It’s been a great first year for Legal Aware, the official blog of the BPP Legal Awareness Society (here it is on the official BPP Students website developed by Madelaine Power and Laila Heinonen).

February

On February 26 2011, I introduced my blog for the first time. I announced that blog would be centred around ten topics, and indeed I have largely stuck to this list throughout the year. Actually, I have expanded the list as my interests in the corporate legal news grew, and I started blogging on non-corporate topics, as my interest in pro bono welfare benefits developed. I have worked for five months in a law centre in London, in a post which was first advertised through the BPP Careers Newsletter.

March

Shortly, after announcing some meetings, I reviewed the plagued Rio Tinto and Riversdale transaction, one which had been plaguing Linklaters for months and which had an unfortunate conclusion. I invited people to join the brand new BPP Legal Awareness Society, which they did.  Maxinutrition was sold to GSK through Marcfarlanes in an interesting transaction, and I reported on the forthcoming implementation of the Bribery Act. Onto the legal landscape, it was becoming  increasingly recognised that professional legal services had to be run as businesses, and the nature of commercial law continued to interest me.

April

U.S. firms were fast adapting to the commercial opportunities of social media, and this was a theme to recur in the whole of 2011. For example, in May 2011, I reported on lessons in the UK industry for my social media strategy which had been very much made up on-the-hoof. In June 2011, Victoria Moffatt would later consider whether junior lawyers should participate in LinkedIn. By that stage, I was gaining a much clearer idea of what the BPP Legal Awareness Society was about, and that was to explain the relevance and critical importannce of law and regulation to shaping the competitive advantage of businesses. The regulation of the banking industry was beginning to bcome important as a theme, and I first brought up firewalls. The SRA spelt out 10 new principles in its Code of Conduct, and members of my Society discussed the use of ‘Second Life’ in law and legal education.

May

Slaughter & May LLP removed what they called a ‘clearly offensive advert’ widely reported in the blogosphere, including “Roll on Friday”. I was becoming very interested  in my MBA on how corporate social responsibility should pervade the business strategy in corporates, and I reported on a recent experience from India. Back in the real world, I was doing pro bono, and I wrote about a test in welfare benefits law which interested me – the cooking test. Motor insurance was hitting the headlines, whilst international arbitration saw two bits of ‘big news': arbitration over nuclear power in Russia was becoming important and a new ‘Arbitration Ordinance’ was introduced. The effects of  the global financial crisis were becoming clearer, as law firms sought to find solace in Islamic Finance in diversification of their range of legal services. The effect of other issues, climate change, continued to be a source of legal work for the City,  RBS considered a international expansion strategy into China through the joint venture mechanism. Amazon Inc continued to explore the intellectual property issues surrounding their “1-click patent”, and Google Inc meanwhile had their hands full with problems over AdWords. The High Court also saw another interesting IP dispute over the name of Lotus in motor racing.

The impact of media law was beginning to become known as England discussed the need for a privacy law whilst free speech on the internet became under scrutiny and Charlotte Harris, a partner in Mischon de Reya LLP, tried to discuss superinjunctions and anonymised injunctions on BBC’s Question Time. Lord Prescott indeed managed to achieve a win in the High Court over phone hacking. Finally, the impact of technology and the breaking of superinjunctions hit the limelight as ‘the Streisand Effect and that footballer’, and I dutifully did not break the superinjunction as I have student enrolment from the SRA.

June

“Roll on Friday” mooted the notion that I and various others at BPP were in fact suffering from “Stockholm Syndrome”, whilst I considered how my Society could help to overcome “the silo effect” in business and legal education. I moved the CSR debate onto a discussion of Bhopal in our Society’s meeting on CSR and international corporate strategy, and the general importance of marketing and CSR in corporate law’s “competitive advantage”.  The changing landscape of the world generally was further manifest in the ongoing discussion of the impact of the Digital Economy Act, now in the arena of whether it offended human rights.

