6)
One trainee, now an associate in a general practice legal aid firm, has some
sympathy with the position of such firms:
I think that the PSC puts a very serious financial burden on training
establishments, in terms of loss of personnel and paying for the course,
without really teaching the trainees anything they didn't or shouldn't already
know. (PF11)
At the very least the PSC provided trainees with the opportunity to meet and share
experiences with other trainees at similar stages of development. As this participant
commented; “you meet all the other people at your stage from other firms locally and
it was always something that you looked forward to” (PM8).
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9 Views on and experience of current trainees
The current spate of complaints about trainees has largely focused upon the
contention that there has been a general decline in the overall quality of recent
graduates.30 We asked our participants for their view on the abilities of current
trainees. The typical view expressed was that today‟s neophytes are no less or more
able that our participants were at their stage, and that much depended on the trainee.
Some are able and dynamic; others need more guidance and detailed instruction:
I don‟t believe they‟re conspicuously more talented than we were [despite
revisions of the LPC] I haven‟t actually noticed a little sea change in the
quality of our trainees. They‟re not sort of stepping into the office and doing
my job for me yet. But I don‟t see them as any worse or any better. Well it
slightly depends on who you are. Some trainees are incredibly able,
proactive, reliable, and are just sort of generally studious creatures. I don‟t
think I was but some people are. And on that basis if it‟s relatively
straightforward work you could say “this is what we‟re aiming to do, and this is
broadly speaking what you need to do. And here‟s a spare pile of similar
transactions that‟ll give you an idea. Have you got any questions? Would you
like to take this one on?” Other trainees who are less confident, less capable,
less wonderful, you‟ll have to give them a file and say “right, what we‟re going
to do here is this, you might want to get your pen and paper out because I‟m
going to tell you the following four steps, a), b), c), d), here‟s an old file but the
things you need to especially look out for are blah blah blah.” So it depends
on the trainee as to the degree of rope you give them to hang themselves
with. It varies. (PM1)
One marked change was an increase in the personal confidence of many new
trainees. Some thought this confidence was due to trainees having had extensive
experience working in other firms or in previous careers, and thus being self assured
in the working environment and comfortable with clients.31 Others put the confidence
down to trainees being cocksure; “these guys are sort of like, „right, OK, I've got the
job, you should be grateful to have me, let's go from here‟ ” (PF8). Added to this, one
commentator said; “unfortunately, so much of legal practice is a confidence trick that
few people feel that they can admit to not knowing something or not understanding it”
(PM10).
However, one participant did echo criticism concerning trainee literacy:
[W]e were talking, some of the partners were talking last week about one
thing that they have noticed about trainees at the moment is that they‟re
terrible at writing letters and so, you know, the grammar and punctuation and
everything is really terrible. And we were talking about whether there was
anything we could do about that, and we sort of decided there wasn‟t really, it
was just something that you learn while you‟re here. But I suppose that when
people start often, like me, it‟s their first office job and they‟re not used to
writing formal letters. And I don‟t know whether it would be too patronising to
30
See, for example, Mizzi A (2002) „Improving qualifying standards by degrees‟ 99:34 Law Society
Gazette 5 September at 23.
31
The average age of qualifiers in 2001 was 28.7 years; see Law Society (2001) Trends in the solicitors
profession: annual statistical report 2001 (London: Law Society). See also Rose N (2002) „The way we
are‟ 99:36 Law Society Gazette 19 September at 22.
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
include something like that on the course, or whether that is included, I can‟t
remember. (PF5)
Another said that she “twitch[ed] a bit when employing trainees who, as far as [she
was] concerned are of no use at all to a law firm when they join” (PF1). This was
more to do perhaps with the nature of her practice - dealing with murderers, rapist
and other sex offenders - than the quality of the trainees. She went on to add that
those trainees who had undertaken substantial work experience at the firm or
elsewhere prior to contract were able to cope with the stresses and strains presented
by the nature of the work:
[W]e‟ve had a couple of trainees who‟ve said “oh I can come and work at
[name of firm] I know you act for murderers and rapists and sex offenders and
all sorts, it doesn‟t bother me” and then they come and they work here for
three months and they say “I‟m so stressed out with it I can‟t cope” and they
leave. And that‟s no good to us and it‟s no good to them. So I think that it‟s
very important to get to know them first, we‟ve got three trainees now who‟ve
all worked with us before they joined. Saying that, we‟ve also got two who
haven‟t, but they are two who have extensive experience working in other
firms. (PF1)
For one of our male participants this inability to cope was not just when faced with
difficult situations but extended to the day to day matters that make up what a law
firm is all about; clients and money:
Well at the end of the day I think all students should be told this is a business
and it‟s about money…we‟ve had, before me and after me, trainees leave
because they don‟t like asking people for money [and] didn‟t like speaking to
clients but I think “well if you don‟t like speaking clients well what the hell are
you doing in law anyway?” This business is about talking to people and
getting money out of them.
You‟ve got a lot of [academically] clever people…on the courses, but they‟re
never gonna make it…they‟ve got no practical skills, they‟ve got no idea of
how they‟re gonna talk to people. [A Cambridge graduate trainee] astounded
me, the stuff he knew how clever he was…he‟d probably forgotten more law
than I‟ll ever know. You can give him a theoretical situation and he would
come up with an incredible answer but give him a practical problem, ask him
to talk to a client, he couldn‟t do it. (PM4)
The final negative comment about trainees also mentioned this need for good rapport
with clients, this time in the field of family law, focusing on their lack of initiative,
which was seen, in part, as due to having been spoon-fed at degree level:
I‟ve seen a lot of trainees and I‟ve felt they have no initiative, they are not
interested in the job. You ask them to do something and then they do it and
they put the file back in the filing cabinet. Whereas when I was a trainee, if my
boss asked me to do something I knew that meant that basically the file was
mine and I had to go on and follow it all without being told what to do each
step of the way. (PF2)
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10 A critique of legal education and training as vocational
preparation
10.1 The learning of skills
So far this report has focused on the legal education the participants experienced.
Although the participants‟ evaluation has hinted at deficiencies, we now classify and
elaborate a critique and identify some of the gaps recognised in this study.
