Training is sound business.

If everyone remembers a good teacher, then the adopted maxim for the legal profession is that everyone remembers a good trainer.

To bring home that point, the Trainee Solicitors Group and the Gazette at the weekend presented their inaugural joint training awards.

The winners were four trainers who have excelled themselves in an area which is increasingly crucial in today's modern business environment.

What all four winners - and indeed, the other nominees - exhibited was a knack for negotiating a delicate balancing act.

The key to good training is to allow trainee solicitors as much access to the coal face - to clients - as early as possible, while all the time maintaining complete supervision.

And the winners go the extra mile of not merely enthusing trainees, but in many cases, enthusing them in the less glamorous areas of the law.

Indeed, one winner was said by a trainee to have 'qualified in 1976 and still cares'.

Caring extends beyond the standard bounds of legal training.

Exceptional supervisors take an interest in trainee solicitors as human beings, not merely as automatons programmed to earn fees.

As Law Society President Michael Napier told the TSG conference at the weekend: 'Never has the business of being a solicitor seen as many changes as the last five years.' With evolution moving so quickly, the role of trainer becomes so vital that it verges on being a vocation in itself.