Meanwhile, Ken Clarke presented his new legal aid and sentencing bill to parliament, and BAILLI realised it was having trouble securing funding. Microsoft took a critical look at the role of entrepreneurship, Compass looked at ‘ethical banking’ in the banking regulatory reforms, and Steve Hynes wrote a brilliant letter to the Guardian on the impact of the legal aid cuts, whilst the Government produced its official response to its consultation on legal aid. Meanwhile, discrimination reared its ugly head, some would say quite literally, in a ‘battte of the cornrows‘ at the High Court. My passion for social law was intensifying at this point in this year, as I went to a brilliant meeting organised by the Islington Law Centre about what the legal aid cuts would mean. Again, I only found out about this meeting through the BPP Pro Bono Unit.

I revisited the subject of my LLM at the College of Law – cloud computing – in attending an interesting one-day conference on it at the HQ of Microsoft in which we discussed possible regulatory avenues for cloud computing. Frank Jennings argued at this meeting that cloud computing offered a myriad of opportunities, particularly for cloud computing providers to “stand out”. The highlight of the month, and possibly the year, was our #tweetup organised by @ShireenSmith of @Azrights at “The Yorkshire Tea”, just a stone’s throw from the BPP Law School in Holborn. I was highly amused at the various antics of Magic Circle Minx, and this interview description made me laugh a lot.

July

As the training contract deadline was drawing to a close, I blogged about the online application form based on a meeting done by the BPP Careers Unit at Holborn. I was in the middle of studying leadership for my #MBA, so I wrote about Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” iconic speech.

I got easily bored, and discussed how Yogi Bear should be ‘legally aware’, and I even likened the training contract interview to the driving test the following month. I gave a well received presentation on the employment support allowance for my student society, whilst the full impact of the phone hacking at the ‘News of the World’ was becoming more widely known and what effect our statute law might have. This was the birth of the #Leveson inquiry which would be a dominant feature of recent months. Phone hacking was now a very active area of debate in the Houses of Commons, which was to be the case for the months which followed.

August

I became increasingly interested in the methods that legal recruiters use to select people for interview for corporate law firms. I had in my sights the ‘situational judgement test’ where applicants have to make a decision ‘what they would do’ in that particular corporate situation; I made my own version up, and so far over 100 people have taken it providing me with clear answers, surprisingly.

September

On 1 September 2011, Alex Aldridge published a thought-provoking article, “Disabled lawyers still face discrimination” in the Guardian.

I commented as follows:

I’d very much like to thank @AlexAldridgeUK for writing such a constructive and positive article on a topic, in my personal opinion, which has become somewhat of a ‘white elephant’ for law firms and legal education.

I agree that all of the firms mentioned in the article have really ‘meant it’, when it comes to widening access to disabled students in the legal profession. I am mentioned in Alex’s article above, and I tweet at @legalaware. The article generated much-needed debate, and I hope that it begins to forge a path for the future, where all stakeholders can bring their views to the table equally validly. For example, I have always found @SundeepBhatia2 very encouraging in supporting me. Sundeep is a Law Society Council member, and is extremely committed to the values of equality and diversity, in letter as well as in spirit.

Although I have now passed my LLM in international commercial law and I am about to commence my LPC in January 2011 here in London, I now run the BPP Legal Awareness Society during my MBA, a student-run society to promote the importance of law to business, and business to commercial lawyers (our news and educational videos are located at http://www.legal-aware.org). This time last year, however, I went to the http://www.open-to-you.com/ (OPEN 2011) event which was immaculately organised.

It was a great opportunity to meet face-to-face legal recruitment experts, other law students, and, most importantly, lawyers generally at Managing Associate or Partner level. I’ ll be strongly encouraging my friends at @BPPLawSchool and@BPPBusiness, where I hope to be increasingly involved in our disability strategy at a personal level. As I am physically disabled myself, I think such an event is wonderful for introducing law students to issues such as reasonable adjustments in legal recruitment, and ongoing training. There was a brilliant session on interview techniques which I loved.

I happen to believe that a much more ambitious debate needs to be had, however. Disability is not simply about law firms meeting future employees face-to-face once-a-year, which I dare suits meets requirements of all those concerned. We need a decent acknowledgement that disabled people aren’t there simply for marketing purposes; disabled citizens are potent members of society. and can indeed secure “competitive advantage” for law firms in a directly relevant area of law such as real-life application of the Equality Act 2010 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents).