Current complaints and concerns regarding the legal education and training of law
graduates are broadly focused on two areas. Firstly their lack of adequate legal
knowledge and secondly their lack of adequate skills - analytical, language, research,
presentation, drafting and so on. Further, there may be a case for re-examining the
inclusion of problem solving as one of the core skills:
A big buzz around the firm saying “oh this girl is starting and she‟s the bees
knees and she‟ll be a breath of fresh air, we‟ve never had a trainee like
her”…yeah she was very personable, she could talk to clients, but could she
give the clients a practical solution to their practical problem? No she couldn‟t,
so they got rid of her pretty sharpish…the client would ring up and say “I‟ve
got this problem”, Okay she could give them an answer to the problem which
is straight out of a text book and probably 100% right but it ain‟t gonna work in
practice. It‟s that practical element, that is totally missing, you‟re taught on the
academic level but the academic level and the practical don‟t mix really.
(PM4)
In light of the rapid changes experienced by the profession and the increasing
specialisation and globalisation of the law, it is arguable that more focus should be
placed on sharpening these higher level professional skills. This might be at the
expense of context bound activities such as interviewing, or specialist legal
knowledge which is unlikely to be used by most solicitors in practice.
10.1.1 Research skills
Qualifying law degrees require a student to study seven foundation subjects plus
legal research skills, although for the latter there are no stipulations for discrete
teaching.32 Furthermore under the Training contract standards trainees must have
the ability to conduct and communicate the results of competent research.33 From the
point of view of our participants, there was clear identification of the importance of
32
“Both the original Preliminary notice to law schools in 1993 and the Announcement on qualifying law
degrees (Law Society and Council of Legal Education, 1995) incorporated a revised description of the
seven core subjects as „foundation subjects‟ and a requirement for legal research skills, for which no
discrete teaching was stipulated”; Barker D (2002) Two hemispheres, three decades: a comparative
study of developments in legal education in both England and Wales and Australia over the last 30
th
years (Speech given to the Association of Law Teachers 37 Annual Conference in Greenwich 24-25
March).
33
Training Framework Review consultation paper, supra n.15 at 10. The Training contract standards
require that: “trainees be able to carry out and communicate results of effective research. They should
learn to analyse problems and find solutions for investigation and factual and legal issues. There is a
requirement that during the training contract, trainees should be given work that will enable them to
practice skills taught in the Legal Practice Course, making use of traditional legal sources and, where
appropriate, computerised research tools, business information and other relevant sources. To help
trainees develop these skills they should be required to: (a) research specific legal issues; (b) research
other factual, historical or commercial matters; (c) prepare for client interviews; (d) analyse corporate
searches; (e) investigate title to property and other relevant searches‟ (f) view title documents (g) read
and review the client‟s papers‟ (h) assist with due diligence enquires.”
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
effective research skills. Debate concerned the stage at which those skills are best
taught and recognition of their failure at the time to take the teaching of these skills
seriously. However, the further along in their legal education and training our
participants progressed the more seriously they took research skills:
As an [undergraduate] student I went to the library about four times in three
years, which is appalling…[if] I wanted to do some photocopying or
something…I could have learned the skills at university but I chose not to I
suppose, I chose just to be a child. (PF1)
I just switched off, they [research skills] just seemed so bizarre and…I just
couldn‟t get my head round them at the time. (PF6)
These declarations illustrate that at the academic stage our participants didn‟t
appreciate the significance of the research skills they were being taught and didn‟t
take them seriously, unless, as we found, there was a measurable outcome in the
form of marks awarded for assignments or group presentations for instance. So, if
research has a purpose then efforts will be made to learn the skills. Generally
though, at this point, reliance was placed on textbooks, lecture notes and case law.
Any more extensive research was seen by some as icing rather than cake:
[F]or the first…six months or so a lot of the time was spent on like, “well what
the hell‟s a tort?” So you were learning the basics. So you‟ve got to learn the
basics before, I think, you put the icing on the cake. (PF2)
CPE interviewees reported a distinct lack of prolonged training in research skills,
acknowledging the fact that studying a three year course truncated into one year
means that something has to give. However, none reported feeling disadvantaged by
this, either because these skills were covered during the LPC stage and/or just
worked out along the way, ie “learnt by default” (PF11).
There was a marked tendency amongst our participants to take research more
seriously at the LPC stage of training (“I think my research skills only acquired some
modicum of excellence when I did the LPC” (PM5)). Firstly, they were obliged to by
the course weighting towards practical legal research skills and the importance it
attaches to them - these skills were part of their daily lives as students and there was
no way to disguise the fact if they failed to complete a research task. But, secondly,
at the LPC stage our participants “felt more like lawyers and wanted to do it” (PF1).
The fact that the problems our participants were asked to research bore relation to
real life scenarios also led to them being taken more seriously, although not entirely:
[At] Law School, I suppose I actually could have taken more advantage of the
facilities they had there in terms of research but I suppose you only do what's
absolutely necessary but it did give you a sort of feeling for how to find things.
(PF8)
Participants informed us that as trainees much of their time was spent in legal
research and that the expectation “on the job” was that they would just “get on with
it”. They appreciated the fact that they could not “just ask questions the whole time
[and had] to be capable of going off and looking things up” (PF7). On occasion
participants expressed resentment as to the amount of research they were required
to do during their training contracts. They felt research was an activity no one else
wanted to do.
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A participant writing recently for The Trainee magazine vividly articulated these
feelings:
From day one I was expected to know the finer, honed skills of research.
Coming from a background in history [degree], the one thing I do have is
research skills! However, legal research is an entirely different animal. Whilst
we are taught the skills of research at degree level, all this is forgotten on the
LPC. We dive into the practicalities, which is all well and good, but
somewhere along the way we slowly lose elements of our research skills.
