Some legal services background to the new reviews in legal education may help. Three areas of statistical development are not well monitored.
First, lawyers feel they are better trained and intellectually equipped than in the past. Decades of 3A’s, A* grades, etc at primary degree entrance level, selection by 2:1 or firsts only thereafter should ensure that only the cream is selected. So it is assumed that lawyers are brighter and better than ever before. Judges may have opinions here, but no-one seems to be willing to ask the clients if they value this intellectual investment. The Chambers, Legal 500, IFLR and LBR directories provide rankings, but on no empirical benchmark. If anything the rhetoric from lawyers is that “no-one does any law anymore” and the clients are expecting a progressive dumbing down of the legal service.
Secondly, “lawyers” broadly described, ie those who have not taken pupillage, training contracts or qualified can only be guessed at, but it is clear that the output from law faculties has for some time now been generating large and increasing numbers of "lawyers" who go nowhere near the mainstream professions.
Thirdly, a number of “grey” areas are emerging in the definitions of “lawyer”. Overseas lawyers converting to UK practice are tracked, and have had a significant role especially recently in keeping numbers up in large firms, but in-company lawyers are only tracked in so far as they need to maintain a practising certificate – which increasingly many won’t.
Without an understanding of how these three issues are developing, the professions are effectively walking blindly into the future.
If clients do not want super qualified egg heads, but would be happier with process policemen tooled up with software – why is the training route into the profession so limited? And sadly in recessionary times, even more so?
Over the long term, statistics from the Law Society Annual Statistical Reviews show solicitor training contracts commenced remains broadly flat. Since 1995 trainees commencing contracts has risen 16.9% in an industry which has grown by 153% from £9.4bn to £23.7bn. The gap has been filled by significant increases in the number of admissions of lawyers from other professions and overseas.
Whereas in 1995, 8576 law graduates equated to 4170 training contracts (48%), by 2009 the percentage has fallen to 36-42%. Looked at another way – the lawyer production line has been producing as many lawyers for areas outside the professions as inside and is now consistently producing many more lawyers for roles outside the profession.
Combine this with the strongest growth in lawyer numbers being consistently within the in-company market and the profession could find that it is shooting itself in foot.
Protecting the quality of entrants to the profession, whether or not the profession’s clients require this particular type of quality, is certainly not “joined-up” thinking and could be construed as more like protectionism than unfettered supply and demand.
Supplying the market with fewer chances for equity participation makes a growth in the number of GCs and in-house lawyers no surprise.
To cap this with a ready supply of legally competent talent for firms seeking alternatives to costly legal practitioners is economically illiterate in the extreme.
Increasing prices and/or eschewing fixed fees while stubbornly putting doctoral brains on scuffed knee problems simply exacerbates this miss match. It is a miss match which has been going on since well before 2003 and for which disillusioned GCs and consumers alike are only symptoms.
See RBP's Legal Services White Paper on Legal Services Reform - White Heat or White Noise? at www.rbponline.co.uk
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