Law Society responds to training review
Bottlenecks in the legal training system are inevitable so long as there are more aspiring entrants to the profession than the market can employ, the Law Society points out in its first formal response to the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR).
The response is broadly in favour of the current degree, legal practice course, training contract approach, as providing the ‘basic knowledge required of rounded lawyers’.
In a critique of calls for ‘activity-based authorisation’ it warns that there are no entirely discrete areas of law: ‘The intellectual framework of the law is, itself, an important concept that any professional lawyer needs to understand.’
It also argues that ‘the qualification requirements for use of the title “solicitor” or “barrister” should be sufficient to ensure that an individual is qualified, to entry level and, subject to supervision and the rules governing competency, to undertake the full range of legal work permitted by their regulator’.
The education and training review is being jointly undertaken by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, Bar Standards Board and ILEX Professional Standards. It is due to complete its research phase this year.
The Society says that work-based learning, including in some cases the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives route, is the best way to become ‘socialised into the profession’s norms’, but that regulators should play a bigger role.
On encouraging greater social mobility, the Society says that alternative business structure firms may offer ‘more diverse ways of providing training contracts’, which it ‘would encourage’.
In the meantime, it blames obstacles to entering the profession on ‘failures in the education system to equip students to meet the standards required by firms’. It also says that continuing professional development (CPD) requires reform.
Access the document, go to: tinyurl.com/c9zvzak.
Comments
Respond to the paralegal question?
WHAT IS A PARALEGAL?
In order to fully answer the above question can you also answer the following related questions:-
1. What should be the minimum educational qualifications of a paralegal?
2. What should be the CPD training requirements of a paralegal?
3. What should be the maximum number of paralegals one lawyer may supervise?
4. In a firm where there are only two solicitors supervising 100 paralegals, for example, what steps should the solicitors be taking to ensure that a "quality" legal service is being delivered to the consumer?
5. The title "solicitor" or "barrister" may well be sufficient for the consumer to understand but what is does the title "paralegal" mean to the consumer?
My view is that it an absolute disgrace that the various reforms have been pushed through without a single official body addressing the issue of the predicted massive increase in the use of paralegals instead of lawyers in the new legal landscape.
Your question "what is a
Your question "what is a paralegal" points to the real issue here facing the profession. I believe that it is an issue which underlies almost all the other topics of concern, including ABSs, Guaranteed Minimum Salary for trainees, Training Review, etc.
That real issue is that there is oversupply, pure and simple. Unless you believe that there ought to be statutory regulation to ensure that solicitors can receive work irrespective of how many of them there are, then one has to bite the bullet and accept that the jurisdiction really does not require 120,000 practising solicitors to function effectively. To put that into perspective, a back of the envelope calculation says that for every 1,000 workers, 3 to 5 of them will be solicitors. (Of course that's not a figure taking into account part-time workers, etc.)
I'm probably going to make myself unpopular here, but some of the posts - particularly the ones which have obviously been co-ordinated by the Junior Lawyers Division, talk on and on about "I did this", "I did that", "I deserve the other", "I should have a training contract", "I did a redbrick uni", "I", "I", "I". Regrettably, that is not the way of the world.
I want to be an airline pilot, and I think I should be given training and get paid a minimum salary of £35,000. And I've studied really hard too. But it isn't going to happen.
So to go back to the original questions:-
WHAT IS A PARALEGAL:- somebody whom a solicitor / other authorised lawyer employs to do legal work (i.e. what 20 years ago was called "Clerk").
1. What should be the minimum educational qualifications of a paralegal?
Whatever the solicitor employing the paralegal thinks makes them suitable to do the job for which they are employed.
2. What should be the CPD training requirements of a paralegal?
None - it is for the solicitor employer to determine what training if any is required, and in practice most training is given in-house by the employers and often additional training from external companies is given anyway.
3. What should be the maximum number of paralegals one lawyer may supervise?
There should be no maximum. The requirement is (as it should be) that an effective system ought to be in place to ensure that the work overall is supervised and that any reserved activities are done only under direct supervision.
4. In a firm where there are only two solicitors supervising 100 paralegals, for example, what steps should the solicitors be taking to ensure that a "quality" legal service is being delivered to the consumer?
That is down to the two solicitors. Despite what the Legal Ombudsman, some posters on here (Kelly Matthews, et al) say, nobody ever held a person at gunpoint and said "you must instruct this particular solicitors firm". People make choices. If they make stupid choices, that is down to them. If the output of the firm employing 2 solicitors and 100 paralegals is good enough, then great; if not, then the "consumer" made a bad choice.
5. The title "solicitor" or "barrister" may well be sufficient for the consumer to understand but what is does the title "paralegal" mean to the consumer?
Who cares? I'm not being facetious, but firstly, I doubt the "consumer" of whom you speak actually does know what is meant by the term "solicitor" or "barrister"; secondly, I don't think that the "consumer" has a need to know what a "paralegal" is or is not.
Gang masters
A small section of the legal profession may be happy to employ cheap labor paralegals, possibly with no formal educational qualifications whatsover, to do the job of solicitor with a view to making proft, under the protection of a Limited Liability Company and with a hope and a prayer of few negligence claims.
