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The potential use of the BCAT to teach critical reasoning skills in law schools
July 26, 2012 8:15 am / Leave a Comment
Diversity on barrister courses and in the legal profession was a pervasive theme in the responses to the Bar Course Aptitude Test (BCAT) consultation completed earlier this year. The Bar Standards Board (BSB) remains committed to diversity at the Bar, and it has been noted, for example, that both high and low scorers on this proposed BCAT test exist in various ethnic groups.
The Legal Services Board (LSB) has previously identified that the proposed BCAT has only been piloted thus far in limited circumstances, and this absolute uncertainty about how the test will perform in practice throws doubt in how the LSB can perform its regulatory duties in the public interest, according to a statement by LSB Chief Executive Chris Kenny. On account of this uncertainty, the LSB has asked the BSB to commit to undertake a five-year data gathering, analysis and evaluation period. Following the conclusion of this, a formal review will take place with a decision to “continue, revise, suspend or cease the BCAT”.
The early version of the BCAT published yesterday contains sample questions unsurprisingly exactly the same as known example questions of the Watson-Glaser test. This test has large samples of normative data, including from law schools around the world such as Thurgood Marshall School of Law in Texas Southern University. This school of law, under the auspices of its own Centre for Legal Pedagogy chaired by Professor Dannye Holley, Professor Anthony Palasota and Professor Edieth Wu, has conducted a number of studies using the test on existing students at their law school.
In this regard, it is illuminating to consider how the Watson-Glaser Test came about in the first place, as a learning exercise rather than an assessment exercise. The instrument is used already by a handful of City firms in their applications procedure. The language in the Bar Standards Board BCAT consultation report is one of ‘cut-offs’, especially in regard to the diversity impact monitoring. However, Goodwin Watson (1899-1976) and Edward Glaser (1911-1993) in their seminal work on critical thinking, focused on the link between rational thought and the educational process.
Their view of “critical thinking” is therefore as a set of teachable skills underlying successful learning, identified by five aspects of rational thought when effectively solving a problem: the ability to define a problem, the ability to elect pertinent information for the solution of a problem, the ability to recognise stated and unstated assumptions, the ability to formulate and select relevant and promising hypotheses, and the ability to draw conclusions validly and to judge the validity of inferences.
Alternative forms of this test allow the Thurgood Marshall School of Law to measure the development of these critical thinking skills, either as a consequence of specific instruction or over a long period of time. The ability to think critically is considered to be a desirable outcome of legal courses anyway. It is thought that law students should have an ability to extract relevant facts, and to distinguish them from legal or factual ambiguities, for example. This could of course be validly developed through other routes, such as the Masters degree or the Ph.D. degree, perfectly rationally.
All of this tends to beg the question: why didn’t the Bar Standards Board wish to use the test in charting any improvement of skills in critical thinking in barristers-to-be? This exercise would have been more fruitful, and would have allowed a more holistic view of the educational development of a barrister in training. For example, the interest in the development of ‘emotional intelligence’ in the psychological, organisational and leadership fields is substantial to thus of us who know these fields well. Taking a view of regulation as representative of a culture of ongoing obligations throughout one’s career, which all professional regulatory bodies undoubtedly do, it would have made more sense to use the application of the Watson-Glaser Test to encourage social mobility, rather than to limit it potentially unfairly. The fact that you can be instructed to perform well at the Watson-Glaser Test may put some students at an unfair advantage, dependent on their schooling, for instance.
Whatever then the outcome of the five-year data collection exercise, I believe it would be most valuable to consider the test performance of students as they progress through their career, from the positive perspective that any glaring critical thinking shortfalls can be ameliorated. This is of course assuming that the BCAT gets implemented in the first place by the Bar Standards Board, and that students are not overloaded through it.
The new websites of BPP and the Bar Standards Board are paradigms of excellent website design
February 18, 2012 12:24 pm / Leave a Comment
In many ways, the website is likened to the ‘shop window’ of the organisation. It is the visible part of an organisation, which is vital for attracting new stakeholders. It also acts a pivotal part of the knowledge sharing mechanism. Furthermore, it can portray a strong brand, if it has a robust brand identity, which ensures loyalty amongst its audience.
