Five years after the advent of the City LPC, Jonathan Rayner discusses the merits of tailored courses


The growing trend of bespoke legal practice courses (LPCs) is no longer just the preserve of the largest City practices, with the news that Berwin Leighton Paisner has this month signed up on the new LPC+, a course aimed at firms with smaller numbers of trainees.


Bespoke LPCs have enjoyed a turbulent five-year history. September 2001 saw the start of a course created by eight leading City firms: Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Herbert Smith, Linklaters, Lovells, Norton Rose and Slaughter and May.

These firms had complained that their students were not receiving sufficient training on the standard LPC in black-letter law – the law of contract, specifically. And so the City LPC was born, delivered by Nottingham Law School, the Oxford Institute of Legal Practice and the BPP Law School.

The City LPC was immediately controversial. Critics worried that it would channel young solicitors too early into City careers, depriving the profession of talented high street and legal aid lawyers. Others were concerned that it was divisive to teach students with City training contracts separately from those destined for smaller practices.

Five years on, the original architects of the City LPC are still in favour of courses tailored to their firms’ areas of legal practice, but have decided no longer to work as an eight-member consortium. Clifford Chance, Linklaters and Allen & Overy have set up bespoke courses with the College of Law in London. The other five firms have opted to work with BPP only.

Ben Staveley is a former tax partner at Freshfields, but since 2002 has been a consultant to the firm on recruitment and training. He says: ‘Five years on from the introduction of the City LPC, we would say that it has been a good experience. We have found that our trainees are better able to deliver in certain key respects.

‘They are more switched-on commercially, with greater in-depth knowledge of the bread-and-butter areas for City firms, such as corporate and debt finance work.’ He adds that the City LPC has given trainees an enhanced understanding of their clients’ business needs and the service they require.

The new City LPC being delivered to Freshfields and the four other firms in the consortium from this month builds on the gains of the past five years. Mr Staveley says: ‘There is an even greater degree of client focus, with legal concepts applied to clients’ businesses. It’s intended to give new lawyers the capability to act as more rounded business advisers right from the start.’

Peter Crisp, chief executive of BPP Law School, explains that course content was overseen and reviewed by partners and others, who also had a great deal of input into the course’s design and structure. He says: ‘Students will have the opportunity to mix with their future contemporaries and benefit from the diversity of a course built by five different firms, rather than being immersed in the culture of just one firm.

‘For the same reason, the course will also help ensure that the future lawyers do not become too narrowly focused and one dimensional in their approach to practising law and do not develop a uniform way of thinking and approaching a problem – and as a result, will be more transferable and marketable.’

The LPC+, delivered by the College of Law, is designed so that it can be tailored, in a cost-effective way, to a medium-sized City law firm’s needs. Berwin Leighton Paisner has 22 trainees. Patrick McCann, head of training and development, says the firm was keen that all its trainees started their contracts from the same knowledge base and so it made sense that they should all benefit from the same LPC teaching.

He adds: ‘We wanted them to see how things worked at BLP on a practical, day-to-day basis. And so instead of their expending too much time on residential conveyancing, for example, we wanted to say this is what we did for a client last week and it’s the sort of thing you’ll be doing when you join us. We wanted greater involvement all round, in other words, even to the extent of partners attending lectures.’

Chris Stoakes, director of the College of Law’s new Moorgate facility, says he is in discussion with other medium-sized firms about providing similar courses. He explains that the LPC+ is distinct from the standard LPC in that the elective components of the course are bespoke. These electives are debt finance, equity finance and mergers & acquisitions, and are bespoke in the sense that they are based on Berwin Leighton’s own precedents and tailored to the range of work that the firm undertakes.

Mr Stoakes adds: ‘The way the underlying law is taught is the same for all students, irrespective of which LPC they are studying. With a bespoke LPC, such as Berwin Leighton Paisner’s, the law is diced and sliced to reflect the particular firm’s practice.’

So it seems the bespoke LPC is alive and well, with a constant stream of firms announcing that they are to send their future trainees to exclusive courses. If the motive is to ensure that their trainees hit the ground running and quickly begin to contribute profitably to the firm’s bottom line, then the increased competitiveness in the market can only accelerate the move towards tailored LPCs.