Why scrapping training contracts is a bad idea

Business Unit Head

"It should be noted that most professions have training years - whether it be dentistry, accountancy or medicine."

And with less good reason each year.

Training contracts represent opaque, inefficient and simply unsustainable levels of non-standardised training.

Most of what trainees get taught can be standardised and made redundant. The rest can be taught in a classroom.

You don't have mechanical, chemical, electrical engineers doing one BE degree, do you? Why should an employment lawyer and a probate lawyer end up getting the same degree? Then follow up with largely the same LPC?

The problem is with how training is structured overall, not just with Training contracts. They do have to go though.

Suhasini Sakhare -01 Oct 2009 | 08:38

It is simply not true that "most of what trainees get taught can be standardised and made redundant". Training periods are valuable precisely because they allow for exposure over a reasonable period of time, and at gradually increasing degrees of responsibility to non-standard situations – i.e. the circumstances of each client and "the real world". It is this variety, exposure to unexpected situations, and gradual familiarity that make the training contract important.

A Google search shows that the poster is in the business of legal process outsourcing. It may be possible to standardise legal processes, and it would certainly assist the LPO industry if they were able to offer more 'solicitors' to take on higher value work. But this doesn't protect (i) paying clients relying on advice or (ii) the fresh solicitors themselves when they are confronted with a "non-standard" legal issue.

Anonymous -01 Oct 2009 | 14:44

This proposal from the College of Law's "independent" research arm is a disgraceful piece of self-serving nonsense.

It simply aims to protect the CoL in an uncertain market - at present it takes fees from folks knowing that a huge number will never qualify as a solicitor, and many current law students must surely be questioning the wisdom of this in the current dreadful market.

But oh, how nice it would be for the CoL to be able to promise future graduates willing to pay £12k to attend their course, that they will become a solicitor at the end of it...

Thom Deanninge -01 Oct 2009 | 19:37

I challenge anybody to say with a straight face that you can learn how to do this job in a classroom.

Anon -02 Oct 2009 | 14:22

Middle ground?

I wonder if what is actually needed is something along the lines of the system in Northern Ireland, which, if I understand correctly, is much more 'on-the-job' training or an apprenticeship, and means that one does not do the LPC without having the means to get the qualified at the end of it.

Anonymous -03 Oct 2009 | 16:11

In my experience the weak link in the chain is the LPC, not the TC. Why not simply scrap the LPC, and change the qualifying law degree and GDL to include some practical modules (as is done in the US). My experience of the LPC was that it was 90% useless - and I did the 'City' version which supposedly prepares people for commercial practise. All the skills I use in the day job now were picked up during the TC.

This would also make legal training far cheaper and remove the negative influence of self-serving LPC providers such as BPP and CoL. Of course CoL ever exploring this as an option would be like turkeys voting for Christmas...

SD -05 Oct 2009 | 13:04

SD is correct - the LPC is the weak link. To streamline the process and to save students from incurring debt with no training contract at the end of the LPC, the two should be combined.

The relevant parts of the LPC should be studied during the relevant seat in the training contract. No training contract, no LPC. Further, firms should pay for the LPC as part of the training contract. Of course, this undermines the revenue stream of the CoL and other course providers but it is better that the poorer quality providers are the victims than the students who are trying in vain to better themselves.

Regional Solicitor -05 Oct 2009 | 16:51

Leeds Partner

I agree fully with Regional Lawyer. The report is self-serving nonsense. COL, BPP, self interest: spot the difference.

Leeds Partner -05 Oct 2009 | 17:46

I suggest the above posters go back to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations where he talks about wage inequality.

Smith explains there how some professions create barriers (some artificial, some less so) to entry. That's why those professionals get paid more.

Essentially, being a solicitor is an easy job. It's fairly routine. I've always felt that law, of all the professions, is the most "forgiving of a mediocre mind".

The reality of the training contract is that it is there to eliminate potential competition, pure and simple.

Yes - I did one by the way. And I really cannot see how one day after another spent on mindless tasks in any way added value for the client. In fact, I think that sometimes the trainees were being used to do secretarial/paralegal work so that it could be billed to the client at a higher rate.

The whole thing is a professional scam and it's time we did away with it. It's embarrassing.

Follow the US model: let's have a standardised test that is both lengthy and tough if we want to improve the risibly low standards of UK solicitors.

Tom -06 Oct 2009 | 02:58

Business Unit Head

Just a quick response to Anon.

The supreme irony is that LPOs can churn out solicitors far far more cheaply and easily than a UK-based law firm would be able to access homegrown solicitors.

The QLTT regime, even the stricter one recently imposed, is a flimflam, as compared to the UK LLB+LPC (flawed as they are). Even so, the QLTT is better than most training contracts.

I became a solicitor by qualifying through the QLTT, and have done a year of the BPP GDL. I know good education when I see it. I know whimsical, arbitrary, unnecessary, tribalistic, "I now pass on the leadership totem to you", networking when I see it.

Fighting words, but from somebody who has done it and seen it.