The new websites of BPP and the Bar Standards Board are both worth looking at. BPP is one of the most important professional educational providers especially in law and business-related disciplines. The Bar Standards Board is pivotal in regulating the Barristers.
I like the BPP website very much as it is visually very attractive. In addition to presenting its formidable strength in professional subjects such as accountancy, banking and finance, law, leadership and personal development, I thought that the section on disability support for students was truly excellent. As a student who has studied the GDL at Waterloo, and the MBA at St Mary Axe, I am now in a third centre, Holborn. All there sites have treated me as a person who feels valued as part of a wider community, and have gone out of their way to support me reach the highest professional standards in my postgraduate studies. I can only compare this to my legal training to the College of Law, for my Masters of Law, which I felt was exceptional too. I can only compare this to Cambridge University where I did other undergraduate studies and my Ph.D., but the focus on teaching at BPP and the College of Law in my personal belief is much more focused and impressive.
Likewise, I really like the new Bar Standards Board website. I have student enrolment with the SRA, but again the presentation of this website is immaculate. It effortlessly presents various issues such as the Code of Conduct, recent consultations (including the BCAT proposals), specialist regulatory requirements (including equality and diversity, both extremely important subjects to disabled individuals like me), and professional conduct for barristers. Its layout is uncluttered, and not overwhelming at all.
Both @BPPLawSchool and @barstandards follow the @LegalAware on Twitter, and it’s therefore extremely rewarding to be part of a wider, positive, network.
Will the new proposed Bar Course Aptitude Test be fair to aspiring barristers?
December 23, 2011 4:41 am / Leave a Comment
The completion of the training of barristers is a genuine regulatory concern of the Bar Standards Board (BSB). According to recent statistics, the number of students who want to become barristers shows little sign of diminishing with 3,100 applicants to the Bar Professional Training Course (BTPC) in 2010/2011 and 3,016 in 2011/2012. There is a growing level of concern at the Bar and amongst law students that the rising demand for the BPTC is not reflected by rising availability of pupillages, coupled with increasing fees for the Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC). BPP Law School, one of the main providers of the BPTC, recently announced an increase in fees by five per cent for September 2012 to £16,540. It is hoped that introduction of the Bar Course Aptitude Test (BCAT) will introduce fairness, by decreasing the number of law students who fail the BPTC, and the public consultation until 29 February 2012 is encouraged to see if this will be the case.
The BSB proposes that, in addition to existing entry requirements as specified in the Bar Training Regulations, all BPTC students should attain a minimum pass threshold on the BCAT, which has been carefully developed and piloted specifically for this purpose. It is proposed that this implementation of the BCAT by Pearson Vue should commence with the cohort of candidates applying from November 2012 to start the course in September 2013. Whatever is proposed by the Bar Standards Board, it will be for the Legal Services Board to determine whether the proposal may be implemented.
The BCAT is based on the established and recognised Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Test which is used by some law firms in recruitment assessment days and by the Graduate Management Admissions Council. The Wood Review of the BPTC’s predecessor, the BVC, had been commissioned by the BSB with a Working Group chaired by Derek Wood QC, and published in July 2008. Learners will now be able to take the BCAT at any stage of their education or career, including after applying for the BPTC. The requirement will be that applicants must have scored the threshold pass before enrolling on the course, similar to the current English language rule and other entry requirements. It is staggering that, despite the fact that no socioeconomic data in the pilot were collected, the Bar Standards Board find that the test will not any effect, adverse or otherwise, on socioeconomic factors of enrolment on the BPTC.
Students in the UK are already prone to be most over-assessed in Europe, and it is an embarrassment to our educational system that academic competences will not have been identified by other means by the time a learner sits the test. The cost of taking the test will be a consideration for some learners at a time when some may in future be coping with university course fees. Unfortunately there is a slightly higher cost of taking the test for international students due to higher cost to Pearson Vue of testing and processing results overseas. The BSB has apparently explored the chance of a reduction with Pearson Vue but it has been confirmed that this cost is non-movable.
