'Give hard-up students a loan'

Law students from disadvantaged backgrounds should be given a leg-up by a Law Society-backed low-interest loan scheme to help them meet the ever-rising cost of the legal practice course (LPC), a prominent ethnic minority solicitor told the conference.

Margaret Bailey, the Society council member representing trainee solicitors, said inequality in the solicitors' profession needed to be tackled at entry level.

She maintained that 'drive and determination' were not enough for students from less affluent social backgrounds and that direct aid from the governing body was required.

Ms Bailey also called on LPC providers to be more transparent about their fees and detail exactly what students are getting for the money.

'Trainees are the lifeblood of the solicitors' profession,' said Ms Bailey, 'so we must do something about inequality.'

Dawn Dixon of London-based two-partner firm Webster Dixon supported that view.

She called on the government to legislate in favour of compulsory diversity monitoring of law firms.

Those firms that did not comply with Society guidelines should be 'named and shamed', she said.

Diversity training - encompassing ethnicity, gender, disability and sexual orientation - at law firms should be compulsory, maintained Ms Dixon, saying that 'the rhetoric needs to be turned into reality'.

Ms Dixon also said that the major City practices needed to be convinced that issues concerning diversity had a business impact.

'There is a relationship between diversity and the bottom line,' she said, pointing out that law firms would increasingly find that clients were pressing them to become more diverse.

The director of the College of Law's Store Street branch in London, Richard de Friend, acknowledged that LPC fees were high and that they did place a burden on less affluent students.

But he maintained that the LPC's emphasis on practice over theory increased the cost.

Mr de Friend said: 'If we dropped the fees of the LPC it would get closer to being the old Law Society Finals which was a cheap and cheerful course.'

Jonathan Ames