Councils cutting trainee intake
Career opportunities in local government are on the wane for young lawyers despite an increased need to deal with the glut of new legislation on the horizon, the new chairman of the Law Society's Local Government Group warned last week.
Speaking to the Gazette at the group's annual weekend school, Sedgefield Borough Council solicitor Dennis Hall said training contracts in local government had become thin on the ground, even though new entrants were trained in increasingly important areas such as competition and freedom of information.
'I think whenever there are contractions in staffing, it's the trainee places that go, and this is a false economy,' Mr Hall said.
'The number of training contracts provided by local authorities over the years has diminished, and that's not good enough.
Trainees don't land in the office running on their feet; it takes time to get them into the organisation and be part of it.'
Mr Hall said the group would launch a discussion paper on the issue shortly.
He said he also hoped to increase general awareness among employers about the benefits local government lawyers could bring.
'Too often, lawyers are not used as best as they could be, they are not called in to give advice before a problem arises,' he explained.
'We are consulted reactively rather than at the point we could be most effective, and too often we are called out to clear up a mess that is somebody else's creation.'
Speaking at the weekend school Peter Keith-Lucas, a partner at Birmingham-based Wragge & Co, agreed that local government lawyers were becoming an increasingly 'rare resource'.
He told delegates that their roles would grow in 2003 due to new laws including the wide-reaching Local Government Bill, and warned that they would also be put under more pressure through scrutiny by inspectors, auditors and regulators.
Following its annual general meeting, the group has renamed itself Solicitors in Local Government as part of a restructuring that follows the Law Society's decision that its associated groups should have separate identities.
Paula Rohan
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