It is occasionally a heart-warming part of this job to meet law students filled with a strong sense of wanting to fight for justice and make the world a better place - before they get it battered out of them when they enter private practice. And this can happen sooner than you might think. In the Young Solicitors Group's latest anonymous 'I Confess....' column in its monthly magazine, one lawyer recalls working as a first-year trainee in a litigation department. The firm was doing debt recovery for a German car manufacturer and had one particularly trying debtor. The time had come to repossess the car but when our budding solicitor snapped at the debtor to call him by his surname, the debtor burst into tears. 'I spent the next hour consoling the guy and trying to calm him down,' the young lawyer explained, 'and in return finding out that not only had he lost his job, but that his wife had left him for another man and that he had spent most of the previous month sleeping in the very car I was about to repossess.' However, all was not lost, as 'it gave me time to send the boys round to collect the car'.