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Anon 11.22, it surely depends on where within the profession you look. In my own experience, most trainees in small and medium sized firms have had to do at least 2 years 'on the job' training as paralegals/junior fee earners before starting the official period of training.

In my case this was over 4 years, very much spent at the coal face of litigation from the lowest level up to high end multi-track injury work.

Contrarily, law school contemporaries of mine who went straight into contracts with magic circle and large regional firms may have qualified a lot sooner but got nothing like the coal face experience I have and spent good portions of their contracts photocopying and milling through reams of electronic data for disclosure on cases so large they could not possibly be allowed loose on them to 'cut their teeth'.

The old adage of judging a book by its cover rings as true in the legal context as it does any other. Some of the people I have learned the most from on the job have been, for want of a better term, 'unqualified', just as others have been solicitors of various periods of standing. Equally, I have seen some utterly shocking/incompetent 'unqualifieds', solicitors and barristers in action!