This post is very much influenced by various conversations I’ve had in the corridors and the main lift of the BPP Law School. Notwithstanding the lack of luxury in the environmental context, I think the discussions I’ve had with other students has offered ground for fertile discussion. We have also discussed and read carefully the published opinions of  Bar Standards Board, CILEX, Prof. John Flood, Rebecca Huxley-Binns, The Legal Services Institute/College of Law/Prof. Stephen Mayson, and Prof Richard Moorhead and the Solicitors Regulation Authority especially. These are therefore opinions of the BPP Legal Awareness Society, an active independent student body within BPP, but they must NOT be taken as representative in part of wholly of the opinions and plans of BPP.

It is difficult to unpack the issues in a coherent way, so please forgive me for explaining some ‘pointers’  briefly, regarding the formal document we hope to produce from the BPP Legal Awareness Society, one of the most active legal and business student societies at BPP before the end of this month.

In the discussion below, ‘LPC’ is shorthand for the Legal Practice Course, the vocational part of the training to be solicitor as a law student, and “GDL” is the Graduate Diploma of Law part of the course, but it is imagined that these parts of the course would be assimilated into an integrated whole. Please note that our ideas are in a state of flux, and are being re-drafted all-the-time.

These are the views of the students on the subcommittee of the BPP Legal Awareness Society. We hope that, as students, our opinions will be taken seriously too.

 

• Students are these days paying for their own education both at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Therefore it makes sense for the legal syllabus and curriculum to be not overly long, and offer a high value educational experience.
• The emphasis in the overall shape of the legal education should be placed upon optimising the performance of the law student in learning how to learn, and how to manage the behaviour, skills and knowledge resulting from their learning. It is likely that law schools should wish to encourage collaboration and teamwork during the educational experience, especially since this is likely to be a factor of their vocational training and beyond. There should be less of an emphasis on memorised facts, although this will be essential for ensuring a competent standard in any assessments.
• Students need certainty in their studies, and employers need to feel certain that students have reached a minimum level of competence, however measured, through their studies. Not all the subjects need to be in a core curriculum, but there should be an application of ‘the uncomfortable test’, in other words ‘would you feel uncomfortable if a law student on completing their training could not explain to a member of the general public the importance of …  [x]?’ where x might be the rule of law or unfair dismissal, for example. However, there should also be sufficient flexibility in the curriculum such that students could voluntarily pursue optional courses in depth, such as media and entertainment law.
• There should not be undue bias to any particular stakeholders in legal education, whether those be academics in constitutional law or insolvency practitioners. Particularly, the LPC should offer some consideration of the law relevant to workers, as well as the companies which employ them. There is no justification for excluding some parts of law, represented by key members of society, such as disabled benefits, albeit there may not be time to devote much time to these at all (if they are included). As a comparison, medical students may receive just one lecture on dementia in the whole of their five or six years as an undergraduate.
• The basic curriculum, on successful completion, should be sufficiently broad as a training vehicle, to allow students to progress to a pre-registration stage, a further degree (such as LLM or a PhD), or an altogether different law-related discipline such as criminology or policy studies.
• It should be possible for students from non-law degrees to pursue law – we feel a compromise for this would be to make the curriculum entirely modular in the form of units, such that you could achieve exemptions from units on the course having done comparable units elsewhere.
• The assessments currently can be dysfunctional, particularly with students clearly ‘question spotting’ on the GDL. The programme should be inclusive of all possible suitable assessment techniques, which might include focused dissertations or projects, or even an e-portfolio or work-based assessments.
• The curriculum ideally should be integrated, so that law students have some valuable work experience. A problem with the law curriculum remains how to address the wishes of those who do not wish to work in a City firm, law centre, or CABx for example; while possibly work placements for this type of career might exist, law schools/law providers should generally consider other types of work experience, such as being an academic research assistant. Many law students wish to pursue a career in something law-related at the start, but due to lack of work experience, get put off from continuing. It is extremely worrying that good candidates leave due to lack of training contract or pupillage, therefore basic training should not be dependent on such opportunities.
• The drive should be away from ‘picking winners’. Whilst it is essential to ensure a minimum level of competence and fitness-to-practice, for the benefit of confidence for students and future employers, certain individuals should not be ‘destined’ to work in a particular firm from an early stage as the expectations of both parties change with time. All stakeholders, including City firms, should therefore concentrate on the provision of transferable skills. This will benefit their current employees too, where some retention rates are poor. Appraisal selection tests can be dangerous in maintaining the reputation of the profession, if the tests used to do not attempt to measure key attributes of being a good lawyer such as emotional intelligence.
• The curriculum is possibly suffering from a subtle ‘mission creep’ in commodification currently. The concern that a corporate culture has become invidious to legal education is not a strong one amongst members of the Society. However, of great concern, is that some specialities, seen traditionally as unprofitable such as housing, immigration and asylum, may be elbowed out at an approach with favours alternative-business-structures and corporates. The practitioner curriculum needs to be balanced, as well as giving due weight and attention to our rich heritage of English law across the seven traditional subjects.
• A potential way forward might be that the topics of the GDL could be inculcated into a 4 year-programme, offering integrated strands as proposed by Rebecca Huxley-Binns, Reader in Legal Education, followed by a specific period of vocational training akin to the BPTC or LPC, and then followed by a pre-registration period, offered by a legal entity, corporate or otherwise, offering a balance of seats relevant to that specialty (e.g. social welfare, corporate law). On registration, practising lawyers, would be free to specialise as they wish, with specialty-related qualifications as currently seen in medicine. The length of this programme would be to ensure it’s not too costly for the student, and also to ensure that students reach a minimum level of competence without being rushed. However, it might be conceived, like medicine, that the academic stages and non-academic stages might be fully integrated from the word-go, but this would throw up the need for changes in regulation.
• An element of this proposed scheme would be to remove the training contract or pupillage as a barrier-to-qualification (effectively barrier-to-entry to the profession). We felt that removal of the 7 traditional boundaries might work well, although we did feel that the current system of the GDL, LPC and BPTC was well executed with much certainty. Such a proposed scheme instead would not be that too distant from the CILEX approach currently offered. For members of the legal profession who wish to be barristers rather than solicitors, the modules corresponding to the LPC could be replaced by modules corresponding to the BPTC.
• Conduct, we feel, should be a continuing obligation therefore for all students from the point at which they enter the whole legal course, and would be effected by the Bar Standards Board and Solicitors Regulation Authority. It is more appropriate that common regulatory features (such as the principles of outcomes-focused regulation) could be introduced at a much earlier stage in the legal curriculum. This would send out a powerful signal that ethics and regulation is an important area itself, rather than simply a necessary compliance issue for future trainees with regulatory bodies. An issue is of course why should the curriculum impose such a strong regulatory and ethics load on people who never even go into practice? A fair counterargument would be to suggest that many of the principles, for example confidentiality, rule-of-law, consent, conflicts of interest, are diverse skills important for academic legal research careers too (and which are examined in research ethics applications by the funding councils).
• Case-analysis could be introduced in a traditional way as traditionally done on the GDL currently, and could be developed into practical legal research as indeed currently done on the LPC (e.g. developing proficiency in writing research-based memorandums (sic)).
• Students annually might have to disclose their compliance with relevant professional codes on an ongoing basis, therefore. Status could be graduated, e.g. ‘student’ for when a law student is doing the basic curriculum, ‘pre-registered’ when a law student is doing further training prior to being qualified, and ‘fully registered’ on successful completion of legal training. This, we feel, should not be a symbolic sop to the regulatory authorities, but to recognise their essential part of academic and practitioner life, and indeed we feel that the BSB and BSB and associated bodies should develop a very ‘hands-off’ approach for individuals setting their own syllabus in pursuing the aims and objectives of a legal newly-designed curriculum.