Then, bang, day one in the office we‟re asked to find something out. I dare
say that the majority of us cope very well, but I think we would cope even
better if we were kept up to speed with it during the LPC. It is all very well
when you‟ve got all the time in the world to locate an answer…but in the
reality of chargeable hours, can we really justify seven hours locating a
case?34
10.1.2 Literacy skills
The Training Framework Review consultation paper has accented concerns, inter
alia, about poor literacy skills.35 Michael Mathews, chair of the review, has reported a
suggestion made to him for an improved level of English to be part of the core
foundations required of a solicitor. He observed that “somewhere along the way the
art of writing a simple, clear and professional client letter has been lost and surely
needs to be mastered before a trainee gets adorned with the banner „qualified‟.”36
All four of the participants who brought letter writing up as an issue pointed to the fact
that it‟s a personal style that can cause frictions. The LPC taught them the basics - to
use plain language, not to express emotion and so on - but they found training
principals rooted to traditional phraseology:
[I]n terms of letter writing skills and giving…practical advice in terms which a
client could understand was sort of honed [on the LPC] ...the partner…tended
to write in a rather old-fashioned way…using old-fashioned words like
„herewith‟ which we were taught really you don't use, unless there was
relevance which, you know, for the most part they wasn‟t. And [the LPC
taught you to] use simple proper plain English and…I tended to write in that
way…I'm sure on a couple of occasions if I was writing letters to clients and
he would look at them, he would change some of them. (PM6)
This participant continued to write the way he was taught, but others felt there was
little point in developing their own style and instead adapted their writing to suit that
of the particular principal for whom they were working. This could be both frustrating
and irritating (PM8):
I had other files where I ran it as my own, but she [training principal] always
checked the letters both coming in and going out. I always quite hated that
though because where it was a substance thing, I was quite happy for her to
say, “well, you know, let‟s not do that for this reason” or “that‟s wrong on law
or tactically it‟s poor”, that‟s fine. But more often than not, and this has been
my general experience actually all the way through, letters would be changed
for style, “well you‟ve said the right thing but I would have said it this way”.
34
The Trainee (2002) „From cradle to grave‟ 12 The Trainee 28 at 29.
35
Supra n.15.
36
As quoted by Eldred J (2002) „How to put recruits through their paces” 99:34 Law Society Gazette 5
September 21 at 22.
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
Most of the people I‟ve worked for haven‟t been prepared to accept that there
are other ways of achieving the same thing. And once or twice we had big
arguments about that, because I would just say to her, “if all you‟re doing is
changing it for style, then I‟m not happy about this”. (PM10)
The frustration and irritation that this type of checking up caused was grudgingly
acknowledged by this participant to be of benefit in the long term:
[T]here was one partner who…literally he would sort of sit you down and give
you a right going over for getting your punctuation wrong but actually that
stood you in really good stead, you know. At the time it was like “Oh my God,
I‟m never going to get any letter passed him” because he‟s just so obsessed
with everything. But actually that was very good training and so I learnt a lot
from him but I didn‟t really feel that I learnt anything much. (PF7)
At undergraduate level legal research failed to provide participants with the full range
of skills they required for practice. This was not helped by the fact that participants
failed to take the teaching of these skills seriously. Their attitudes changed on
undertaking the LPC, mainly because of the practical nature of the course and its
focus on skills. As trainees, participants spent much of their time in legal research
and of necessity became proficient. For most participants literacy skills were not
highlighted as an issue. For those making comment trainers‟ complaints about
trainee‟s lack of literacy often concerned a conflict of personal writing style.
10.2 The impact of specialisation
The logic of the present system of legal education and training is that the stages are
progressively more relevant to legal practice. The contribution of the degree, insofar
as it is relevant to practice, provides a broad base of legal knowledge and, largely
academic skills. Participants perceive this to be the case. For example, one
suggested that “my actual law degree was not that relevant in a number of ways but
everything at law college was very relevant” (PM8). The pervasiveness of workplace
specialisation, however, calls into question the relevance of teaching „practical
applications‟ as opposed to theories of application, or general principles:
I have perhaps known a couple in big commercial firms where the partners
still will try their hand at one or two different things. And those partners to my
knowledge now have retired very recently and I do not expect them to be
replaced by any all rounders, they will be replaced by specialists. Law is
becoming more and more specialist…I think that education is better teaching
people about the principals of things and I think that the reality is that you will
learn the practice when you actually get to the firm. (PM3)
Workplace specialisation for lawyers has raised the issue of what level of particularity
and generality is relevant at the initial and vocational stages. This issue was
identified by a number of participants, and succinctly put by one as the difficulty of
achieving the balance between general education and usefulness:
You‟ve got a tension between the profession wanting a sort of core basis of
knowledge, that should be common to all solicitors, but the more you pile that
on before they‟re in practice the more likely it is that a large amount of it is not
going to be relevant as firms of solicitors become more and more specialised,
which of course they are nowadays when they weren‟t sort of 20 years ago.
They were all general practices. So your Law School stuff could be wholly
irrelevant to a lot of people. On the other hand, if you had a one year CPE
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
and then a three year article system the Law Society I think would, fairly,
worry that, at less wonderful firms where ongoing training and ongoing
supervision was not so good, you‟re going to have someone who, over three
years, didn‟t have the necessary training and supervision and experience.
(PM1)
There are various possible implications of job specialisation that need to be
considered. Does specialisation call for greater generality because of the
unpredictable nature of career paths? Does it suggest a need for a shorter general
education and longer period of education in the area of specialisation? Does it
suggest a need for more „on the job‟ training and, if so, how should this connect with
legal education?
The argument for a generalist core was put by several participants:
I don‟t think it‟s a bad thing if they start off and one sixth of the first year, when
they‟re doing CPE, is devoted to crime. I think it‟s no bad thing that there is
some common thread that runs through the profession and that all solicitors
have done these six basic topics. (PM1)
Institutions could decide upon whether they wanted to offer the intellectual
[subjects like] jurisprudence, I don‟t know now but at the time there were I
think less and less universities asking you to do that. I personally didn‟t find it
a particularly rewarding experience, but there are friends of mine who thought
it was wonderful. (PF3)
It appears to be difficult for law graduates to assess how well education has prepared
them for practice, and this difficulty is exacerbated the further back they have to go.
Participants therefore found it difficult to assess the intrinsic value of the initial stage
as a professional preparation. There was some appreciation that awareness of the
general legal framework is useful. For example, one said:
Of course it‟s useful and the basics are obviously there, the building blocks,
what is a contract and all the rest of it, that‟s useful, that‟s essential and you
need that knowledge. (PM5)
In contrast, many participants reflected that the specialised nature of their work had
rendered much of their degree work redundant, that the value of the initial stage had
faded by the time entrants to the profession began working:
Legal practice is different from legal education, and what you‟re doing and
how you do it. But that's just the nature of the beast. (PM1)
Further, the strength of the argument that students benefit from breadth is tenable in
relation to legal knowledge but declines in relation to transactions and skills:
The theory is that you teach people to do what they will be doing and frankly if
somebody teaches me how to fill in a form, and this is literally the case, I
knew I wasn‟t going to be doing domestic conveyancing, and if somebody
teaches me how to fill in the relevant form to get a search done, I fill it in and I
have immediately forgotten how to do it, because I am not interested in it.
