Scrap training contracts, says College of Law chief

TSG CONFERENCE: Law Society to review minimum salary

The traditional two-year training contract should be scrapped, and students should be allowed to qualify as solicitors after completing their graduate courses, one of the country's leading legal academics told trainees last week.

Speaking at the Trainee Solicitors Group spring conference in Leeds, Professor Nigel Savage, the chief executive of the College of Law, said the training contract was now a professional anachronism and that full qualification should be granted by the Law Society once students had successfully passed their legal practice courses.

Prof Savage said there was a 'window of opportunity of four to five years during which the solicitors' profession could embed itself as the foremost qualification in the professional services field'.

He maintained that the accountancy profession was reeling following the Enron scandal and that the sole factor inhibiting solicitors from usurping the role as the profession of choice for graduates was the training contract.

Law Society President David McIntosh, who also spoke at the conference, agreed that the training system needed to be under constant review.

But he predicted that the current vocational training model would be in place for at least the next ten years.

Mr McIntosh also highlighted concerns about trainee debt.

The Law Society Council is set to review the minimum salary for trainees, and Mr McIntosh said: 'I hope the council...

will go some way to alleviating the financial difficulties of some trainees.'

But he warned that the governing body will need to balance the needs of trainees with the financial constraints on some firms.

Jonathan Ames