Certainly the equality and diversity impact assessment will have to be evaluated critically. For example, while no significant differences were found for age, or disability, statistically significant but small differences were found for gender and primary language. Indeed, Pearson Vue intend to mitigate against the effects of disability, indeed as they are obliged to under current equality legislation, through “reasonable adjustments” at test centres. The BSB will need to ensure that these are enforced rigorously, as anecdotal reports on the success of implementation by legal recruiters have been unimpressive for training contract applications.
A legal secretary commented on Twitter today that diversity would be ensured according to ‘how easy is it to pay for coaching to pass’. Formal education is currently expensive, and it is unlikely that educational providers might draw attention to the finding in the report that ‘coaching can have a small effect’, and indeed It is the view of the Bar Standards Board that it is more important to ensure fairness by allowing an unlimited number of re-sits, as the risk of applicants being coached sufficiently to achieve a pass is limited.
Views of current BPTC towards the proposed BCAT are mixed, but few current students are enthusiastic about what it will achieve. One current BPTC student ‘tweeted’, ‘I did LNAT and failed. According to that I shouldn’t have done law at uni, or anything further. So sceptical at aptitude tests.’
It is hugely impressive that the BSB have put produced such an excellent report into the development of the BCAT which is now open to consultation until 29 February 2012. It will be very interesting to see how the profession responds. The Law Society has already commenced investigations into a similar LPC aptitude test, and will undoubtedly follow the progress of the BSB BCAT with enormous interest.
Does the proposed Bar Course Aptitude Test examine the right skills?
December 22, 2011 5:11 pm / 1 Comment
On 24 February 2011, Catherine Baksi from the Law Gazette reported that the Chair of the Bar’s Regulator, Baroness Ruth Deech, had said that too many people on the Bar Professional Training Course (“BPTC”) are ‘wasting their money’ because they are ‘not up to it’.
Baroness Deech said the Bar Standards Board (BSB) would press ahead with its plans to introduce aptitude tests for students before they can undertake the BPTC.
This week they indeed proposed a new aptitude test, the Bar Course Aptitude Test (“BCAT”), and are welcoming feedback on their public consultation before 29 February 2012. This test is designed to measure an aptitude to complete the BPTC, though we are specifically not told whether this is the same for aptitude for a successful career at the Bar. The BSB perceives the main problem to be the current high failure rates of the BPTC.
Currently the admissions requirement for the BPTC at both the College of Law and BPP, as well as an arbitrary good standard of English, is a II.2, whereas the usual minimum requirement for a corporate training contract is a II.1. Currently, at Cambridge, approximately 80% of students achieve in Part II of the Tripos (Finals) a I, II.1 or II.2 in some subjects. The most parsiminious explanation therefore for a high failure rate on the BPTC is actually that its academic requirements are simply not high enough. However, many teachers feel that a simplistic judgement based on academic qualifications is not that fair in determining success in this profession.
Most curiously, the latest initiative from the Bar Standards Board seems to be in a ‘parallel universe’ to the excellent initiative, including eminent academics, teachers and lawyers, called the ‘Legal Education and Training Board‘. Part of the problem for the high failure rate of the BPTC, according to the BSB, may be students not succeeding in small, interactive sessions such as involving role-play.
It is now consistently acknowledged that people have different skills in general cognitive (thinking) intelligence and social/emotional intelligence. In the current management and leadership literature, as well as in experimental psychology, the role-plays found in the BPTC would in fact be considered to tapping domains of emotional intelligence, as framed latterly by Daniel Goleman, not traditional cognitive intelligence. The BCAT is based on the Watson-Glaser Test, and this test does not test emotional intelligence at all. For anybody to ignore knowingly the recent decades of intelligence in the last decades is rather perplexing. The BCAT does not test either how law students would react in well-validated ‘real life’ scenarios they might experience as a law student, or ultimately a trainee. This would be a ‘situational judgement test’.