(PM3)
Therefore, the justification for skills on the LPC might lie, for example, in principles of
active learning rather than in learning behaviour:
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
I frankly don‟t think it works. I think the reality is these sort of skills are best
learned in practice. Best taught in practice, you know, you could only really
learn them on the job. But it‟s laudable, it‟s no harm, if people want to have a
bit of fun doing all those pointless role play exercises, it breaks up the
monotony of the day. (PM1)
Some participants advocated alternatives to conventional legal education that
maximised practical experience as vocational preparation. For example, a partner in
a large provincial firm considered that the traditional practical route had very real
advantages:
The person who is, effectively, my boss here now, a very clever bloke, he
didn‟t go to university…he‟s only ten years older than me but he did his A
levels and joined [name of firm] straight off and he did a five year training
contract…that‟s equally as good …you learn the job, the practical side,
straight off and I suppose the downside of it is you don‟t know why you‟re
doing it. But then, does it really matter, do you really need to know why you‟re
doing it? You know, I am certain I have forgotten 95% of the law I ever learnt
it just becomes second nature. So, that‟s an equally valid route. (PM4)
Alternatively, another argued that, because of specialisation, academic method had
become more important:
Once you‟ve narrowed yourself down a little bit, like now, I only do property
law, … your knowledge focuses very much, you know, you‟re focused, aren‟t
you, on a particular area and, you know, I think the academic training has
been very helpful in that respect. (PF4)
This lack of appreciation of a broad legal education can be contrasted with the
experience of a CPE graduate. This participant had worked in a law firm on the basis
of specialist expertise in another discipline before commencing training as lawyer.
This participant felt at a disadvantage in relation to law graduates joining the firm at
the same time, because of this lack of legal awareness. He offers some insight into
how it feels to work with lawyers without any legal training:
The trainees had a much better understanding of everything than I had, even
though I had practised at a higher level than most trainees had…they had
studied law instead of [the other discipline] and because the structure of what
they study in the academic year gives them the basic concepts… and the
practical year introduces them to some of the practice and the way in which
the trainee moves around department, give them an appreciation of how the
law firm works. I had none of that and I didn‟t understand at all. I didn‟t
understand at the time I was in [name of firm], it's a very, very important piece
of my career actually being at [name of firm], but I didn‟t understand what the
firm did. (PM3)
The career paths of participants in this study often took unexpected twists and turns.
This may have made earlier specialisation irrelevant and is an argument for a focus
on more general and transferable knowledge and skills. For one participant, for
example, legal education had:
No relevance to what I‟m doing at the moment, and little or none to what I‟ve
done since I finished my training contract. The reason for this though is
because of my career path. I did my training contract in a twenty partner
commercial firm, where the LPC training was useful. And then I had a year in
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Practitioner perspectives on legal education and training
high street firm where, again, it was useful. But since then I had four years
doing professional indemnity work for defendants, and the LPC concentrates
really on claimant work, and there‟s little or nothing, I think, on defendants.
And I haven‟t done any professional negligence, either in my degree or in the
LPC, so it was all on the job training. And now I‟m working in house for the
Financial Services Authority doing insurance regulation work, and again there
was nothing, so it‟s all on the job training. (PM10)
Similarly, for another:
I'm sort of working in-house for (a regional television company) … so I've
changed really from doing more high street or commercial litigation to doing
media and entertainment which is, obviously, totally different and also working
in-house which is also a difference so … university education and then the
LPC … didn't cover any direct relevant law which would be of use for me in
my work today because, obviously at that time, I didn't anticipate I'd be doing
this. (PM6)
The unpredictability of the kind of work an entrant to the profession might eventually
do may be an argument for breadth in the formal stages, with the detail of specialist
areas being left until later. This, however, may be unrealistic, for, as a participant
observed, the training contract is an unreliable means of acquiring relevant training:
I think certain firms, maybe the small to medium sized ones, which are the
ones that I‟ve had experience of, don‟t have as formalised a training structure
as perhaps they should…that can leave you bereft sometimes of the more
practical elements of the job, of doing it day to day…I started at one firm, did
my training contract then moved to the other…I‟m not sure comparatively but I
do think this is a profession where you…have to be really very positive and
dynamic about the kind of things you want to learn. It‟s not laid on, or you‟re
not put through a prescribed route. It‟s very „open plan‟ and that‟s great if you
have a good idea of what you want to do and you‟re proactive about looking
at courses, going to see the Head of Training and saying, look I want to go on
this, this and this because I think this will be useful. (PM5)
Therefore, to shift more responsibility for specialisation training into the training
contract would require an even higher level of monitoring:
The training contract part needs to be more regulated because, you know, I
was given a training contract and I think you have to register with the Law
Society or whatever but in practice nobody would have any idea what I was
doing and I could be there doing nothing for two years and someone would
sign the form at the end and I would be qualified as a solicitor. (PM6)
Increasing specialisation in legal practice creates a tension between the demand for
higher level skills and knowledge and the length of legal education. Much of the
substantive knowledge learned will be irrelevant. This puts a premium on the skills
and attributes developed in the processor legal education and training.
