Law schools face crackdown as legal education goes under spotlight
Legal Week reports: The three biggest legal regulators have launched a full-scale review of legal education and training as concerns about the oversupply of law students continue to escalate.
The review by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), the Bar Standards Board (BSB) and the Institute of Legal Executives Professional Standards (IPS) will examine routes to qualification and the requirements placed on law schools in light of the likely future shape of the legal market.
College of Law chief executive Nigel Savage welcomed the review and argued that it was long overdue. He added: “It [the review] must be root and branch and embrace the undergraduate degrees as well as post-graduate courses. It also needs to look at matching what lawyers do within the legal services market with a brand new education and training framework.”
In the mid 1990s, when I was CEO of BPP Law School, I attended an education conference. An academic from the University of London (I cannot, now, recall her name) raised a concern that The Law Society was seeking to dictate to universities the content of university law degrees. Paul Pharaoh, speaking on behalf of The Law Society, responded drily that if a university wished their law degree to be a ‘qualifying law degree’ then it must comply with the requirements laid down by The Law Society. I could hear a fair number of pins drop.
Legal education is too important to be designed solely around the needs of the vocational law schools – those providers which run courses for the Legal Practice Course (Solicitors) and the Bar Professional Training Course (Barristers) – or even the needs of a profession in future dominated by Tesco Law? The ‘law’ content of both the LPC and BPTC currently is by no means intellectually demanding. There is a great deal of content to get through, no doubt, but the ‘sentiment’ I have seen on many websites is that the LPC / BPTC (a) is fairly easy and (b) is of little value in practice. Such comments do, of course, need to be taken with some salt, but those same students do often base their comments on what they find when they get into practice. So, work does need to be done on the LPC/BPTC. The ‘Laws’ of course, are the Laws – set down in statute and caselaw; so the academic law degree stage can’t be blamed there. In fact, much of the content of these vocational courses, rightly, is concerned with procedure, and the skills needed by lawyers to practice. If they are not up to scratch then the regulators need to address it. The hard law or *Black Letter* law has, traditionally been covered by the universities at the academic stage.
Nigel Savage, CEO of The College of Law, writes on his blog on the College of Law website…
Maybe we need more radical solutions? Let’s take the undergraduate LL.B law degree. What does it really prepare students for? It is taught largely by individuals who have never practised law and who increasingly have PhDs in a wide range of areas that bear no resemblance to the practice of law. Students are required to spend a semester – or if they are lucky an academic year – studying contract law, at the end of which they will never have seen a contract. Students will be told they are taught to think like lawyers. They are not. They are taught to wade through bizarre factual problems, which is a useful exercise, but what they really need is to think in terms of solutions. David Chavkin, a professor of law at American University Washington College of Law, recently said, ‘if the goal of medical school were to teach students not how to be doctors but how to think like doctors, would you want to be a graduate’s first patient?’.
Read the full post: The law degree – fit for purpose?
A number of points arise:
1. It is not unreasonable that universities should provide high quality legal education in subjects relevant to future lawyers and these areas be required if a student wishes to practise as a lawyer.
2. It is also important to remember that not all students who read law wish to practise law. Law is a social science, a study in its own right, of value also to those who study it with a view to going into other disciplines. Curiously, the teaching of Jurisprudence – or legal philosophy – has rather dropped off, even in the leading universities. This, I believe, is a mistake for Jurisprudence considers the politico-philosophical basis of our law and its rich history. To dismiss the academic stage of legal education as being taught by people with Ph.ds is not a particularly credible proposition in my view. The law is the law – there is a lot of detail, a great deal of concept and a great deal of politico-economic and social context to the decisions of our judges and the deliberations of our MPs – thankfully
3. Law is an intellectual discipline. Good lawyers need to have a firm grasp of legal principle – and the devil is in the detail, to use that much borrowed phrase. When I did a review of legal education for the Magic Circle firms some years ago – they were interested in a City oriented LPC – I remember the then managing partner of Slaughter & May telling me that law is a cerebral and intellectual discipline. It was, he told me, of ‘first importance that trainees had a firm grounding in black letter law’. I cannot imagine that much has changed in that regard in the last fifteen years. If anything, as laws become ever more complex, I would have thought it more important that law students who are going into the profession have a very thorough grasp of law in relevant areas and, as important, the principles of legal theory and highly developed legal research skills.
