Part 1 of my review of 2011 is here.
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,
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