10.3 The continuum
Numerous official reports on legal education and training, in the UK and abroad, have
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urged that legal education and training should form a continuum.37 These data reflect
mixed views on this issue. Some participants voiced the conventional arguments for
broadly based law degrees that do not necessarily reflect practice in any way:
I think it works fine as it is. I mean people do very different law degrees, but,
you know, I mean I suppose that‟s why they apply to those particular
universities because that‟s the sort of course that they want. I don‟t think
there‟s a problem with that. And a lot, well not a lot, but quite a few people do
a law degree and then do nothing connected with law. And maybe have never
even thought of doing anything connected with law. So I think it‟s good to
have academic courses that are, you know, that are not vocational at all. At
the vocational stage, I think that type of law LPC thing works quite well
actually. (PF5)
There were many comments on the contrasts between the initial stage and the
vocational course, for example:
My university course was very academic…perhaps because it was a very sort
of old fashioned law course, to the extent that we had to do Roman law,
which seemed a bit excessive…I was quite interested in the academic side of
law anyway, so I actually quite enjoyed that, but there was absolutely nothing
about doing law in practice. So it was interesting in its own right rather than
being useful for practice really. And then law school: I was the first year that
the LPC exam changed at law school, and I think it went from being a course
that was far too difficult to something that sort of went the other way really. So
we didn‟t really have that much work to do the year we did it. (PF5)
This failure of the different methodologies to permeate the stages may have some
unfortunate consequences, in particular by shielding students from the reality of
practice. A few participants argued that some people just do not have what it takes to
be a lawyer and they should find this out earlier:
We had an Oxford graduate who was actually red hot on the law but who just
couldn‟t sit down with Joe Public and talk to them without either patronising
them or losing them within minutes and he had real problems with the
practical side of things and I think, at the end of the day, unless you‟re
working in a big department, in a very niche area of law, where perhaps you
don‟t get a lot of client contact, you need those social skills. (PM5)
I think students should be told the reality at a much [earlier stage],
somewhere along the line reality has got to be taught and it‟s probably [on]
the LLB. So those people who know that they ain‟t going to be comfortable
with talking to people or they want the academic side of life, know life ain‟t like
that…you‟ll root out a lot of good people I think, a lot of very good brainy
people but those are the people who are dropping out anyway but why let
them drop out after all of that…why not just let them drop out at an earlier
stage? (PM4)
This supports the observation of one participant that the problem with undergraduate
legal education is not that it is not useful, but that it is does not integrate very well
with subsequent stages (PF10). Given that the participants had seen the whole of
legal education fairly recently, it is not surprising that they had many ideas for
37
Boon A (forthcoming) „Ethics in legal education and training: four reports, three jurisdictions and a
prospectus‟ Legal Ethics.
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delivering stronger integration of the stages of legal education. There was some
support for extending the law degree and including more skills work in it:
Put parts of the LPC onto the law degree so you then do a four year degree
and not sort of three year university and then one year LPC…Sort of,
handling clients, drafting skills, that sort of thing. (PM2)
I don‟t think you can do without the legal practice course in some way. [It
could] be slotted in with the degree…[T]here‟s always going to be someone
who wants to do a law degree as such, I don‟t think just offering a CPE-type
thing is going to be sufficient for everybody‟s purposes. But ultimately, really
it‟s training on the job that is it. (PF3)
Others proposed paring down the LPC and emphasising skills in the training contract:
Leave the training contract and professional skills course to deal with a lot of
the nitty gritty as to how to do it. And people… shouldn‟t be taught practical
aspects of things that they are highly unlikely to use. [The LPC] … could be
condensed down significantly. You see I don't think you can get rid of it
altogether… so much of law is litigation and even non-litigators really need to
understand it. And I think you also need to know something about company
law as well, which you don‟t tend to pick up in the CPE. But I am not
convinced about learning the practical aspects of a lot of the other side of
things and… if you are going down the practical route you need to allow
people to be far more specialised. They really only need to be learning that if
they are actually going to do it. (PM3)
I personally would either bring back the old five year apprenticeship or what I
would do is I would make the LLB a bit more practical…I would concentrate
on other things like client care because that‟s what‟s missing really out of all
your training. (PM4)
One of the things that I thought would have been a good idea on the LPC
would have been the idea of having a clinic. The insurance aspects would
have been a nightmare but to get the LPC students to actually run almost a
CAB type clinic, so that you really did see a huge cross section of society and
you got used to talking to people in terms that they would understand… it will
also get the students into contact with local businesses, local CAB‟s, the
whole range of stuff from the client community people through to the
commercial people and I think would be a very useful way of integrating them.
(PM5)
Finally, another participant urged that assessment processes should seek to reflect
more closely the demands of practice. He gave the example of assessing students
by projects to be completed over periods of time that are realistic in an office context:
It would have tested the time management aspect, of actually doing things to
deadlines, which is always a good skill to learn. If you can work with
deadlines all the time and you‟ve got lots of different deadlines for different
bits and pieces then I think that works and I think it also obviously tests your
ability to use the resources that you have at your disposal. (PM5)
Participants appeared to perceive that the initial stage should not move too far
towards vocational preparation. One area concerns the nature of the teaching role in
each arena. This may be quite marked. In particular, the contrasting natures of the
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degree and LPC have given rise to quite different roles for lecturers and different
attitudes of students and lecturers to each other. For example, one respondent
recalled that degree level teachers:
Were really good. They were really inspiring and all very, very enthusiastic
which I found quite marked compared to when I went to [LPC provider]. The
lecturers there just seemed completely bored by the whole thing and their
approach was just: “God this is boring, it is such a trudge”, you know, can we
get through it, whereas at, it just might be because the LPC course was, is
not the most fascinating course ever, whereas the CPE you can really get into
case law and discussions and research and that‟s all really interesting. (PF7)
Another said:
The tutors at university were on the whole very good. And probably because
you just had much more contact with them. On the LPC, to be honest, I can
hardly even remember any of them. They just weren‟t important. Because we
had very good course material, I suppose that makes a difference, we had
very good text books at Law School, whereas at university there was nothing
like that, you were starting from scratch really. And by and large if you just
learned what was in the textbook for the LPC then you were fine, and you
could even take the books into your exams. So I mean I really can‟t
remember the lecturers having any great impact to be honest. (PF5)
10.4 Access, opportunity and careers
Understanding of the problem of access to the profession has been a significant
issue for a long time. The legal professional bodies have largely accepted that the
profession should broadly reflect society, yet issues of gender and ethnicity remain
significant. Recent work suggests that these issues are most clearly delineated in
relation to large firms.
For two groups, ethnic minorities and women, two issues predominate. In the case of
ethnic minority students it is the difficulty of recruitment to large firms, and for women
it is the inhospitable culture of large firms. In this study these issues did not
predominate. Although there were participants from ethnic minorities, discrimination
was not raised as an issue. There was only one group, mature students, which
perceived their distinguishing features to be significant. Indeed, maturity appears to
be a mixed blessing for potential entrants to the legal profession:
I think possibly mature students have the advantage of knowing what‟s
important and what isn‟t. You know, you‟re pretty much, if you‟re a mother of
kids, used to getting up, getting organised and I think it follows through in the
way that you approach the degree… you could sort of summarise… [and]
when we were doing public law, we were talking about things that had
happened when they were toddlers, you know, and you can remember it,
remember reading about it. (PF4)
However, mature students coming from an office environment, particularly legal
practice experience, might find it difficult to accept simulated experience:
This is sheer arrogance but I had difficulty in being taught how to negotiate.