The main potential fault with the solution proposed within the proposed BCAT is that there exist no published data about the reliability of the Watson-Glaser Test in predicting success on a BPTC course. To my knowledge, one magic circle firm is thought to use the Watson-Glaser Test in selection of future solicitors, and the most of the rest use the SHL online verbal reasoning test. It has previously been argued that psychometric testing should not a sole criterion for job suitability. There is no compulsory regulatory requirement of these psychometric tests, but the British Psychological Society has been calling for best practice standards in this field for a longtime along with their European counterparts. There are few published studies about the correlation between psychometric tests and performance in a any professional legal service environment, let alone formal studies comprising barristers or solicitors in training.
The BSB consultation provides a description of the features of the ideal psychometric aptitude test, and this indeed useful; it is a list of characteristics which few people in this field would disagree with. However, even if you are testing cognitive intelligence rather than emotional intelligence, there are many different cognitive skills you can choose. For example, it is possible to perform poorly at the SHL online verbal reasoning test due to cognitive deficits in learning, memory, attention, strategy and language, so therefore most reasonable cognitive neuropsychologists would find drawing conclusions from such tests difficult. However, these tests determine the future of intelligent students wishing with all the best will to enter the learned profession. Morale of my student colleagues is poor – managing strategic change like this new test will need the goodwill of the profession, including all its stakeholders such as students. The Bar Standards Board will then have to listen carefully to the expert views of academics, not just psychological test suppliers.
However, the Bar Standards Board have to be congratulated for producing and recommending such a comprehensive proposal for a practical aptitude test for the BPTC, the success of which is pivotal for regulating overall standards at the Bar from an early stage. The proposal, if students can afford it, seems eminently practical with an industry-respected test supplier. The views of the open public consultation are bound to be interesting.
#UCLLawDebate: Do lawyers need to be scholars? Panel discussion on 11 October 2011
October 12, 2011 4:33 am / 7 Comments
This was a brilliant event, “Do lawyers need to be scholars?”, supported by LexisNexis yesterday. It is described as follows:
The Wadester is proud to support the UCL debate: Do lawyers need to be scholars? The huge imminent changes to the legal services market are well documented… but what does all this ‘evolution’ mean for the training of lawyers? Do they need to be scholars or do they need to show commercial awareness, be effective communicators, be able to apply legal principles to client issues and provide counsel to clients in a business context?
Lexis® Legal Intelligence is at the heart of the changing legal world for many stakeholders, as the platform ensures both academics and practitioners to find relatively easily practical, up-to-date information or guidance from authoritative sources.
It was lovely, as well, to be at UCL again albeit for an evening, indeed where I was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute of Neurology. I was interested in the subject of this lecture, as I am a law student about to do the LPC at @BPPLawSchool, having received scholarships at BPP Business School (to do the MBA in which I am currently a full-time student), Westminster School (where I was a Queen’s Scholar), and the University of Cambridge (where I was a Foundation Scholar). I would like to give a special mention to Lee, who was Security for the UCL Engineering Faculty yesterday, where I spent the vast majority of the afternoon, and of course @colmmu and @legalacademia who kept me company before the panel ‘discussion’ – they are pictured below. All wonderful people.
Prof Dame Hazel Genn DBE QC(Hon) FBA BA LLB LLD introduced the panel discussion, as the official Chair of this panel discussion, held at Darwin House, UCL. Prof Genn advised the audience members Legal Education and Training Review (LETR). LETR is a joint project of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), the Bar Standards Board (BSB) and the Institute of Legal Executives Professional Standards (IPS). This constitutes a fundamental, evidence-based review of education and training requirements across regulated and non-regulated legal services in England and Wales. The legal services sector is experiencing an unprecedent degree of change. LETR is required to ensure that the future system of legal education and training will be effective and efficient in preparing legal service providers to meet the needs of consumers. Final recommendations will be published in December 2012. Their website is hosted by the independent Research Team that is conducting the Review. She mentioned the very wide-ranging terms of reference; it refers to the following:
