A leading legal aid practitioner has set out how collegiate training could be an alternative qualification route to help debt-laden students. Yet academics urge that such a scheme should conform to common standards, says Mark Smulian


If a patient went to a doctor only to receive the reply after preliminary examination ‘I’m sorry, we didn’t do that where I trained’, the patient would not be impressed. Yet this is how solicitors are trained, according to Roy Morgan, chairman of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group (LAPG).


In devising a solution to meet the crisis in recruitment of solicitors to legal aid work, Mr Morgan maintains that he has hit on an approach to training that could be adopted across the profession.


He calls it the ‘collegiate’ system, and says it could provide an alternative to the pre-set route of degree, followed by legal practice course (LPC), and then by two years of work-based training.


Law Society chief executive Janet Paraskeva has already welcomed the proposal as being ‘in line with the thinking underpinning the Society’s review of the whole training framework’.


Under Mr Morgan’s proposal, trainees would be placed with a variety of firms, and organisations such as councils, for three years, with periods of block release for formal study.


He says: ‘If you are training as a doctor you are not packed off to one GP’s surgery in some town to learn everything, which is what our profession does. I started thinking up this idea from thinking about the way doctors are trained.’


The specific problem in legal aid is that the salaries are low in comparison to commercial work. Would-be entrants who are burdened with student debt from a law degree then have to pay for, and support themselves through, the LPC, increasing the debt as they go.


They have little opportunity to make inroads into repaying debt on the sort of salaries legal aid work offers, and so they are deterred from that field of practice.


Mr Morgan does not oppose the LPC as such, but sees the collegiate method as an alternative qualification route. Those firms that offer placements to trainees would have an interest in paying them a salary because they would receive value from their work, he says.


But, as Nigel Savage, chief executive of the College of Law, points out: ‘I don’t yet entirely understand this scheme, because if someone is supplying training, that has to be paid for. I’m not sure about the extent to which such trainees could be charged out to clients. There is a lot of money involved in any change to training and you cannot just sling something together, it will take a lot of effort to design it.’


That said, Mr Savage favours the basic thrust of the idea, saying ‘it has got to be a good thing to offer more work-based learning’.


Funding is the key issue, and Mr Morgan places his hopes with the Legal Services Commission (LSC). He says: ‘I have had discussions, but they must remain confidential at present, though I am hopeful that the Legal Services Commission will fund a pilot. It’s true I am in effect looking for central government funds.


‘At the moment the LSC funds 300 places, which is a drop in the ocean.’ He predicts that the LSC would be interested in financial support for his idea because of the dire shortage of those entering legal aid work.


Mr Morgan, principal of Cardiff-based Morgan Solicitors, says money would be needed to cover the cost of administering training and to provide a salary from trainees during the three years of what would be something like a sandwich course.


The salary trainees received might not exceed what they get now, but they would be earning during what is now the LPC year, he points out.


Cardiff Law School is interested, though not formally committed to, a pilot scheme with 30 trainees starting in September 2005.


‘Wales is good as a pilot area because it has advice deserts and people can be parachuted into firms in areas where there is a shortage,’ Mr Morgan says. ‘The areas concerned are both remote rural ones and inner cities.’


An LSC spokesman, while not committing the commission to the idea, says: ‘If legal aid were equally well paid as other work, the majority of new solicitors would be interested in it. We have had stands at graduate fairs and people have said we get more visitors than Clifford Chance – we are just surrounded by people.’


The 300 places the commission at present funds ‘are just snapped up to the extent that people try to find law firms that offer them and as soon as the advertisement goes up it gets 200 applicants in a day’, he says.


But Mr Morgan says the collegiate idea would do more than help legal aid entrants financially, it would also make them better solicitors, he maintains, going back to his doctor analogy about the range of experience gained in training.


He explains: ‘At present, trainees are placed with only one firm and it might not have all the expertise needed. The key thing about the collegiate approach is that if a variety of firms and organisations get involved we will get people with wider experience in the profession.’


There is some interest in adapting the idea. LAPG director Richard Miller says: ‘Potentially, if it worked for legal aid there is no reason why it could not work for the commercial firms, as the structure could be used to usher in a new way for training for the profession’.


Training consultant Sue Nelson, who chairs the Law Society’s training framework review group, says the approach fits with its thrust of seeking to provide a choice of routes by which one can become a solicitor, with the emphasis on a new solicitor’s knowledge and ability to apply it. She says: ‘The group has looked at what we think are the knowledge and skills needed by a solicitor.


‘We have a long history of people taking degrees, then the legal practice course, then workplace learning, and some people may come out of it after two years no better than when they started, while others could do it in one year. We could ask, perhaps, does there need to be a one-year course, or could it be six two-week modules? Do you break up the LPC or make it possible to do so? Should we make it easier for an individual to intersplice academic work with workplace learning?’


She sees Mr Morgan’s collegiate route as a promising way to solve the particular problem legal aid has, but she is concerned that if a multiplicity of routes to qualification emerges, the end result should still be that one qualified solicitor is of the same standard as any other.


‘The LAPG has particular problem to solve,’ Ms Nelson says. ‘It should not mean that on the first day they qualified someone who had taken that route would be at a different standard from anyone who had followed the current route.’


She says already some 20% of those who become solicitors each year do not do so through the LPC, but by means of a qualification from a foreign jurisdiction, topped up by whatever the Law Society deems necessary. ‘That is an equivalent qualification route, and we need to think about what other equivalents there might be,’ she says.


‘It could be some people want face-to-face teaching and others might just learn on the job.’


This issue is not yet resolved. Mr Morgan uses the analogy of doctors, while Ms Nelson uses a comparison with learning to drive, where one has a choice of many or no providers to take the same test.


‘You can take a driving test on your own, though it is usually better to have taken a formal course,’ she says. ‘But there is a choice according to applicants’ needs.’



Mark Smulian is a freelance journalist