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It's not the profession who made any 'false promises' though is it? It's the training providers who are happy to charge £12,000 to anyone who ponies it up with a vague promise that '90% of our graduates are employed in the legal sector' etc.

They saw the TC bottleneck post-LPC as a factor that was putting off potential recruits so pushed really hard for the SRA to sign off on letting them 'qualify' people as solicitors at that stage (without a day's real experience of the law for simply having passed an exam that some of them advertise up to 95% pass rates for).

Instead the SRA said 'we think your fees are also a bottleneck so we'll just take over the exam side and set a cheap online one instead that anyone who has been paralegalling for a couple of years can sit'. Having had their cynical money-grab backfire so badly, the training providers are now having kittens.

This is moderately amusing but not useful to the firms. What the firms want are good candidates who can hit the ground running on day one. Most are going to be very wary of hiring someone who has passed an online exam (with presumably a very high pass rate), who hasn't done an LPC-type (and in the case of a non-law graduate) a GDL-type course.

The other thing the profession as a whole does not want is the dilution of the solicitor brand by having people who haven't had proper training or met what the firms regard as the relevant quality threshold qualify as 'solicitors'.

The TC system works well for the firms and in general the better candidates get through. Some firms are exploiting paralegals en masse but the answer isn't just to make all paralegals solicitors.

The answer to the bottleneck is to stop the flow of B grade candidates being sold a dream for £12,000 (and often for £27,000 by their law degree providers as well).