 

References

The members of the BPP Legal Awareness Society forming a subcommittee to address the Legal Education and Training Review were invited to consider carefully the following references:

Boon, A., Flood, J.A., Webb, J. (2005) Postmodern professions? The fragmentation of legal education and the legal profession. Journal of Law and Society. Vol. 32(3): Sept, pp. 473-92. http://www.johnflood.com/pdfs/Postmodern_Profs_2005.pdf cited in http://www.johnflood.com/categories.php [accessed 17 March 2012].

BPP website: Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) http://www.bpp.com/postgraduate-course-details/-/d/postgraduate/GDL/145 [accessed 17 March 2012].

BPP website: Legal Practice Course (LPC) http://www.bpp.com/postgraduate-course-details/-/d/postgraduate/LPC/146 [accessed 17 March 2012].

LegalAware blog. (2011) “#UCLLawDebate: Do lawyers need to be scholars? Panel discussion on 11 October 2011. “ Oct 12 http://legal-aware.org/2011/10/ucllawdebate-do-lawyers-need-to-be-scholars-panel-discussion-on-11-october-2011/ [accessed 17 March 2012].

LegalFutures blog. “Review sets out “radical” options for reform of legal education and training”, 13 March 2012. http://www.legalfutures.co.uk/latest-news/review-sets-out-radical-options-for-reform-of-legal-education-and-training [accessed 17 March 2012].

Legal Services Institute/College of Law (2012), “Reforming Legal Education: Issues for the Legal Services Board”, February, http://www.legalservicesinstitute.org.uk/LSI/LSI_Papers/Institute_Papers/Institute_papers/ [accessed 17 March 2012].

LETR (2012), “Discussion paper. Key Issues(1): Call for Evidence” http://letr.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Discussion-paper-012012.pdf [accessed 17 March 2012].

Metcalfe, C. (2012) “Add ethics and values to legal education, researchers say”, Lawyer 2 be, 16 January, http://l2b.thelawyer.com/add-ethics-and-values-to-legal-education-researchers-say/1010947.article [accessed 17 March 2012].

Metcalfe, C. (2012) “Bang goes the law degree”, Lawyer 2 be: http://l2b.thelawyer.com/bang-goes-the-law-degree/1011592.article  27 February 2012 [accessed 17 March 2012].

Moorhead, A. (2012) “LETR: Is there a big hole opening up under the solicitors’ profession?”, 2 March 2012, http://lawyerwatch.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/letr-is-there-a-big-hole-opening-up-under-the-solicitors-profession/ [accessed 17 March 2012].