1. Why is a review of legal education and training necessary?
2. What will the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) cover?
3. Who is conducting the Review?
4. Does the Review focus on just the regulated legal services sector?
5. How do I keep up to date with what the Review is doing?
6. What is the purpose of the Consultation Steering Panel?
7. Are you consulting more widely than the Consultation Steering Panel?
8. Are you interested in the views of consumers of legal services?
9. Can I communicate with you other than via the LETR website?
10. When will the Review finish?
11. What will happen once the final report has been published?
Prof. Genn outlined that the review is fundamentally to do with the competence of the legal profession, as well as the regulation of the legal profession as a whole. She outlined a fiercely competitive situation in the legal services field, in addition to the high costs of legal education. She emphasised the need for the panel members to be clear about the questions that they sought to answer in the course of the evening. The panel members consisted of Rebecca Huxley-Binns from Nottingham Trent University, David Bickerton from Clifford Chance LLP, Prof. Stephen Mayson, Richard Moorhead, Sir Mark Potter, and Prof. Philippe Sands QC.
Rebecca Huxley-Binns is the Module Leader for criminal law (taught in year two), the law of evidence (final year) and Critical Legal Thinking (final year). In addition, Rebecca is the Coordinator for Learning Enhancement for the whole Law School. She is co-chair of the Learning and Teaching Enhancement group and is also a member of the Nottingham Law School Quality Monitoring Committee and has led various staff development seminars (e.g. on eLearning, assessments, marking and moderation). She is also a Co-Founder and Chair of the Legal Education Group (part of the Centre for Legal Research). Rebecca was awarded UK Law Teacher of the Year in 2010.
Rebecca emphasised that the world works with law, that the law is part of how the world works. Rebecca explained that most law undergraduates ultimately want to have a job ultimately, and part of the beauty of law degrees is that they are so flexible in terms of career outcomes. (The latter part of this argument has been much advanced elsewhere, including by @BaronessDeech; see, for example, Baroness Deech’s podcast with @charonqc). Rebecca emphasised that an inescapable fact of life was that universities are also businesses. Fundamentally, she would abolish the seven foundation subjects – to develop instead a curriculum that embaced the law much better, and education in key legal skills such as statute and case analysis, and to embue the curriculum with pervasive intellectual kills. She cited that academics are prone to ignore how difficult it is in fact to read carefully Supreme Court judgments. She would further like the curriculum to emphasise ethics in such a way that goes more than a code of conduct, and she would prefer to view the curriculum as being more value-driven, explaining the context of law in various socio-political ideologies.
Mr David Bickerton from Clifford Chance specialises in debt and equity capital markets and other financings including high yield, acquisition finance, exchangeables, convertibles, equity derivatives, regulatory capital, project bonds and structured securities and projects (including PFI/PPP) transactions. He pointed out that law firms had not been properly consulted thus far about what they would like to see in the curriculum, that his firm received roughly 50% law and non-law grauates, and they trained about 130 graduates per year. Mr Bickerton explained his personal belief that 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.
Prof Stephen Mayson has been consulting in legal practice since 1985. He qualified as a lawyer in 1977, and was for a time a tax lawyer with the firm that was to become Clifford Chance. In addition to his work as a strategic adviser, he was also Professor of Strategy and Director of the Legal Services Institute at The College of Law and a Senior Fellow in the Law School at the University of Melbourne. In 2008, he was appointed to the Ministry of Justice’s Strategy Group for Public Legal Education. He also serves on the Legal Services Board’s research strategy group, the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s ABS reference group, the Bar Standards Board’s advisory panel on the Legal Services Act, and the Bar Council’s policy advisory group and ABS working group.