Perhaps I shouldn‟t have done, perhaps I should have listened but it was
difficult to be taught that and to have to play those games, when one had
negotiated at a relatively high level some quite difficult things. (PM3)
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Then, in the employment market, there appears to be a significant prejudice against
mature applicants in certain sections of the legal services market:
I still feel that, it's much more difficult to get job offers and interviews; much
harder to get partnership and the American firms are much more open-
minded actually…they retire later, so they're much more open-minded.
Whereas you still get this kind of, in my view, blinkered view of English law
firms that they just want [youth] particularly the magic circle ones. (PM9)
As another participant explained:
[We want] younger people, because they do have fresher ideas and they‟re
easier to get them into a way of working which we think is good for us in our
firm and it‟s a very young firm, and I know we‟re getting older but, we like to
keep it quite fresh. But that‟s just us. (PF6)
Another issue relates to the funding of candidates through legal education. It is well
known that large, elite firms pay the fees of prospective trainees, usually those from
the elite universities, while applicants going into legal aid or high street practices pay
their own way. One participant argued:
They should fund it. The funding issue I think is wrong. I think it attracts the
wrong kind of people in, or, well, not that it attracts it, I think it puts off a lot of
people who should be doing it, especially when you think these are where
we're going to get our judges from… I think it's immoral to make an industry
out of it where huge numbers of people that go through it cannot possibly get
a job with it…it's just not on. (PF11)
I'm Mr. Generalisation so I have to apologise for that. But, generally people
from privileged backgrounds will want to go into big city firms because that's
where their parents will be encouraging them to go and it's those city firms
that will throw £10,000 at them to do the LPC and I think generally people
from less privileged backgrounds will want to go into things like family and
that kind of area and they obviously don't have any of that assistance… I think
this has been mooted in the past but I think there should be a pot of money as
opposed to these law firms giving the money to their own trainees, I think they
should all pay this money into a pot and then it should depend on financial
ability. Mr. Socialist. (PM7)
Recent years have seen significant developments in attitudes towards the place of
careers information and advice in higher education. Whereas at one time, „careers
advice‟ was a marginal activity external to courses, it is now increasingly integral to
courses and has even been re-branded „careers education‟. Such developments may
well help to remedy perceived defects in the legal education experienced by our
participants. There was regret regarding the absence of good advice about legal
careers at school and thereafter (PF10). However, there was some admission of
personal fault also, and hence an issue of the timeliness of any advice:
So I think the advice was available at the wrong times, and partly maybe it
was my own fault because I didn‟t go looking for it either, but I was a kid, so.
(PF1)
One participant described the rising hysteria of his cohort of students about careers:
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And it got worse as it went on because you became more and more aware of
how difficult it was going to be to get articles… nothing from the Careers
Service had given me the slightest idea of what it was going to be like, I mean
absolutely nothing and there was a slow, increasing level of despair that
everyone was going through which just got worse and worse. (PF11)
There were various suggestions for improving careers education, including a desire
for practical placements (PF7) and for “having someone coming in and telling you
about their work”. But a note of caution was sounded when one participant said, “how
candid somebody could be without their firm getting really upset is doubtful”. (PF7)
It appears, however, that a purposeful self help strategy could be effective in
obtaining a training contract. One participant undertook a number of work placements
and only applied to the firms that did the work he had experience in and which he
wanted to do:
So I think by the time I had the careers‟ interview I had already got a pretty
good idea where I wanted to be. And looking back on it now I mean I just find
it amazing because it was the time when it was a real struggle to get any kind
of training contract at all. And people were writing hundreds and hundreds of
letters and I think I sent out to about 16 firms, but because I knew that I
wanted to be in this area. I wanted a certain size of firm… I had interviews
with about 6, 7 of them and then got down to second interviews for I think
about 4 of them and then got this, the one that I really wanted. (PF3)
10.5 On being a lawyer
Participants admit that, with hindsight, their impressions of the legal profession were
unrealistic. One was influenced by reading about Marshall Hall38, admitting, „I‟m very
romantic, I had a very romantic idea of what it was all about‟. A criminal lawyer said:
[If I had known what being a lawyer is like] I wouldn‟t have done it...hand on
heart, if someone said to me, “would you do it again?” I‟d say “no”. It‟s not
because I don‟t enjoy my job but I think that‟s the side of the profession I‟m in,
I think it‟s certainly glamourised, I think the profession in general is
glamourised and I think it‟s a very unglamorous profession. (PF6)
The connection between glamorous images of the legal profession and expectations,
though nebulous, is pervasive. Most people, for example, can remember a legal
television programme but cannot evaluate how it may have affected their desire for
law. For example, one participant said:
The only thing I remember watching, Crown Court, as a child, as I‟m sure
everyone of my generation did… and thought “Oh that‟s interesting”. But I‟ve
never had a desire to be a criminal lawyer. So no, I don‟t know, I just was
fascinated by the work when I got there, and that‟s probably why I was so
enthused because I just didn‟t expect anything and then was just suddenly
bowled over by it. (PF1)
Another:
I think LA Law was sort of „university time‟…I wouldn't necessarily have
thought that law here wasn't like that [but] I think I thought law was a bit like
38
An advocate in the USA.
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that. And obviously the American system is very different and they spend a lot
more time in court as a rule, they don't have the barrister system, so they do
attend court a lot more than here and it tends to be part of most people's
practice over there. Whereas here there are a lot of lawyers, a good
percentage of lawyers, the majority who don't go to court very often. So I think
I imagined a lawyer being in court all the time and that would…have come
from the media, not from any family because I haven't got family in law at all.
(PM7)
This gap, between expectations and experience of „real life‟ in the law, was summed
up by one participant, who said:
I expected to go to court, I expected that I would start and be given maybe
three files to start off with and, you know, gradually build up my caseload over
my two years there and that's how it would be and it just wasn't like that at all,
it was a lot more paperwork that I realised, there was a lot more whingey
clients that I expected, people were a lot less grateful for my services than I
expected. And that has probably got worse now because people are more
and more aware of their rights and things. So, you know, it wasn't, in that
sense it wasn't what I expected at all. And also, actually being a lawyer didn't
have the kudos I thought it had…maybe because I was at a high street firm
rather than a big firm, but it wasn't as impressive as I expected. (PM7)
Legal education does little or nothing to disabuse students of their fantasies about
the law:
Nobody really explained what a big law firm is and how it works and what it
does, and nobody explained what the other aspects of legal careers were
either. (PM3)
Few participants identified specific subject matter lacking from the initial stage. One
thought that the obvious lack at degree stage was procedure. But this participant
thought that the law degree should retain its academic orientation because procedure
“is not very interesting”. (PF5) A significant matter that was raised was the absence
of any material on being a lawyer (PM6). One participant said:
I mean most people want to be lawyers, well they are either ideologically
motivated or they want a career, which is going to produce a reasonable
return. I am generalising I suppose but that's what I think is the case. And
perhaps they ought to be taught more about what being a lawyer is like. I
don't think anybody tells anybody who is studying company law at LPC stage,
well you had better get used to the idea you are not going to be sleeping very
much. Because corporate deals are done at night, that's just the way it is.
