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My response to discussion paper 02/2012 SRA/LETR
First things first, I have adored my LPC course, and don’t regret it for a minute. It was extremely well taught, and I enjoyed all of the subject content very much. Therefore, this article will come across much more negative than it should – the content of the course is currently advised by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. I have finished all the core and special elective teaching at BPP Law School, Holborn, London. My special electives were in employment, advanced commercial litigation, and commercial law and intellectual property. Yesterday, the SRA/LETR (Solicitors Regulation Authority and Legal Education and Training Review) published their document 02/2012 outlining the key issues. I have a confession in that none of my student peers on the Legal Practice Course have even heard of the LETR; it has not been mentioned by any of the staff to me once during this year, and there is no mention of it on our intranet. A follower of mine on Twitter even in fact mentioned that she had brought it up of her own accord in a training contract interview at a City law firm, and the interviewers had never heard of it.
The report by Prof Julian Webb, published yesterday, makes for very interesting reading in my opinion as a LPC student. In paragraph 45, they itemised the common criticisms of the Legal Practice Course. These criticisms, I think, are fair from my experience of this course. The range of criticisms is described quite extensive, relating both to the overarching design and structure of the course, its specific contents, and its supervision.
The common core is seen as too large and over-prescribed. The Business Law and Practice course, which has a larger number of taught supervisions and hence face-face teaching time, is by the far the largest core module. The emphasis of this course, I feel, is too much on regurgitation of factual material, despite the use of permitted materials. This course does not at all encourage the student to develop the skills essential for life-long learning, and in fact actively discourages original thought or contributions to the topics being discussed as these will not be credited on the rigid mark scheme. What additionally concerns me the most about these modules is that you can have little actual knowledge of vast areas of these subjects and still manage to pass, whereas you could know, for example, a lot about Business Law and Practice (the twenty-six small group sessions and fourteen lectures) and still really struggle to pass the examination through being quite unlucky (whilst know very little but shine brilliantly at the assessment.) The ‘over-prescriptive criticism’ is one which I very much agree with; whilst the teaching materials are excellent, perhaps compared to some university courses, the material is undoubtedly spoon-fed, and leaves virtually no motivation for independent work. I cannot conceive as to how this is good preparation for actual practice as a functioning solicitor. There is absolutely no incentive to read outside the course, indeed read outside of the assessment, for example the latest legal aid reforms, the changing nature of media law and super- injunctions.
Drafting and advocacy training appear to be the most criticised aspects of the course. In my experience, the drafting and advocacy parts of the course are treated as self-contained competences, required as a tick-box pass/fail exercise. This does little to foster an attitude of their relevance to general practitioner work. This may not be a problem as the majority of graduates from the Legal Practice Course will not be called for an interview, let alone be offered a training contract place. Also, the course, some allege, does not sufficiently assist trainees in developing the ability to attend-to-detail (this seems again particularly relate to the teaching of drafting). I think that this criticism that the course does not sufficiently assist trainees to develop an ability to attend to detail in part stems from the over-prescriptive nature of the course. I have witnessed with this with my own eyes in running the BPP Legal Awareness Society, where I feel that it is genuinely very difficult to get some student colleagues to show responsibility, pro-activity, and take initiative. I think this transgresses to the attention-to-detail domain, where the spoon-fed nature of education as a product double declutches students from having an ability to think for themselves. I think an inability to form an argument, but a relative ability to cope with short answer questions, is, however, pervasive at GCSE, A level and the LPC, unlike university degrees.
The assumption of a common pass mark for all skills and knowledge assessments overlooks the fact that in some practice areas, trainees need to be better than competent from day one of the training contract. It seems odd that certain skills have a simple ‘cliff-edge’ pass-mark, where you are considered either bluntly ‘competent’ or ‘not yet competent’. The degree in quality of scripts between 50 and 100 for professional conduct and regulation, practical legal research, and solicitors accounts, I suspect is huge in reality.
Finally, the course does nothing to address equality and diversity issues, save for two sessions on discrimination in the special elective, which many Legal Practice Course students do not take. I beg to differ with anyone who says that “commercial awareness” is a pervasive theme in the Legal Practice Course, either. It might be a pervasive theme in that there are no human individuals as clients, but that’s where this line of argument abruptly ends. Having completed a MBA last year, I would in fact say there is next to nothing in the way of business or management teaching; for example, budgeting, organisational structure and culture, business strategy, innovation, marketing, or performance management are not covered at all on this course. The report itself makes passing reference to ‘commercial awareness’, but this appears as a sop to City firms rather than a genuine wish to engage with the relevance, if at all, of a business education. There are no electives on housing, immigration and asylum, welfare benefits; this, I feel, is a genuine social tragedy, but reflects too the ‘managed decline’ of these services on the High Street.
Is the future of legal education online?
An impression that the debate in delivering online legal education is fast gathering pace is a genuine one. Alex Aldridge reported in the Guardian last week that Peter Crisp, Chief Executive of BPP, had opined at a major conference about the merits of “online only solicitor training”: “More flexible learning options allowing students to “work while they study”, according to BPP Law School chief executive Peter Crisp, who was critical of the legal regulators’ refusal to allow his organisation to deliver online only solicitor training.”
On 17 July 2012, it was reported that Edinburgh University had become the first UK university to sign up to a major influential US online delivery project of education. The investment in this project has been substantial; for example, elsewhere it is reported that: “Adding to Coursera’s success are UPenn and Caltech combined investment of $3.7 million in the company. With additional investment from current investors New Enterprise Associates and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the company now totals over $22 million in funding.”