Prof. Mayson explained that the profession had become “outcomes-focused” – and that practising lawyers tended to be failing in critical areas. One is a failure to develop a basic technical understanding of the work they use the law for. As a profession, we appear to be failing scholars; there are for example senior litigators who do not understand apparently the fundamental principles of duty-of-care, breach, and causation. Lawyers were also very good at exhibiting “the lighthouse in the desert syndrome“, i.e. failing to apply the law in its proper context – the law is brilliant, but otherwise, unfortunately, completely useless. Lawyers also tended not to understand basic project management skills, such as scope, price and delivery of product. Some lawyers suffered from an ability to develop ethical and regulatory skills. Some lawyers seemed unable to build a ‘sustainable’ business entity.
Prof. Mayson further argued that law is both a profession and a business. He felt that the training contract was too long, compared to other jurisdictions, and continuous professional development emphasised compliance with CPD points, but not much ‘actual competence’. Therefore, legal education prescribed too much and enforced too little, whereas the converse should be true (in Prof Mayson’s judgment).
Unfortunately, Prof Mayson felt that the UK had ended up with a system which is not “fit for purpose“, and that the modern training contract had ended up being a “barrier to entry“; and that the “academic stage of training” was best left up to the academics possibly.
Prof. Richard Moorhead‘s main research interests, at the Cardiff Law School, are legal aid, no win no fee arrangements, the courts, the legal profession, regulation of professions and legal systems and socio-legal research methods. He has conducted a number of evaluations of legal service programmes as well as theoretically informed empirical research into the courts and the legal profession. He teaches an undergraduate course on lawyers: practice and ethics and an LLM course on commercial legal practice.
Prof. Moorhead was interested mainly in the answers to two questions.
- Do lawyers need to be scholars?
- Do lawyer need scholars?
Prof. Moorhead thought that lawyers needed scholars, and vice versa. This brought up the spectre of ‘knowledge generation’ – do practising lawyers need to be scholars? No, not really, but sometimes. Lawyers need to understand the client’s case, and to be able to advise on the client’s case. This could in theory be pretty routine, and indeed it could be possible to design a system which is entirely ‘slills based’. Prof. Moorhead felt that this ultimately was not legal education is about.
The answer, Prof Moorhead felt, was partly in the views of students when expressed when they first attend University. Such students appear excited, not know what to expected. In Prof. Moorhead’s view, was that such students wished to ‘do justice’ and to do ‘meaningful work’. Views were wide-ranging including those of academics who wished to understand how the world worked, and how law had subserved society through the ages. This possibly needed an approach similar to that of an ‘educational psychologist’, who understood the key context and concepts. Legal education was more rounded these days, with more teaching techniques. Lawyers therefore 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.
Prof Moorhead emphasised that there was a close link between academics and practitioners in a number of areas. For example, the rule of law was inherent to the current legal aid debate, and the work of other members of panel. Law therefore had a substantial and substantive public policy role. The reputation of the law was in part dependent on the reputation of the universities, and this was essential for the English and Welsh law to be able to compete against New York law firms. This was essential at such a time when law was indeed going ‘global’. The legal curriculum needed to be the best, most exciting, most stimulating, and offering ‘competitive advntage’ – it is the case the law is a business now, and needs to get better and improve. Academia had directly provided a huge input into practice – for example the impact of the Harvard Negotiation Project had been substantial, and there has not been a true equivalent (yet) at the English Bar. Academics were needed to opine on (and criticise over) what worked and what did not, enhancing the competitiveness and quality of the curriculum, well placed to suffuse their thoughts with imagination and experience.
Prof Moorhead described how his views had been shaped by Michael Colville and John Baldwin from the Courts in the area of ‘plea bargaining‘, and there are other examples from his own work where jurisprudence has been directly relevant to the law in practice, for example:
“We are likely to see a significant number of challenges to the government’s legal aid reforms, but the effect of Article 6 challenges is uncertain. It will depend on who brings what cases and, to an extent, the quality of those cases. Short term gains may also bring long term trouble. Article 6 challenges which are successful in one area are likely to lead to cuts in others, unless the judiciary takes a very strong line. More subtly, challenges may close down policy options prematurely. Arguably (although controversially for many) the challenges on family tendering closed off the most plausible alternative to the kinds of scope and eligibility cuts we are now seeing: competitive tendering based on quality and price. The success of that challenge will be used as an argument for having a tendering process based on quality rather than competition. Once this campaign is over, there needs to be some hard thought about how all sides re-engage to protect, rather than argue about, legal aid.”