(PM3)
Participants reported long hours and stress. For example:
I think people need some type of appreciation that it is going to be stressful
but I don‟t think you could ever teach anyone [about] the pressures of work. I
think it‟s just a shock to the system from being at college… Exams; you think
they‟re stressful but they‟re not really. I found like mid twenty-five-ish it was
just awful and I just thought “what am I doing, why am I doing this job?”…ask
any of the people who know me, “what have you done for the last seven
years?” And I would say, “I‟ve worked”. You know, that has been my life and it
has taken up a lot of my life and I think the older I‟m getting, the more
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resentful of using my own time I become. I think you‟ve got to be very
prepared to work long hard hours and, like I said, I‟ve got friends who work in
the commercial side, people who work in the City, you know, quite a broad
spectrum of people within the profession and I think the general consensus is
we can‟t believe how hard we work and I think in London at the moment, if
your firms aren‟t as prosperous as they used to be and you know one of my
friends in particular worked in a firm where they‟ve laid people off and you‟ve
got to keep on working hard. Now, he said he feels under as much pressure
now as he did years ago. (PF6)
It is implicit that recent entrants to the profession felt that they needed more
information about their options and about the implications of particular choices. There
was a range of information that participants felt could and should have been a part of
their legal education. For example, one wanted to know:
About the way the office works, about the way different things interact, about
the way that partnership works, it‟s a very bizarre concept, you know, rule by
Committee, it take‟s some while to get use to, I‟m still getting use to it, God,
you know, and trying to get something through. (PM5)
Another that:
The impression at law school that, you can be this great solicitor that can
spend four hours with a client explaining simple points to them. And that the
client has always got to be the most important person and the great lawyer
and the successful lawyer is the one that will spend all his time with one
client, even if you're only repeating it again and again and again. But the
reality is that you can only get paid for 10 minutes of that because that's the
amount of time that a judge would find reasonable for you to explain that. And
if you're only getting paid for 10 minutes, and you spent four hours doing
something, then you're not profitable and then you get all the partners having
a go at you saying, “it's all very well you having three clients thinking you're
fantastic but that's not good enough, we're here to run a business, you've got
to get a profit in”. So that sort of thing you just don't get taught about. It's all
very well getting told how to be a good lawyer but there's the actual business
world that you're not taught about really at law school which you soon find out
about. (PM8)
Yet another said:
The high street stuff is just not what you think it‟s going to be at all. The
quality of the work is poor, the resources and the support you get is poor.
Legal Aid work is far from being this great noble thing; a complete nightmare
of unpaid social work and poor hourly rates and enormous pressure to make
it pay when you‟re competing against… commercial parts of a firm that just
want to dump you…You know, they‟re charging two or three times the hourly
rate that you‟re going to get. And the Legal Aid Board won‟t pay for most of
what you do. (PM10)
One participant had thought carefully about the absence of information about legal
work in legal education and, following interview, recorded his views in an e-mail that
summarises these informational gaps:
There were two key gaps - the first was „career choice‟ based and the second
„day-to-day work‟ based. It would have been useful to have someone explain
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to me what it would be like to work as a barrister or a solicitor, and if as a
solicitor, in a high street firm, a large commercial, but regional practice or in
the city. For example, and even though I had undertaken several holiday
placements, when I chose my training contract and made my first moves on
qualification, I realise now that I had little idea how different these positions
could be.
I worked in a high street firm - there were funding difficulties within the firm,
because turnover was low. I therefore had to do a lot of admin, as well as fee
earning. The work was of a lower quality and often outside my areas of
expertise or interest. The clients were often legally aided or just above the
threshold limits. This meant that funding for cases was often a problem. My
salary was lower as a result. These factors all lead to low job satisfaction for
me. In many small high street firms there is also the added pressure of a
heavy work-load with few legal and admin resources for support. I had a very
low workload in this particular firm, but I suspect that that is unusual. There
are also specialisation issues. The law is vast and changing rapidly. You are
often up against people who specialise. It is very difficult to have a broad
enough knowledge of the law to really be a general participant any more.
In a larger firm, there is much better admin support, but you specialise. I think
that is better but it does not suit everyone. There is much greater pressure to
bill a certain number of hours and a certain amount of fees. There is also
considerable pressure to develop the practice by marketing - something
which is often difficult or impossible, depending on the type of work you do
and the reputation of the firm.
I worked for insurers so there were no funding issues - at least the client
could pay. However, the pressures were still there - internally, there are
significant issues between departments because some types of client/work
pay far better than others. This can mean that it is difficult to hit billing targets
in some specialisations. These factors lead to significant competition between
solicitors within a firm (for the best work, the best chance to shine and be
promoted etc) and between firms. This can be stressful. However, I had good
support in terms of admin and legal resources. I also worked with other very
able people and this helped me to develop. Finally, I had much better quality
of work.
I am now in-house. The billing, time recording and marketing aspects have
gone, but others stresses have arisen. Typically, for this type of work, I have
more reasonable hours so that my work/life balance is much better than it
was in private practice, but my salary will probably fall significantly behind
private practice rates going forward. Finally, moving in-house and moving
back can be difficult.
Students need to know about all of these issues so that they can choose the
right firm for them at an early stage. The profession is still quite staid in terms
of commitment perception. People are expected to make only two or three
firms changes in their career and they are not expected to change specialism
more than once, if at all. There is therefore enormous pressure to get these
choices right first time - something which can be difficult, if not impossible.
There is also a significant snob value between types of firm and types of work
within firm. This can help inter-firm moves, or hinder, depending on what you
want to do and where you want to go. All of these things mean that the
training contract casts a significant shadow over potential earnings and job
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satisfaction going forward. It is therefore important that students have a
thorough understanding of these issues before making a commitment. If they
do, this may help to reduce the significant number of people leaving the
profession. (Incidentally, I don't know very many happy lawyers!)
