Law Society Diversity Access Scheme calls for funds
An initiative designed to boost social mobility and help talented students become lawyers has appealed for greater financial support to help raise funds to assist candidates in need.
The Law Society's Diversity Access Scheme (DAS), which is supported by the Law Society Charity, supports promising entrants to the solicitors' profession who face exceptional social, educational, financial or personal obstacles to qualification.
The scheme provides financial support to candidates, funding their LPC places, as well as networking and mentoring.
It is supported by BPP Law School; the College of Law; Nottingham Law School; the University of Plymouth Law School; the University of Westminster School of Law and the University of Wolverhampton School of Law.
The DAS, which relies on donations made to the Law Society Charity, has set a target of raising £250,000 this year to fund 30 LPC places and build up a fund to safeguard the future of the scheme, but it says funds have so far been slow to come in.
Last year the scheme enabled 12 students to take the LPC. Since its launch in 2004 it has helped 61 aspiring lawyers on the first stage of their career.
Law Society Charity chairman Nigel Dodds said: ‘Last year a report by the Alan Milburn-led review panel highlighted the lack of social mobility across the professions. The DAS is one of a number of Law Society-led initiatives which can really make a difference and help the legal profession identify the best talent, irrespective of their social background.
‘However, the scheme cannot turn to government grants or some hidden pot of money. It has to rely on support from the profession and other sectors to make a significant difference. Without it we, the profession, are missing out on reaching the most promising lawyers of tomorrow.
'The outlook is clear though – without more support to fund enough places many will miss out on this very real opportunity for a career in law and the profession will not move forward in its commitment to social mobility.’
Comments
Whilst I support the funding
Whilst I support the funding of highly talented impoverished law students, I cannot help thinking that this article sums up the Law Society view of life.
How can Nigel Dodds be so surprised that it is difficult to raise funds from the profession in the deepest recession we have ever faced? Does he really suppose that those solicitors, who are so busy exploiting their own LPC graduates, by making them work for nothing, are going to dip their hands in their pockets to pay for his laudable project?
Then there is the arrogant assumption that becoming an solicitor somehow gives you a higher status in society, than say a police officer. I am afraid that status is largely governed by earnings today and senior police officers are earning much more than most partners in high street firms. Any police officer who reaches the rank of sergeant earns more than a high street assistant solicitor.
There is huge social mobility in the solicitors profession. Unfortunately it is downward social mobility. All but a tiny minority of city solicitors are rapidly descending down the earnings scale, to the point where high street solicitors are earning less than plumbers.
The policies and actions of Margaret Thatcher and then New Labour are largely responsible for this but they don’t see it. They have reduced the earnings of the high street so much, by competition and the slashing of Legal Aid, that the high street branch of the profession is barely profitable. I was amazed to find a non lawyer MP, who graduated with me, congratulating me on my prosperity when he heard that I was a high street solicitor. Yet he earns double what I do and gets expenses on top of that (yes, he was mentioned in The Daily Telegraph).
New Labour’s competition policies, which emanate from the Legal Services Act 2007, are probably going to destroy the high street branch of the profession. Yet, the ridiculous Milburn Report stills sees us as a bastion of privilege.
Nigel Dodds and the Law Society have swallowed this rubbish whole and are busy pandering to it.
It puts me in mind of an old family story. My step-cousins are Russian Countesses, whose forebears escaped from Russia at the time of the revolution. Many aristocrats escaped as well but many fell on hard times. A lot of them gravitated to Paris, where Princes and Counts became impoverished taxi drivers. My cousins liked to tell the story of one impoverished elderly Prince who couldn’t quite understand that he had no money. His daughter scraped and scrimped and washed clothes, to make ends meet but every Friday the old Prince would go to Cartier and order a diamond necklace for the Princess turned skivvy, his daughter. The Prince had been a valued client of Cartier before the revolution and they felt for him, even though they knew he was impoverished. Every Friday they would deliver a diamond necklace to the daughter in the Princely hovel that passed for home and every Monday she would take it back. In Moscow Lenin sat in his Rolls Royce condemning the parasitic wealthy aristocrats, whilst in Paris those same so called wealthy parasites scraped a living.
I would like to see the Law Society carrying out proper research into high street solicitors current earnings and their overheads. I would like to see proper comparisons with other professions and callings and their current overheads and earnings and also historical comparisons. I would like to see the whole lot given to Milburn, with a request for him to comment on why it is that the earnings in traditional working class callings, such as then police and plumbing have outstripped those in the middle class solicitors profession and why is he telling people who would have traditionally gone into the police or plumbing to become solicitors?
Law Society Diversity Access Scheme calls for funds
I agree with the Online Comment of last week (18 February 2010). The SRA have done the business no good at all having this policy that 'the profession should be opened up' at all costs through the professional entry qualifications. Tell me please. How is it to be opened up when the pass mark has steadily been reduced from the days of the LSF and before? Opened up to whom and with what result? I spoke to a Chartered Accountancy friend the other day (who was from a dysfunctional family and a poor background but who had striven through only O Levels to this level of education/status) who now says that their exams do not require a trial balance to be prepared.
The strange thing is that I am and never was a 'nimby'. But, I think there is very little correlation between being a good Solicitor and the School, University or LPC Provider one went to (the 'P' in the LPC does at leat stand for something, 'plagiarism' (and copying out of books). There is however, every correlation between competition for a pass or distinction at professional exam level and a good Solicitor.
I see no use in infantilising the entry qualifications because one 'believes' that it aids 'diversity' it does not. It aids those with money but not with intellect and it does not aid any of the intake at the ground level from much less well off backgrounds who cannot 'get in' and 'get a good job' with 'good pay' whether they be those with the right tick boxes on an Equal Opportunties Questionaire or those who would otherwise vote BNP because both cannot now get a 'hand up' by working as a clerk and doing cheap, extremely tough exams and getting the credit for them.