In my opinion a senior lawyer should not be allowed to supervise more than four trainee solicitors or four paralegals with legal qualifications. It is totally unrealstic to believe that a supervising solicitor can properly supervise say 10 paralegals with legal qualifications.
Without a minimum educational standard for paralegals set by the regulators then some of the spiv businessmen who invest in the legal trade will be looking to keep costs as low as possible by recruiting the lowest level candidate they can blag their way with.
Any discussion of the training and standards of lawyers is a farce without there being a minimum educational standard for paralegals who will be attempting to do most of the work a solicitor once
did. How can it be that work once regarded as the domain of higher professionals can now be done
by literally anyone if a legal employer - who may not be legally qualified -says this is ok.
What is going on beggars belief and it is only because the law is not unionised that the reforms have taken the former profession to the cleaners and then asked the cleaners if they would like to be involved in legal services! That said I do not believe that the legal profession should be unionised because of the importance of it in upholding the rule of law. Nethertheless one would have expected the powers that be not to have embarked upon what has been described as "consumer fundamentalism" executed by people of either questionable intellect or people lacking in real knowledge or understanding of the role of the legal profession in the democratic system.
Irrespective of the above the experiment will not work and as was the case with the estate agency owned by a major building society, who put their negotiators in uniforms, the new firms will go to the wall very quickly.
The vast majority of the general public will not be instructing uniformed muppets to represent them in legal matters even under the supervision of a good looking solicitor who is trusted enough to buy his/own suit.
Norma Desmond
The bad news is that they already do trust factory operations because they are relentlessly driven towards such outfits by estate agents. As for unionisation, you must get out of the mindset of those who say that this is below us. We are rapidly becoming part of the masses because of this attitude whilst doctors are striking because of a reduction of pensions to £58,000 per annum. This is a salary only dreamed of by tens of thousands of current solicitors who will get no pension. We are the Norma Desmond's of the professional world still believing we are special. Our view of ourselves is shaped by the past not the future. We were once great princes like tsarist aristocrats but, like them, we will end up as taxi drivers or the legal equivalent
I am and always have been
I am and always have been wholly against "consumer fundamentalism". But I have to disagree with everything else you have written.
Your post is based on a fundamental premise - which you include in your first sentence - that is wrong. You said "...employ cheap paralegals... to do the job of a solicitor".
What is the job of a solicitor?
My view is that it is not and never has been the job of a solicitor to do everything that needs to be done on a client's case. In the recent past with the benefit of 120,000 qualified solicitors, and captive market for clients who can be made to pay high fees, it may well be that junior solicitors have been employed to do these things. But because solicitors may have done it, does that make it the job of a solicitor?
I myself have in the past spent many an hour at the photocopier, and many hours writing standard letters, etc., making necessary but tedious phone calls.
But I actually don't want to do these things, and I don't want my clients to have to pay for me doing these things.
Yes, it is true that one day, a paralegal will take a witness statement from a client in a matrimonial dispute, and the client will mention that their property is unregistered land and that the neighbour moved the fence 11 years and 9 months ago, and that paralegal will not consider the question of potential adverse possession, or that there is an unregistered rentcharge on the car-parking space, etc., etc.
But are you really saying that because of this (or similar) possibilities, we should have a person who has had six years training, and x number of years experience who is qualified in a profession to practice law as an independent practitioner sat there writing down the words of what a person says to them?
My house is in an area where there was formerly coal. If I want a garden wall building, should I pay Dan the builder £50, or should I instruct a Chartered Structural Engineer, a Quantity Surveryor, and architect and a German Civil Engineering Consortium to do it? What if I pay Dan to do it, but he digs out some tree roots which may lead to land heave without properly infilling it with mass-fill concrete?
Yes, you have this exactly
Yes, you have this exactly right.
A lot of "law" is, in fact, not "law" at all-but merely administration for which one needs competent but not legally qualified staff. The difficulty which the legal profession has always had is that of distinguishing the parts which need the relevant level of staff.
The profession's response to the vast increase in numbers of solicitors is to pretend that all "law" is difficult and needs a solicitor-with the appropriate level of remuneration. This was obviously caused by the increase in volume-itself caused by the relaxation in entry requirements.
The response of the client is to question the entire basis of the "qualification" needed for the practise of law-and hence the various government initiatives to introduce ABS's etc.
The ingredient which has been left out of the equation is, of course, the ethos of being a profession-something which cannot be regulated for but which arises from the intent that one does ones best for the client and not for oneself. That ethos is now dying -and will not be present at all in ABS's.
As in banking there will be great frauds of none sort or another perpetrated under the ABS system-but it is what the state and the clients want (until they are the victims).
A view from a conservative
My case load is healthy and I get a proper fee but my profession is under attack from an unholy alliance of bankers and socialists in the legal apparatus. I hear of £25,000 clothes allowances for bankers and yet trainee solicitors are only deemed worthy of a salary circa £11,000. As a conservative I am self-interested with a realistic view of human nature and as long as I get a share of the pie I doubt whether I will get out my seat. There will, however, be a lot of usual tory voters who either have or will be getting out of their seats if this trend continues.
Well as a conservative if you
Well as a conservative if you think trainees aren't. paid enough - give them a pay rise!