As a national week-long celebration of apprenticeships begins today, London firm Farrer & Co has revealed that it is taking the unusual step of training its first cohort of solicitor apprentices on business services before they embark on legal work.
Applications for the scheme close on Sunday. The two solicitor apprentices, who will join the firm in September, will spend their first two years rotating across various business services teams, followed by two years working in legal teams in a paralegal-style role, and then the final two years in a trainee solicitor position, undertaking the firm’s six-seat rotation before qualifying.
They will join the firm on a starting salary of £20,000, which will be reviewed annually. Academic training will be provided by ULaw.
Katherine Wilde, Farrer & Co’s director of knowledge, learning and development, explained that ‘from a strategic point of view, we just want our qualified solicitors to have a really solid ground in the business of a law firm, appreciate the whole picture rather than getting bogged down in all the legal, technical stuff’.
Wilde said she herself had seen ‘both sides of the coin’, having begun her 22-year career with the firm as a commercial litigator before transferring to business services. ‘It will not be the case that the apprentices are seen as second-class citizens because they did not do the traditional route. It will be the opposite,’ she added.
Today marks the start of National Apprenticeship Week. Insurance firm Horwich Farrelly, which introduced a solicitor-apprenticeship scheme in 2019, said today that its scheme had been ‘very successful’, with 14 apprentices who started at level 3 progressing to the next level. Last year the firm introduced a graduate solicitor apprenticeship for those looking to join from university.
Solicitor apprentices also fared well in the first batch of SQE results. Although they made up only 27 of the 1,090 candidates who did the first batch of the new exam, the Solicitors Regulation Authority said their pass rates were ‘well above average’.
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