As regards once you are in the job, PC skills are important - it would be well
worth learning to touch type, word process, use PC based legal research
tools and the Internet. I would also be useful if people were told about the
politics within firms and how to handle them. An explanation of the various
firm structures would help, e.g., what is lock step? (I still have little idea). Time
and stress management training would be useful and training on what to do if
you find something that has gone wrong (whether your mistake or someone
else's). Who can you call? Who should you tell? How to protect yourself?
People need to know about protecting their reputations and avoiding claims
etc. Training on CV development, CV drafting and job interview skills is also
likely to be useful.
Finally - the sacred cow of marketing has become so significant in most firms
that some training on how to market oneself within a firm (without arrogance
etc) and how to market the firm and oneself to outsiders would inevitably help
career choice and career/practice development. (PM10)
As to whether education can prepare students for these issues and demands, one
participant said:
I suppose really until you get into practice or speak to someone who is in
practice, it's very hard to get that impression across. I mean if all our lecturers
had said you're going to spend your life covering your back, working your guts
out and worrying about it, we would have sort of gone, “Oh yes, oh, never
mind, we want to do it anyway”. But I think it's only really once you've had
experience of it, you start to feel that way. (PF8)
Another participant agreed on the importance of educating entrants on the reality of
legal practice, but felt there were limitations on how much could be achieved:
The LPC clearly tries, and I think that to a certain extent it deals with real life
situations, but it can't convey the actual experience either of Court or of office
life, or give the impression of what different areas of law actually entail doing
all day. For instance, it never occurred to me that a PI lawyer is likely to
spend an awful lot of time alone in the office, compared to the time a family
lawyer will spend either in the office with clients or out at court. Nothing
prepared me for the sheer volume of work and the stress of the responsibility
one is expected to assume, and judging by the trainees I see now, I don't
think that that has changed. (PF11)
This, then, is an argument for interlacing information about the profession with actual
experience:
I've got a friend that is an accountant and a friend that's training to be an
actuary and those professions do it in different ways. There's no perfect way
to do it. I think that my friend that's an accountant did it sort of the block way
where she was doing some work and then block release study and I don't
know how long it took her in the end but sort of exams as it was going on and
then my friend that's an actuary…they work all the time but they have a study
day every week and then ongoing exams all through whilst they're working, so
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that makes it very hard work because you're working as well and doing exams
which is a lot of pressure but they're able to relate what they're learning to
what they're doing rather than just doing one and then doing the other. (PF10)
10.6 Ethics
It has only recently been appreciated that ethics are not taken seriously in many
workplace environments and that education could and should do more to embed
ethics in graduates in anticipation of this.39
No participants recalled studying ethics on their degree course. Nevertheless, there
was some recognition that ethics and values are important. One participant
expressed concern at the decline of the „moral side‟ of being a lawyer, saying:
[I have] this thing about my reputation…if anyone does anything that either
hurts my reputation or the firm‟s reputation I will get upset about it and I think,
“why did you do it, don‟t you think about things before you send me to the
wrong court” or anything like that? And yeah, I‟ve always been aware of it as
39
This is also true of non law graduates. For example, a recent study of business study students found
a tendency to “disengage with ethical issues” under the pressure of organisational life (Tysome T (2002)
„Work is bad for your ethics‟ Times Higher Educational Supplement 6 December at 8.
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a trainee as well because I was a local girl, and my friends from school are in
the area and some of them come to see me as clients and things. And I want
to do my job properly, I don‟t want people to talk about me and say
“[participant‟s name] doesn‟t know what she‟s doing or she doesn‟t care about
what she‟s doing”. (PF1)
Another area of ethics identified as a concern was handling role conflict. There are
distinctive challenges facing different kinds of lawyers on a day to day basis. The
traditional independence of lawyers is undermined by client demands and the
demands of firms that clients be pleased. These pressures may be particularly
severe for commercial lawyers. One participant had taken up a role as a training
officer in a firm and said:
I don‟t think I‟ll ever practice law again…I have a small child, and I don‟t think
that the sacrifices required to be a good lawyer are worth it for me, because I
also want to have a family. And I just think, and that was one of the things
about deciding, originally deciding not to be a corporate lawyer, was that I
wasn‟t prepared to give up my life to work. And that‟s the problem with the
law, and the problem with being a lawyer, particularly in private practice, is
that the client says “jump”, and you jump. And it doesn‟t matter whether it‟s a
Friday evening at six, or a Sunday when they want to have a meeting; the
Americans always want to meet on Sundays. (PF12)
As one participant observed, “ethics is what you get when you open your Guide to
professional conduct. Morality is what you personally feel about it and often the two
can clash” (PM5). It was also thought that more training in ethics might relieve
pressure on the Law Society‟s ethics helpline (PM5).
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11 Conclusion
This study demonstrates some of the benefits of qualitative research. Established as
an open-ended enquiry, the research enabled participants to impose their own values
on the study of legal education and training. Participants chose to view legal
education and training from the perspective of its usefulness as vocational
preparation. Two dominant views emerge. The first is of an education and training
that is interesting and largely meets the needs of participants on entering practice.
The other is a critical evaluation of legal education and training as vocational
preparation seen through the prism of specialisation. This views much of the
curriculum of education and training as ill focused and misconceived. The initial stage
is largely inconsequential, often an exercise in memorisation and regurgitation of a
content thereafter largely forgotten.
The LPC was perceived to offer no more than a general introduction to skills that had
to be jettisoned or adapted to enable entrants to the profession to cope with areas of
specialisation in practice. The training contract appeared to offer relatively little by
way of a planned training, comprising an arms length engagement in larger firms and
almost total immersion as full participants at many smaller firms. If the intention of the
LPC is to prepare students for action, the absence of this feature in the training
contract is likely is lead to frustration. It might be concluded that the latter model, with
higher levels of supervision than reported here, is preferable.
It was typically only in the latter stages of education and training that participants had
understood the implications of particular career choices and the consequences of
taking certain career paths. There was felt to be a need for much better integration
between the stages of legal education and better information on the profession, on
ethics and on careers at the initial and vocational stages. This would have made
better sense of the notion of a continuum between the stages of legal education and
training, a concept that has been a feature of reports on legal education and training
over the last 30 years. It would also assist in establishing a continuum if methods of
teaching and assessment were trailed from one stage to the next during the process
of education and training.
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