Suhasini Sakhare -06 Oct 2009 | 10:44

I think training contracts need to be retained but they need to become part of the LPC (or maybe the LPC needs to become part of the TC). Therefore, if you get an LPC place, you complete your training and become a solicitor, rather than having lots of LPC graduates who can't become solicitors, as now. The number of LPC places would have to be trimmed back, and employers would have to offer training places, but on the upside for them, they wouldn't have to pay as high salaries and could still use the TC to select their newly qualifieds. I'd also suggest that like, for example Germany, trainees should experience more than one type of training placement - eg with a law firm and with a government department, or shadowing a judge or working in-house. People criticise the fact that the training on the LPC is so wide (eg doing wills when you want to work in corporate finance) but having an overview of the profession is important. The whole system needs reform.

Helen -06 Oct 2009 | 15:11

Risk Manager

The plight of all those LPC graduates who cannot find a training contract is truly shocking. I think it would be wrong, however, to devalue the solicitor brand to give them a token title.

The changes should be made at the LPC provider level re the numbers coming through.

I worked in-house at one of the Big 4 business advisors alongside actuaries who jealously guard the reputation of their profession. They routinely have a mere 30%-40% passing the professional exams and they would never countenance dumbing down the qualification.

Neither should we.

Anon -06 Oct 2009 | 16:02

Senior Associate

If the aim is to produce trained lawyers, training contracts don't work.

The brutal and blunt fact of the matter is that newly-qualified solicitors are barely capable of doing anything - about 10% of the work of a qualified lawyer at most. They are marginally better than trainees who can't do anything, but that's it - its only after about 2 years PQE that a solicitor in most City firms has a clue.

Compare this to something like engineering where engineers straight out of education starting their first job are able to do about 50% of the work of an engineer.

Both the training contract and the LPC are jokes - the entire legal education and training system needs to be overhauled.

Options include merging the academic and LPC stages into a US style "law school" or doing what accountancy firms do for non-accountancy graduates where training is on the job combined with study leave, but the biggest change needed is that in the culture of firms - to actually establish rational working methods and train new staff in them. But the status quo is pitiful and it seems to a large extent maintained by people who did well through it and so think it is great.

Anonymous -06 Oct 2009 | 16:16

As others have suggested, scrap the LPC not the TC. Does the solicitors profession want to go down the route of the Bar and have thousands upon thousands of (often very mediocre, and not infrequently a bit doo-lally) people claiming membership of a profession to which they are not really properly entitled? It devalues the coinage. Resist this self-serving nonsense at all costs!

Stringer Bell -06 Oct 2009 | 21:42

Stringer Bell - "Does the solicitors profession want to go down the route of the Bar and have thousands upon thousands of (often very mediocre, and not infrequently a bit doo-lally) people claiming membership of a profession to which they are not really properly entitled?"

What planet are you on?!? That is exactly where we are already! And the training contract and a culture of firms getting trainees and junior lawyers to do low grade grunt work because it was lucrative, pre-credit crunch, is mainly responsible.

"Training" contracts don't produce trained lawyers.

Senior Associate -07 Oct 2009 | 18:19

Agreed - I'm currently doing a training contract and what I've learnt is due mainly to good fortune (or bad fortune when it comes to being thrown into the deep end with no guidance) and definitely not because of the design of the entire system. From what I've seen, the fact that trainees are just passing through a department is used as an excuse not to provide them with any real skills or to make any real investment of time in guiding them. Also, it adds a bottom rung in the hierarchy, below junior associates and NQs that really don't know anything, ensuring that any commercial sense and common sense that the trainee once had was probably trained out of them by NQs or junior associates who have no idea at all what they're doing, but assume they're smarter and better because of their title.

Anonymous -08 Oct 2009 | 08:10

I have worked for a partner where I had to discuss the issue with the senior partner because the senior partner's trainee gave accurate advice whereas the partner I worked for gave changed instructions, wrong instructions, half instructions on a regular basis.

There are several year PQE assistant solicitors, even partners who are on the coat tails of others and are not client pulling, relying on others to keep them in post - and they even believe the "I'm a solicitor", I am therefore ... gravitas ... when really the firm is just a meal ticket for them.

There are good trainees, there are good partners, there are also those who should never have got near partnership but somehow did - they need to be weeded out the system.

Anon -08 Oct 2009 | 09:33

"Training contracts don't lead to trained lawyers" - they ought to...

We all know that there are four seats of approx six months and that selection may not occur in any of those seats for actual qualification as a solicitor.

Bear in mind float secretaries manage to move every two weeks and turn out quality work ...

They know what the end product looks like because they work for partners, associates, assistants and trainees.

Also bear in mind that the paralegals doing the 'grunt' work may actually be more capable than the assistants, associates and partners.

Anon -08 Oct 2009 | 09:40

Senior Associate - I might well ask the same question of you Re: your current planetary location.

At the moment, to be entitled to call oneself a solicitor, one has to complete the LPC AND a TC, whereas in order to call oneself a barrister, all one has to do is pass the BVC. Ergo, it is not, as you suggest "where we are already."

On my reading of it, the CoL is proposing pretty much (but with some differences of detail) that type of scenario (ie: that people will be able to call themselves solicitors upon completion of the LPC), which, without the filtering mechanism of the TC "competition", will inevitably lead to a massive increase in the number of people calling themselves solicitors and a comensurately massive decrease in the quality of the people so entitled. Even if that decrease in quality proceeds from an already low baseline, as you and many others seem to suggest.

The question of whether or not the LPC or TC are fit for purpose, either individually or collectively, is a different question, and not something I am qualified to answer, given that I'm from the other side of the profession.

Stringer Bell -08 Oct 2009 | 21:22