Prof. Philippe Sands is on sabbatical for the 2011/12 academic year, writing a book on the making of modern international law; he will continue to supervise his existing doctoral students, but will not be engaged in other teaching . He expects to resume his LLM teaching in September 2012. Philippe Sands joined the Faculty in January 2002. He is Professor of Law and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals in the Faculty, and a key member of staff in the Centre for Law and the Environment. His teaching areas include public international law, the settlement of international disputes (including arbitration), and environmental and natural resources law.
Prof . Sands provided that, currently, legal education was carried out by a variety of people including universities and practitioners, and related to the work of many ranging from solo legal practitioners to international law firms. The review was coming at a time when law appeared to moving from a profession to a business, where indeed large supermarket chains were able to offer legal services. It could be that fundamental issues are what should be taught in legal education. Prof. Sands fundamentally believed that it is the not the function of universities to be restraining professional activity, and that universities did need to respond to what consumers needed. The university environment is supposed to widen one’s education, for the learner to discover how the world functions, and to allow legal practitioners to know how to function, whether this is is in a small practice in Norfolk or at the International Court of Justice. Prof Sands thought there might be immediate steps in improving legal education; for example, improved attention to other jurisdictions (such as Australia), making law a graduate degree, and dispensing with the idea that you need a legal degree to practice. He then conceded that such ideas were indeed provocative, but inherent to what the social function of the law is. Law is not, as such, a business, but a professional fundamentally governed by a duty of independence.
There had been a ballooning of the numbers of students who had been awarded law degrees, in about 5200 to about 13000 in 2010. However, it was important not to lose sight of what the function of the lawyer was in society. Prof. Sands viewed also that the purpose of the law is to widen the mind intellectually, and such challenging was about development of creativity in the legal argument. It was perhaps a sad indictment that such innovation in thinking was nowadays coming from the US courts, and not the English and Welsh ones. Broadening students’ minds, he felt, was ultimately about breaking down barriers.
Sir Mark Potter QC was called to the Bar in 1961 and practised in commercial law at Fountain Court chambers. He tool Silk in 1980. From 1988 to 1996 he was a Judge of the High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division and from 1991 to 1994 he was a Presiding Judge on the Northern Circuit. Sir Mark was appointed a Lord Justice of Appeal in 1996 and became President of the Family Division in April 2005. He offered an overview, without wishing to become immersed in the actual debate.
Law schools need to manage great expectations
April 9, 2011 10:58 am / Leave a Comment
Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations.
Great Expectations
Mr Jaggers about Pip, Chapter 18.
The reason that I am writing this blog post is because of a recent podcast entitled, “Lawcast 181: Baroness Deech, Chair of The Bar Standards Board on legal education and the regulation of the profession”
I really enjoyed this thought-provoking and interesting podcast, which I think is highly relevant to my arm of the profession too: the solicitors. I am one of hundreds of thousands bombarding the corporate law firms with my training contract application. Without a training contract, I can’t actually be admitted to the Roll of Solicitors. This obviously concerns me. The bottom line: there are thousands of students who won’t get Pupillages either, as the market is so intensively competitive.
That is why I applaud Baroness Deech so much for raising awareness of issues which are extremely important to me as a student. I am yet to do my LPC, which I will do at BPP (Waterloo) between January and September 2012, although I have completed my LLM at the College of Law (2008-2010) and GDL at BPP (2006-2008). My first five degrees were in medicine and biological natural sciences at Cambridge; as I obtained the second highest First there and my PhD following AAAA11 at A level, I can put myself firmly into the ‘academic’ camp. The further aspect to my application, which I tend not to reveal, is my strong research output in frontotemporal dementia, for reasons I’ll explain later. I decided to study law late in my life, as I became strongly interested in aspects of the law by accident (e.g. constitutional issues, regulation of financial services, access to justice) and I wished to pursue a formal qualification in it. I have no reservations about pursuing corporate law either.