Crucially, all disabled lawyers can exhibit remarkable skills in completely different areas of the entire range of corporate law specialities, such as share acquisitions or joint ventures, as indeed you’d find out if you were to attend the ‘OPEN 2012′ event. I believe that many disabled lawyers are also happy in high-street ‘social law’ in professional legal services firms offering specialist advice.

and

I couldn’t agree more with Tim’ s comment above: especially the need to ‘walk the walk’ as well as ‘talking the talk’ when it comes to inclusivity and diversity. This extends to all forms of legal recruitment, including careers fairs.

Tim is deaf as stated in his comment, and I have mildly impaired walking ability, as indeed also stated correctly in Alex’s article.

I feel intuitively that partners promoting disability in ‘top law firms’ (a term used in helenfcooke’s comment above), especially if they are not disabled themselves, could ‘do no harm’ ln listening extremely carefully to the views of people who live with disabilities.

This is, I suppose, what the people like me might call ‘face validity’ (cognitive neuropsychology was the subject of my own Ph.D., hence my somewhat late interest in psychometric tests for legal recruitment).

Ideally, I don’t feel it would be a bad thing if there were more disabled lawyers at Managing Associate or Partner level in these ‘top law firms’, anyway as I feel that there are few role models for disabled law students like me.

Furthermore, the proportion of disabled people in the general population is not altogether insignificant, so there is arguably no legitimate reason why disabled citizens should be underrepresented at senior level in such ‘top law firms’, or any law firm for that matter.

A new intake of students arrived at BPP University College. I hotfooted back from the party conference season to display my stall at Freshers Fair with Majid. During my conference, there were many interesting topics which I blogged on. Having already done pro bono work as a law student for several months by that stage, I attended a major event at the Labour Party Conference on the perils of the legal aid reforms. I concluded that the proposals did not constitute ‘justice for all‘. At some point during the year, probably inspired by two academic economists Prof Paul Krugman and Prof Joe Stiglitz, who both won the Nobel Prize in economics, that the Coalition policy was wrong and profoundly anti-Keynesian; I disagreed with Vince Cable’s interpretation of it in a blogpost I wrote on the “paradox of thrift“. I felt I had to tie in the notion of ‘economic rent’ and Ricardian economics in discussing bankers bonuses, however.

Later that month, I decided to make my own platform to help law students, particularly those with dyslexia and visual impairments, become good at the online verbal reasoning test; this is an obstacle for many law students getting even an interview for a training contract now. I wrote an introductory post on this here.

October

I became increasingly interest in how psychometric tests had managed to gain such an elevated status in legal recruitment; in fact, at one point, I reviewed the history of the situational judgement test, with a view to considering what the future holds.

On 14 October 2011, Alex Aldridge published an article in the Guardian entitled “Is the law degree an ass?”.

I commented as follows:

I really enjoyed attending this debate at UCL on Tuesday for two main reasons. Firstly, as a law student (about to study the BPP LPC in Holborn in January 2012, having successfully completed my GDL, LL.B.(Hons) and LL.M. as a mature student), I was interested to hear how academics answered the question “Do lawyers need to be scholars?’. This is particularly since I have received academic scholarships from three well-known institutions including Cambridge. Secondly, UCL is in fact where I did my own post-doc, and I have fond very memories of the place. I

I would like to thank the organisers @LexisNexis and UCL who took great care over the many delegates. I was able to sit near the front, due to my poor eyesight. I hope very much that @LexisNexis hold an event in the near future, with panel representatives including ‘real’ law students. I hope particularly @kevinpoulter will be involved as he is an experienced legal commentator who communicates well. I sat with fellow ‘legal tweeps’, @colmmu from the College of Law, and@legalacademia, a legal academic originally from Cardiff. It has been interesting for me (as @legalaware) to read the general feedback following the event, which converges on the notion that the scope for discussion about the issues was too limited, and drawn from people who were perhaps too senior. Notwithstanding these issues, I am very much looking forward to the outcome of the review to be conducted by the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR).

