Last week brought excellent news for job hunters in the legal sector – but only if you happen to be a school leaver or a high-achieving lawyer mum or dad.

The first piece of excellent news was headlined: ‘100 apprenticeships offered across north-west for budding legal eagles’. The headline aroused memories of the outrage caused by the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s proposal that trainees could be treated – and remunerated – as apprentices, earning as little as £2.60 an hour after years of studying for A-levels, a degree and the Legal Practice Course (LPC).

Some desperate would-be solicitors might say £2.60 an hour is not ideal, but it is progress: a foot in the door, a gateway (to mix metaphors) to the profession and, anyway, you can always subsidise your starvation wages by flipping burgers.

Um, no… Damar Training managing director Jonathan Bourne, who is working closely with the government-funded National Apprenticeship Service (NAS) to provide these 100 opportunities, told me that they are aimed almost exclusively at entry-level candidates who have just completed their GCSEs. Some candidates with A-levels might also be eligible, but there is no government-funded help for graduates. And that’s official: recognised NAS apprenticeships are regulated by statute and them’s the rules.

Bourne said: ‘I feel desperately sorry for LPC graduates, but an apprenticeship is not the solution.’

The 100 apprenticeships, he told me, are expected to be taken up by young people training to work in administration, accounts, secretarial roles or in chambers as ‘junior, junior clerks’. And as for £2.60 an hour, this would only be paid to someone working for a very small firm. ‘We have some apprenticeships on £17,000 a year,’ Bourne said.

So let’s jump a generation to high-achieving mums and dads who are lawyers. Obelisk Legal Support is run by Dana Denis-Smith, a former magic circle firm solicitor who jumped ship to become a full-time mother – like so many women solicitors before her and since.

Obelisk signs up lawyers – female and male – who left City firms to devote themselves to parenthood, but would now like to get back into practice on family-friendly terms. They are placed with City firms or in-house, usually working remotely, and take on the sort of duties that trainees traditionally undertake – such as compliance and risk, due diligence and disclosure, summarising terms, legal proofing and document management.

Denis-Smith told me: ‘They tell us how many hours a week they can work and we arrange things accordingly. Sometimes it’s a job-share, with two people doing the work and a third checking quality. Whatever the arrangement, everyone’s a winner, with the client firms getting experienced professionals working at very competitive rates.’

So there is life after nappies, teething rusks and gripe water (I’m really showing my age here) for City lawyers who can’t resist the siren call of M&As and all that other grown-up stuff.

Just think twice before you allow your children to follow you into law – unless they revise the rules around apprenticeships first, of course.