hrtraining

An inter-firm diversity initiative is being launched this month to make the legal sector more accessible to lawyers from multi-cultural backgrounds. A number of City firms are already on board with the NOTICED (Networking Opportunities to Integrate, Celebrate and Educate on Diversity) scheme.

A training regime whose only specification is what a newly-qualified lawyer should be able to offer on day one is the kind of deregulation the Legal Education and Training Review should be considering, according to the chief executive of the Legal Services Board.

Only a third of large firms who are signed up to a Law Society diversity charter – including three-quarters of the top-100 – have adopted flexible working, which helps explain why their partnerships remain “overwhelmingly white, heterosexual, male and able bodied”, the society’s president has complained.

Co-operative Legal Services will launch a ‘Learning Academy’ later this year that will offer all staff training for a range of skills and qualifications, including becoming solicitors and chartered legal executives.

Law firms should introduce targets to increase the representation of women lawyers in partnership and senior roles, and turn talk of flexible working into reality, a major new report has recommended, with the Law Society president saying that if career progression was based on pure merit, some senior partners would have got nowhere near the top.

Controversial rule changes that scrap the minimum salary for trainee solicitors and allow solicitors to refer clients to tied financial advisers were approved last month by the Legal Services Board. In both cases the LSB found that there was no reason to refuse the applications.

Stress continues to dominate calls to legal healthcare charity LawCare, and this in turn leads some lawyers to alcoholism later in their careers, its review of 2012 has said. More than two-thirds (69%) of the 378 case files opened last year related to stress.

Only a handful of the 15,000-plus members of the Bar have disclosed information such as whether they went to public or state schools, in a snub to the chairs of the Bar and the Bar Standards Board (BSB) who had personally requested it.

Private client departments with fewer secretaries are more profitable, new research has suggested. The mini-survey found that firms with less than one secretary for every two fee-earners reported a gross profit margin of 52%, as against 44% for firms with a higher ratio.

Our regular round-up of important news nuggets includes the newest SRA-licensed ABS, an advice contract for the Co-op, a survey of top firms on how they are changing, a probe of SRA files to identify any racial discrimination, heavy fine for spam texters and much more.

The impact of non-lawyer investment into law firms came to the fore today as Liverpool personal injury practice Silverbeck Rymer announced plans to create 300 jobs over the next year and so more than double in size.

The Legal Education and Training Review may end up “unbalanced or worse” because it has incorrectly identified its purpose, the president of the Supreme Court warned last night. Lord Neuberger also questioned the need for root-and-branch change.

The Chartered Institute of Legal Executives (CILEx) has formed a strategic collaboration with the College of Law to offer legal employers training options for all staff, from school leavers to fully qualified lawyers.

The final discussion paper produced by the Legal Education and Training Review “lacks rigour and is therefore unhelpful” in concluding that the current system is unfit for purpose, the Law Society has said. But it strongly backed creating alternative routes to qualification.

There is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to produce a “bold blueprint” for change in legal education and training, but “vested interests” are striving to water it down, the Legal Services Consumer Panel has cautioned.