I have written a blogpost based on my own personal experience of this panel discussion on our ‘LegalAware’ website, the official website of the BPP Legal Awareness Society. On a positive note, Mr Bickerton explained his personal belief that the purpose of the degree is fundamentally not supposed to teach people how to be good at the law – his firm are rather looking for aptitude, interest, and a need to pursue law as a vocation. However, I found a bit alarming his relative disinterest as to what should be in the legal curriculum compared to the well-reasoned thoughts of the academics in the panel, in that the trainee recruitment of the Clifford Chance was of acceptable standards anyway. Ironically, it is perfectly possible for the Graduate Recruitment Team at Clifford Chance never to discover that you are a “scholar” if you do not meet their benchmark in their situational judgement test or verbal reasoning test. However you choose to define what a “scholar” is, most reasonable people would not define it as simply producing an arbitary mark in a psychometric test.

Personally, I found the views of Prof Richard Moorhead the most compelling. Prof Moorhead is at the University of Cardiff Law School (profile here). According to Prof Moorhead, lawyers ‘needed’ scholars, otherwise it would not be clear where the knowledge was coming from; scholars researched the key issues, and there is a key interdependence of lawyers and scholars – without scholarship, the advancement of knowledge would slow. The curriculum therefore needed to be exciting and innovating.

and

Interesting. I’ve had entirely positive experiences as a postgraduate student at BPP Law School, BPP Business School and College of Law doing my LLM, LLB(Hons) and MBA – but please bear in mind I’m bound to be happy at anything surviving a 2 month coma due in meningitis in 2007. i am also mindful of ‘advertising’ legal providers in this new ‘age’ of ‘expansion’ of legal services and legal education providers.

I did spend a lot of time at Cambridge, close to ten years in fact, as both an undergraduate and postgraduate student at Cambridge. I think @BaronessDeech is possibly being a bit tongue-in-cheek in her views about Cambridge, but I have always had a huge amount of respect for the jurisprudence FHS at Oxford.

I am now myself disabled, and I have passionate views about improving access for people like me who are visually impaired. Indeed, I have a chance to air them in the Comments section in a different article by @AlexAldridgeUK recently. I once had the enormous pleasure of meeting Prof Jim Harris. If you read his obituary, you’ll understand why,

Obituary in the Times

I didn’t study the Law Tripos at Cambridge – but I think i can understand where your impression of it as ‘stifling’ came from from my limited understanding of the organisational behaviour of faculties at Cambridge, @alienat. I think Cambridge suffers from a lot of very clever academics who don’t talk to each other when designing the Tripos, meaning that the Tripos is totally overloaded. As is usual in academic interests, they tend to be protective about representation of their own research interests in the undergraduate courses (and their examinations),
This was certainly my experience in an altogether different Tripos.

I would, however, be a bit disappointed if the Law Faculty (which does have an amazing research record, for example in criminology), were not able to input constructively into design of the law curriculum. They must however be extremely careful not to overload the curriculum (different from syllabus, by defintiion) with their suggestions, however.

Interestingly, since my comment was published, Clifford Chance have decided to discontinue their use of the Situational Judgement Test (they set exactly the same test in 2010 and 2011). I assume that this is not related to my comments above.

 

In the final three months of this year, I wrote more about psychometric testing (for example in the proposed BCAT and psychometric tests for training contract applications), human rights (for example the future of the Human Rights Act as discussed in a meeting of ALBA at the Inner Temple), and book reviews (for example on affect and legal education and happiness).

However, in these three months, I did become very interested in disability issues, accessibility and inclusivity.

 

October

The BPP Legal Awareness Society published its timetable for meetings to be held at the BPP Business School, St Mary Axe. We held all these meetings successfully in October – December 2011, including flotations, debt finance, international arbitration and joint ventures.

In October, I started blogging, in addition, for ‘Legal Cheek‘, an alternative blog look at the legal education and legal life in general. I wrote an article outlining my feeling that disability is the legal profession’s white elephant.

In this article, I argued that embracing disability was a good way of improving the quality of law schools.

All law schools deserve to be scrutinised very carefully in their response to the government white paper entitled, ‘Students at the heart of the system’, over the issue of whether disabled students are seriously disenfranchised. The formidable white paper, which was published in June, sets out proposals for a higher education sector which is sustainably funded, delivers a “better student experience”, and contributes fully to the efforts to increase social mobility. The ability of a disabled student to get a job is a massively significant factor in that individual’s social mobility; virtually all individuals do not aspire to sustain themselves through the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) itself. An adverse effect of the legal aid cuts may be to put off disabled applicants from applying for the DLA. Good law schools will wish to embrace theNational Student Survey, and participate in it to the full.

