Jonathan Rayner profiles the newly launched Law Society Junior Lawyers Division and outlines why the profession needs a new membership group


Every conceivable section of the solicitors’ profession has its own support group. There are, for example, groups for in-house and local government lawyers, black and Muslim practitioners, litigators and women solicitors. There are associations for mental health and employment lawyers, and there is Resolution for family law. There are also regional law societies from Cornwall to Cumbria and from Wales to Norfolk – and all points in between.



So whose bright idea was it to launch the Junior Lawyers Division (JLD) when, surely, there is already a group to meet everyone’s needs?



Katherine Gibson, the first chairwoman of the JLD and an in-house lawyer with Nortel Networks UK, argues that the new division fulfils a crucial purpose. ‘The JLD replaces the Trainee Solicitors Group and Young Solicitors Group and is now the only independent voice for lawyers starting out in their careers,’ she says.



The JLD, says Ms Gibson, will engage in serious debate about issues central to the future health of the profession and ‘won’t shy away from challenging the status quo’. With a constituency of more than 70,000 enrolled students, trainees and solicitors with up to five years’ post-qualification experience – around 40% of the profession – the JLD has enough voices ‘to make sure we are heard’, she adds.



Law Society President Andrew Holroyd also sees a role for the JLD. He says the profession is growing and changing at an unprecedented pace, and lawyers embarking on their careers should have no illusions about the difficult decisions ahead of them. ‘The JLD has a vital role to play in looking at such key issues as the work-life balance and stress,’ he says. It is never too early to begin networking and ‘banking contacts for your future career’, he adds.



Jeremy Sandelson, London managing partner of Clifford Chance, is another of the JLD’s friends in high places. Drawing attention to the problems of student debt and getting a first foot on the housing ladder, he says the JLD, through its helpline and mentoring schemes, ‘has a central part to play in the welfare and development of all young lawyers’.



The membership is equally committed to seeing the JLD prosper. Peter Wright, a JLD committee member and an associate solicitor at Nabarro’s Sheffield office, explains the genesis of the new division: ‘There was a lot of duplication of effort between the Trainee Solicitors Group and the Young Solicitors Group and it made sense to merge and take advantage of the economies of scale.’



The Law Society, with its new focus on representation alone, backed the project all the way, he adds. Fiona Woolf [Law Society President 2006-2007] set up – and chaired – a working party to see how the merger could be effected. ‘Andrew Holroyd also gave us his backing,’ Mr Wright adds.



Grace Brass, a JLD committee member and trainee at Cambridgeshire firm Adlams, says the new division has three major policy issues to address over the coming months: the legal practice course (LPC), the training contract, and the retention of junior lawyers.



‘We want to look at the content of the LPC and how it is taught by the various providers,’ says Ms Brass. ‘Our aim is to help ensure that students get best value from their tuition fees and are ready to take up their training contracts and make a valuable contribution to the firm employing them.’



Keith Etherington, another JLD committee member and a litigation solicitor at Oldham firm Mellor & Jackson, highlights ‘the gold-plating of the LPC’ as an issue. He says some providers include elements in their courses that bear no relevance to students’ chosen future careers – but for which student lawyers still have to pay, such as property courses for aspiring City lawyers.



Student debt is the biggest problem however, he says: ‘The LPC already costs more than the average car and students don’t need any additional and unnecessary expense. The JLD is going to try and help them take control of what they are spending their money on.’



The supervision of training contracts is a key area for Ms Brass, and not just because she is herself a trainee. She says there are anecdotal reports of trainees spending two years making the coffee and doing photocopying, before being signed off as qualified solicitors – which is bad not just for the trainee but for the profession at large, and its clients. ‘We want to train the trainers by developing and running courses explaining how to supervise trainees,’ she says.



Ms Brass’s third policy area concerns the retention of junior lawyers or, as Ms Gibson vividly puts it, the ‘the two-year retention wobble’. This is the tendency for newly qualified solicitors, just two years into their careers, to become disenchanted with the profession and change to another calling – or less drastically, to leave their firm and join another.



Ms Gibson mentions several contributory factors behind the ‘wobble’, including high work-load, poor work-life balance, lack of variety in the working day, and inadequate support from the firm’s management. But, she says, there is also the problem of disillusionment caused by the sudden lack of short-term goals by which to measure achievement.



‘A newly qualified solicitor has got there by working hard at school and university, and by passing the LPC over a 12-month period and the training contract over two years,’ she explains. ‘They go on to spend the first year post-qualification learning the ropes as a fully-fledged solicitor. Suddenly, they realise they are now in the grown-up world, having achieved everything they have so far set out to achieve, but with 30 or 40 years of career stretching ahead of them. They look around and think: “Is this it? Is this all?”’



Mr Etherington sees the need for more pastoral care. ‘Our work to assess the scale of the problem is still in the preliminary stages, but it is already clear that there is an unmet need for pastoral support – maybe through mentoring – to help junior lawyers get over the two-year hurdle. We’ve also got to try and increase awareness among the firms themselves and help them counter this expensive draining away of talent. Maybe a culture change in firms is needed.’



All the JLD committee members recognise that they have set themselves a major challenge. Mr Wright talks about how the JLD helpline is already receiving calls from distressed trainees who are being bullied or neglected. ‘Many firms are still wedded to chargeable time above all else. The pressure means they have less time to spend with trainees – and more temptation to burden those same trainees with unrealistic work-loads.’



Help is at hand, though, in the form of the JLD’s helpline and interactive website, its social and networking events, and its mentoring schemes, says Ms Brass. ‘If you’ve been dropped in the deep-end,’ she says, ‘the JLD just might be the life-line you need.’



See juniorlawyers.lawsociety.org.uk