Educators tend to wish to go off the record about their views, which makes debating this much harder. One lecturer at BPP that I know remarked, “Truth told, I’m still mired in old-world teaching and techniques. The classroom sessions I deliver are very traditional”. Yet, another lecturer at BPP whom I know well too commented, “Be careful what you try to destroy. Education is very personal. One size doesn’t fit all.” In response to this, Jon Harman, Director of Learning Design and Media at the College of Law responded, “one size doesn’t fit all yet we keep insisting on it in formal education.”
The Legal Practice Course (LPC) as currently set, across most institutions and centres, is delivered as a ‘standard product’. This means that it has a highly rigorous specification, and the learning objectives and assessment criteria for each part of it are clearly specified. I appreciate how this is organised, from having had an OFQUAL/QCF course approved myself in fact. These can be aligned transparently with the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) document for key objectives for the LPC which is available on their website. However, when it comes to the issue of face-to-face teaching and learning, the SRA is in fact very precise. According to clause 3.50 of the ‘LPC Information Pack’ (available here), “A face-to-face requirement has been set to ensure there are opportunities for all students to interact with each other and with tutors and to develop together their professional skills, attitudes and behaviours.”
As a student, I fully agree with this. Being a bit banal about it, BPP is ‘preparing you to practice’, not ‘preparing you to sit at one of a computer terminal to meet assessment objectives’. Teamwork and communication are highly sought-after competences in corporate law firms, and your ability to communicate articulately with colleagues and explain your ideas must be a key attribute of trainees. However, I remember once asking a partner at Freshfields how much international corporate law is done online, and he explained, characteristically openly, “an awful lot”. So the component of international corporate law which is being done online is growing itself, one suspects.
I learnt a lot about innovation management in my MBA, and this is a specific sector within business which decades of experience in other sectors of business might not match. I graduate in November, having completed this course successfully at BPP Business School earlier this year. With an ‘innovation hat on’, having done a full course with my tutor Dr Vidal Kumar (@VidalAndreas) which I loved, we were taught about the importance of culturing a wider network through key participants of a network, such as the Coursera network involving Stanford, Michigan, Lausanne and Princeton above; about having some ‘key adopters’ such as A-star universities, the operational issues which might limit or facilitate its success (e.g. fast technological infrastructure, clusters of innovation), but most importantly how you could secure competitive advantage through your business model through innovation. Crucially – and most fundamentally – you need to understand what an innovation is. An innovation is more than an invention – it has to be a dialogue between the person who created it, and its purpose, and its intended recipient. That is why it’s going to be interesting to see whether Menshn ‘takes off’. Innovation is not necessarily about improving on design specifications, in the spirit of the famous Henry Ford saying, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse'”. Likewise, producing an e-book is not the same as digitising a ‘conventional’ book.
This aspect is the heart of the issue. Democratising education is incredible, in that your outreach of the audience is of a different scale, but it means that you can offer online courses to the world. Many do not pass such courses because of the high attrition rate. Providers need to be able to ensure that such courses are not offered just because they are cheap, and indeed that the concepts of ‘cheap’ and ‘low price’ are not conflated with ‘cheap and nasty’. I believe online education can work, if supported by other means (such as the fact that students are individually supported by a real-life teacher so that there is regular monitoring of the learning experience which may not necessarily be the same as the assessment objectives). I first went up to Cambridge in 1993, so this is now my 18th year in higher education of some sort (some of which has not been on full-time or part-time courses), so I have much experience as an ‘end user’.
But the question must become also: what’s in it for the law school? By offering so many courses so cheaply, it is hard to see where the profit comes from, unless the inward investment comes from private equity or venture capital; but even then the private equity and venture capital firms need to consider carefully how sustainable the investment is, and in simple terms what the return-on-investment is? For example, the social media have been notorious in monetising their innovations; even possibly the chief strategy of making a profit from innovation, the initial public offering, has turned sour for Facebook.
This is a very complicated debate, but one which I will be sure to follow even though I will be leaving legal education for good in two months time, having done my LLM, LPC and MBA.
A formula to become a 'newly-qualified'?
This is the image of the “dataroom”, but probably not representative of that enjoyed by many corporate law trainees.
The recent post by @MagicCircleMinx belies a powerful aspect of the training contract.
“So is this what newly qualified recruiting partners are looking for as well i.e. a lawyer who doesn’t raise any alarm bells (AB), a lawyer who delivers a little magic (LM) and a lawyer who makes the right impression (RI)?
(LM + RI) – AB = NQ”
This theoretically may seem like a strange concept, when this is the tool of the trade for the trainee corporate lawyer, that possibly the late (great) Lord Denning didn’t have in mind?
Nonetheless, a really interesting discussion then ensues by @MagicCircleMinx.
One of the most salient points for me is that, to become a ‘NQ’ (newly qualified), you need to deliver a little magic, create a good impression, but, be most of all, safe.
This is a very powerful concept. It means that you do not have to know a huge amount of case law to ‘make it’ as a trainee provided you obviously put in the slog. Most pertinently, for mere law students like me, it’s about making sure that you complete the training contract competently (having got one – I haven’t got to that stage), such that you can be admitted to the Roll by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
This is undoubtedly a huge privilege, despite possibly the sweat and tears of being a trainee in the data room, etc.
