by Beth Wanonowho is a trainee at Halliwells and a member (elect) of the Law Society Council.

There is a difference between a crunch and a squeeze. My impression of the trainee market is that the situation is akin to 10,000 people trying to cram onto a train that can only hold 1,000. You could extend the tenuous analogy further and say the platform is already overflowing with those who couldn’t squeeze on to the last train.

There is a difference between a crunch and a squeeze. My impression of the trainee market is that the situation is akin to 10,000 people trying to cram onto a train that can only hold 1,000. You could extend the tenuous analogy further and say the platform is already overflowing with those who couldn’t squeeze on to the last train.

I can’t say that the atmosphere among trainees at different firms I’ve spoken to is particularly optimistic or pessimistic. There is an understanding that the situation is out of their control. Stoicism is the prevailing mood.

I’m not sure where it started. Whether because tuition fees forced firms to raise their starting salaries to present themselves as an attractive prospect for applicants, or whether it was because big City or London-based US firms set such high salary benchmarks that other firms had to increase their figures to stay competitive. Whichever way you look at it, the gap between the image most students have of a megabucks legal career and the reality for most applicants has never been bigger.

For so long that gap has been shrouded by fancy brochures and posters promising access to the profession for all, while the reality has been underpinned by risky personal loans, intolerable levels of stress and a punishing search for a potentially non-existent pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Information on this reality is not reaching those who need it the most: the students considering a career as a solicitor.

Access to the professionWe have reached a stage where the balance between offering access to the profession and managing the expectations of those considering it has become dangerously tipped towards the former.

The level of legal practice course fees is in the hands of market forces. The salaries the firms offer trainees are in the hands of competition. These things, like the economy, are outside our control. We must ensure that, when students consider a career in the law, they are made frankly and openly aware that, while they may be entering a discipline as traditional as medicine, they are also entering a discipline which is more and more dependent on the commercial market.

No guaranteesThe illusion that anyone can be a solicitor should they attain an LPC must no longer be propagated. It is to the detriment of the careers of both those at the law schools and the profession as a whole.

It must be made clear to all prospective solicitors before they sign up to pay the LPC or gaduate diploma in law fees that those courses are only one year of a much larger process and that completing them is no guarantee of qualification or employment. The point must be clearly made to all prospective solicitors, regardless of age or stage of education, that the LPC is one year of a required three-year qualification process, and that acquiring the training contract which makes up those remaining two years is a difficult and extremely competitive process.

Life-changing loansThe aim is not to discourage people from having ambitions to be a solicitor. It is to be hoped that, by making this information common knowledge among prospective entrants to the profession, whether at sixth-form college or university, they will approach their training choices without being misinformed before they take out life-changing loans. Above all, they can begin to hone their CVs early, know where to focus and bolster their chances of finding that proverbial pot of gold.

Sadly, there is already a near-absurd level of oversupply. We have seen naivety slowly become stoicism. Now we risk seeing stoicism becoming outright cynicism. And isn’t it a little early for future generations of solicitors to become so cynical?

Beth Wanono is a trainee at Halliwells and a member (elect) of the Law Society Council. The Junior Lawyers Division is the representative body for LPC students, trainee solicitors and newly qualified solicitors. See www.juniorlawyers.org.uk or call its its helpline on 08000 856 131.