hrtraining

Work on increasing social mobility in the legal profession is losing ground amid concerns over the effectiveness of the many separate initiatives aimed at increasing diversity, the latest paper from the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) has suggested.

Scrapping the minimum salary for trainee solicitors is likely to stimulate more training contracts – but the majority will pay below the current minimum level, a Solicitors Regulation Authority report has concluded. However, the negative impact on diversity is not as clear-cut as critics think.

Applicants for pupillage who are white, male, attended a fee-paying school or Oxbridge, or have parents who are educated to degree level are all more likely to succeed than those without such characteristics, Bar Standards Board research has found.

The College of Law is to target expansion of its new undergraduate law degree following its sale to Montague Private Equity. The deal separates the legal education and training business from the college’s charitable activities, with the proceeds of the sale going into a £200m-plus fund.

The prospect of trainee solicitors claiming housing benefit and taking on second jobs because the minimum salary has been scrapped “is not the type of image that befits the profession”, the Law Society has claimed.

Prospective trainee solicitors at Reed Smith are to conduct projects for the international firm’s clients as part of an innovative legal practice course that integrates legal and business learning and leads to a unique Masters qualification – the MA (LPC with Business).

The Bar Standards Board is formally to seek the introduction of an aptitude test for prospective Bar professional training course students from this autumn, setting the pass rate at a level that would eliminate the weakest 10% of students.

Regional law firm Mills & Reeve will next month launch a fixed-price online know-how and training package for family lawyers that it claims will enable practitioners to compete in a shrinking market.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is to consider retaining the minimum salary for trainee solicitors at the level of the national minimum wage after discovering that without it trainees would be classed as apprentices and so could be paid just £2.60 an hour in their first year – less than £5,000.

The Legal Services Consumer Panel has called upon the ongoing Legal Education and Training Review to propose a revalidation scheme for lawyers. At the same event, delegates were told that judicial evaluation in the Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates is flawed.

More common training of would-be lawyers, sector-wide CPD, and scrapping the training contract and pupillage, are among the “more radical” options being considered by the Legal Education and Training Review, according to its first discussion paper, issued yesterday.

Now is the time for collective action by women lawyers who want to improve their lot in the legal world, the Law Society vice-president said yesterday. Lucy Scott Moncrieff said women lawyers also need to get noticed individually, but in a good way.

An innovative legal outsourcing business that uses former City solicitors to provide law firms and in-house departments with temporary support is set for a massive expansion, aiming to grow from 60 to 500 by the end of the year.

Flexible working combined with performance metrics that are not linked to hours in the office are needed to prevent a “female brain drain” from the legal profession, it was claimed today. A survey of 1,144 women lawyers around the world even found some support for quotas as a way to achieve gender diversity.

The introduction of an aptitude test for prospective Bar students may be premature – and in any case fails to address the “real issue” of the mismatch between student numbers and training contracts/pupilages – the Law Society has told the Bar Standards Board.