Roll over “outcomes-focused regulation” being implemented by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. The current core syllabus for the Legal Practice Course, the stage of legal training prior to the training contract, provides for a “objects-focused curriculum’.

Inevitably, the bread-and-butter of law will be the documents. Indeed, the Business Law Practice glides effortlessly through the documentation required to ensure shareholder dividend for an English company, and even completes the story by describing the document required for a company to end. People aren’t involved in business and solicitors accounts obviously; numbers are.

People are an occupational hazard in civil and criminal litigation, civil litigation taking pride-of-place of course in the context of what happens when individuals sue companies or companies sue companies. “Objects-focused curriculum” is in a world of own of course when land is considered for an entire subject.

It is no wonder that the English company and inanimate objects figure prominently in the Legal Practice Course. However, law indeed has to respond to some of the problems of society in  general, which includes – but does not include exclusively – companies. There is absolutely no doubt that professional ethics, practical legal research, and other skills should be part of the new-look Legal Practice Course, but it would be nice if the Legal Practice Course did not take an agenda which is entirely shareholder-focused.

It is pitiful that a law student can get to the training contract, if he is lucky enough to be offered a training contract at all from a large corporate, without knowing a basic minimum of information about immigration, asylum, welfare benefits or employment? But these involve stakeholders don’t they? They’d be rather out-of-place in an ‘objects-focused curriculum’.

Here are some other nice objects, anyway…