I only passed my GDL, but I spent 50% of it in a wheelchair doing it by distance learning because of a two month coma due to meningitis which left me disabled. I am aware of the arguments that law course providers “mass-produce graduates” akin to a sausage factory, but in my case BPP were extraordinarily flexible and compassionate about completion of my GDL. I have loved my time there, not only because of the actual course, but because of the people that I’ve met. Many of the well-known corporate firms have told me that, whilst their official criterion is AAB at A level and a II.1, the vast majority of their good candidates have considerably better qualifications, but they can only invite a small proportion to interview. Some law firms have an intake of even 5-10 per session. My GDL pass is ‘tolerated’, only given my extenuating circumstances, I feel. I happen to believe that 20 problem questions across 7 topics in the GDL, compared to 12 difficult essays in my Finals, does not reveal much about how one can analyse different sides of an argument critically, in the first place, but my views on this are utterly irrelevant. They must surely be testing different things, and I hope that the Joint Academic Stage Board are able to make sense of this. My LLM commendation “looks better”, but one firm indeed wanted a Distinction.
There are other questions on the application form for training contracts which raise eyebrows with me. One is the “Why law?” question, but there are people who have genuinely questioned my commitment to being a legal practitioner given my academic publications record. I run myself a student society to raise awareness of how commercial and legal worlds interact (http://legal-aware.org), but I often find students reluctant to take part unless there’s something in it for them (like, for example, a training contract application mention). I feel strongly now that law schools now need to offer quality careers advice in careers other than law, such as teaching, the financial services or charity work (e.g. in human rights). Notwithstanding that, I feel sorry for the fact that law firms have to ask this question at the point before offering a training contract, when one feels that this should have been addressed prior to assumption of a GDL/LPC/BPTC place.
The next obvious way to tackle the “Why law?” question might be therefore to cite legal experience. Whilst firms have told me officially that it doesn’t matter whether this work experience is legal or not, invariably at interview partners have asked me about my relative lack of work experience. The “social mobility” component to this is that I am now prepared to take out a loan for this – as it happens, I believe that chambers should not have to pay their interns to offer them at all. I am far too old for most solicitor vac schemes. I am now thankfully doing pro bono work at a London law centre in employment and discrimination law, and it’s great as I really want to do it as I am myself disabled, but some firms apparently wish to see ‘corporate work-experience’. This is particularly pertinent in the “Why does the culture of our firm suit you?” question. Perhaps, it’s hard to justify applying to Gordon Ramsay when all you have worked for is Burger King.
I happen to think that any education is worthwhile, as you never know when you’ll need to use it. A Professor in Law at the University of London once told me this. I am currently doing a MBA, and when I told a Legal Graduate Recruitment Advisor that I am not trying really hard to get a distinction in it but that I was doing it because I really loved how businesses operate, she sounded much less than pleased. So should it matter if you come from a ‘non-legal route’ or ‘legal route’? I argue that it shouldn’t, in the face of all those law firms who have ignored my undergraduate and doctoral studies. Should it matter I’m not a great linguist? I am learning five languages, albeit at basic level. And so we could go on.
This all is leading to my conclusion that Law Schools need to take ‘expectation management’ more seriously than they ever used to. BPP Law School prides itself as being one of the leading providers of vocational education. The School is now able to award degrees following approval from the Privy Council. The Bar Standards Board has required BPP to appoint an independent statistician to review all available admissions data for the previous 5 years and clarify that in his/her professional opinion the number of offers that BPP wishes to make should not lead to over-recruitment.
However, critically, I do not believe that BPP is unilaterally responsible for this overload in the job market.
So, finally, I should like to thank Baroness Deech enormously for making me think about such issues.