hrtraining

Legal education and training are unfit for purpose, causing lawyers to fail to meet the needs of clients and leaving the profession exposed to rival market entrants filling the gaps, according to Professor Stephen Mayson.

The lawyer behind a new outsourcing venture that recruits trainee solicitors and then seconds them to law firms and in-house legal departments to do their training contracts has been defending the model from a volley of instant criticism.

Around half of Europe’s 1.4m legal professionals should receive training in European law and other member states’ legal systems by 2020, the European Commission has said. It also wants all lawyers to have at least one week’s training in EU law during their careers.

The Law Society could encourage firms to undertake annual pay audits as a way to combat inequality in the solicitors’ profession, we can reveal. It comes as Chancery Lane prepares to publish a flexible working protocol to help law firms embrace the concept.

Law firms and chambers whose workforces are significantly at odds with the make-up of the wider profession can expect questions from their regulators, the Legal Services Board (LSB) has warned. The LSB today confirmed that it is pressing ahead with controversial plans to make firms and chambers survey and publish the levels of diversity and social mobility in their workforces.

The Legal Services Board (LSB), Law Society and Bar Council have thrown their weight behind a best practice code aimed at stamping out bias in granting internships and improving social mobility for disadvantaged students. Meanwhile, LSB chairman David Edmonds has criticised the idea of restricting access to training to deal with the oversupply of bar students.

Jane Ching, Reader at Nottingham Law School, outlines its experience of running the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s work-based learning pilot that offered a route to qualification as a solicitor for those working as paralegals.

A groundbreaking scheme aimed at young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who are interested in a legal career is helping them with their university ambitions, new figures have shown. Students who have gone through the £3m Pathways to Law scheme are more successful in gaining a place at a top university than a comparator group that has not.

Increases in tuition fees means the overall cost of a law degree is nearly £90,000 and only half of lawyers would have gone to university had it cost as much when they studied, a survey has found. Legal recruiter Laurence Simons argued that this shows UK universities are failing and need to adopt the controversial approach of the philosopher AC Grayling, who is setting up a new private university, and also embrace apprenticeships.

There are a number of risks and dangers associated with using an aptitude test to select law students – particularly that it will favour those from privileged and certain class and ethnic backgrounds – a report commissioned by the Legal Services Board has concluded.

There could be several benefits from using an aptitude test to exclude law students who are most likely to fail the legal practice course (LPC), according to a report for the Law Society. However, it said linking a test to the likelihood of gaining a training contract would be “more difficult” to justify.

Bar students are set to become the first group offered exemptions from parts of the legal practice course (LPC), it has emerged. However, LPC providers will not be required to offer a discount on fees. The move has been driven by changes to the Qualified Lawyers Transfer Scheme.

An action plan to deal with a range of equality and diversity problems in the solicitors’ profession – from pay inequality and firms’ billing practices, to flexible working and career progression – is being drawn up within the Law Society, Legal Futures can reveal.

Offering would-be solicitors – and particularly paralegals – a route to qualification that does not require a training contract may not be the way to reduce barriers to access to the profession, new research has suggested.

Legal Services Board chairman David Edmonds is wrong to say there is a “disconnect” between legal education and legal practice, it was claimed last week by the man who has systematically reviewed the Bar’s education and training regime.