 

November

In November, I argued in an article for ‘Legal Cheek’ that the term ‘diversity’ is an unhelpful one, not least because it means different things to different people.  My conclusion was follows:

I believe that an useful first-step in advancing the diversity debate would be to phase out the word ‘diversity’ from the terminology, because, far from encouraging individual differences, clumping people together – inappropriately – inadvertently abolishes key individual differences.

Continuing the theme of disability, I developed the argument that law schools could take practical steps to make the wellbeing of disabled students much better:

The agenda for disabled law students under the government’s new framework is very much set by the law students. One way of getting involved is through the National Union of Students’ recently-launched petition calling for the establishment of a national advocacy service for disabled students (disabilities usually include long-term illnesses, mental-health conditions and specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia). In fact, if you’d like to set up your own disabled students’ group, you can email them for advice:disabled@nus.org.uk.

Still, I also feel it is up to the individual learning provider to be pro-active in responding to what disabled law students aspire to. At the bare minimum, they can simply comply with the white paper. But learning providers which wish to add social value may wish to do more to understand what disabled students aspire to and are legally entitled to. Certainly, it would reflect well on them to do so.

Meanwhie, back on the LegalAware blog, I was becoming acutely aware that the overlap between law and politics was becoming much closer. The legal aid cuts agenda remained at the front of my mind:

‘Sound off for justice’ and ‘Justice for all’ maintain that their campaigns are not political. However, senior people I talk to in law centres in London come to a conclusion that it is not possible to divorce politics from legal aid funding. Poverty unfortunately is political, as the Shadow Attorney-General, Emily Thornberry MP, suggested yesterday on BBC’s ‘Any Questions’. It happens that access-to-justice could disproportionately affect people on the basis of their income, in that cases of access-to-justice could become much harder to obtain for poorer people for certain problems. With many law centres set to shut down altogether, the legal services for immigration, housing and asylum, and welfare benefits, look set to be affected. The question is whether the poor will suffer disproportionately. Rich people will possibly be able to afford superinjunctions as before, as the evidence that the top 1% of the population have been affected substantially by the recession is lacking. This top 1% includes some (at least) well-paid lawyers in London.

However, colleagues of mine found it hard to discuss the political issues in an open way, but the funding of legal aid had unfortunately become a political isssue.

Whatever – I personally think all legal practitioners should be given support, acknowledging that funds are limited. but funding bodies will have to prioritise unfortunately. In fact, a focus on funding may have the beneficial effect of providing better precision to all stakeholders in their strategy and core competences of their legal services, whatever sector they are in. However, fundamentally, I most agree with the observation that, at this late stage, arguing over a sense of entitlement is totally unhelpful. It is desperately important that we fight until the end for our common purpose in protecting legal aid. I would find it very hard to support law centres if they wished to campaign at the expense of CABx or other stakeholders, but they should think about how they differ from other stakeholders when applying for London Borough grants for community investment or structural upkeep, I feel.

 

December

By December, I had come to the conclusion that a more radical solution had to be developed to improve access to the legal profession

It’s my fundamental belief that people are written off far too early in England and Wales at present. We have an education system that seems to punish certain bright people who fail to get perfect grades at GCSE and A-level. It doesn’t help that students are forced to make very specialised educational choices for their 16-18 studies at an age where they may not be totally convinced about their career choices.

I feel that the education and assessment environment needs an overhaul to prevent recruiters from using arbitrary academic achievement to ‘sift’ candidates out of sheer laziness. Talented people are being deprived access to jobs in the legal profession. Instead, we should be encouraging people to learn how to learn for themselves, and know where to find relevant information.

To this end, I feel law firms should be able to hire people straight out of school, if they wish, but also to take advantage to a greater extent of the enormous breadth of experience from other spheres of life mature candidates might offer. Unfortunately, we’re not in a place where that sort of flexibility can happen.

What will the future hold? 2012 has now begun.