4. I would not wish to see the vocational law schools leaning on the regulators – or the regulators succumbing – to a view that legal education and practice can be conflated conveniently into a dumbed down course. The College of Law and BPP University College both enjoy the right to award degrees. I hope they use this power wisely and do not, for convenience, reduce the intellectual and content element of legal study to suit their needs at the expense of the future of the profession or the independent study of law as an intellectual discipline.
5. I am fairly certain, having talked to some very experienced practitioners on both sides of the profession that much of the practise of law is actually learned in practice. Unfortunately, not all law firms can afford the expensive training infrastructure of the top City and Commercial firms and I would doubt that most pupil masters / mistresses can do more than give of their expertise as best they can and combine it with excellent work being done in The Inns and in some Chambers. This is a very complex issue.
It may be that the vocational law schools and the regulators will take offence at the suggestion that a future regulation of ‘qualifying content’ would ever be dumbed down. I mean no offence – but I do have two words which may be worth bearing in mind: *Degree inflation*. It is astonishing how some universities have awarded ever more Firsts, Upper Seconds and Lower Seconds compared to twenty-five years ago to students as the profession has sought to be more restrictive and selective. Given this phenomenon – it is not unreasonable to say that this review needs to take especial care of the content of the legal education syllabus.
5. The review needs to look very carefully at the syllabus needed, the needs of business, the legal profession and other fields of endeavour where a law degree would be useful and it certainly needs to look at the modules which are essential to a modern lawyer who wishes to practise. The vocational law schools should, in my view, continue to focus on procedure, skills and the wider aspects of commercial and other contextual practical knowledge and not become involved in the teaching of black letter law. That is, in my view, best left to those who have specialist knowledge of the ‘laws’. I think it fair to say, as a generalisation, that law teachers in universities know rather more about the ‘Laws’ than their counterparts in vocational law schools – who will, in turn, probably know more about legal skills and procedures and practice? Perhaps more discussion between academic stage universities and providers of the LPC/BPTC on content would be an idea?
6. The issue of numbers will continue to be a very difficult issue for universities and the profession to deal with. I make no comment on that issue here.
This is not a detailed analysis. I merely pose these issues for debate and discussion and do not ‘prescribe’…. as always.
As ever Charon a well argued piece with some very interesting dimensions, some of which I am exploring in a post that is taking an age to write about HE education, rather than legal education. I think we run the risk in legal education at over evaluating an education model for now, our language of vocational and academic education is out dated as our notions of what they are. This is prevalent throughout education as we currently stand and we are facing a climate change of great magnitude in education needs, therefore this review must be welcomed and not be allowed to flounder in the shallow waters that the TFR did. It needs a landscape and holistic view of education. A deep insight into notions of complexity theory and how quickly our world and thus industry will change and continue to change at an exponential rate. This is not happening in education and we are marching into the future whilst looking in the rear view mirror. It’s to be welcomed, but I hesitate to see if the focus will be right. Please have a listen to the talk I attended yesterday on these wider issues that I have posted on my blog.
That blogpost with recorded talk: http://digitaladventures-colmmu.blogspot.com/2010/11/creativity-key-to-our-future.html
May I chip in with a comparison with another regulated profession?
My first degree was in electronic engineering. The degree course which I followed was accredited by the IEE, the Institution of Electrical Engineers (as it then was), in addition to the normal standards which applied to the university to allow it to award degrees. The point of accreditation was to provide a degree course with a sufficient amount of foreseeably relevant subject-matter, which would enable the graduate to hit the real world of engineering with useful skills, which would then, naturally, be developed and honed as the budding engineer gained the practical, professional skills which are required to earn admission to the Profession as a Chartered Engineer. A non-accredited course can of course lead to such admission – it just takes longer.
My second degree was in law, and was (still is) a qualifying law degree, although admittedly a senior status degree. You can see the equivalence.
Universities, of course, do not exisit just for teaching. Their primary purpose is to research, pursue new learning and understanding, and then to pass that on to the rest of the world. In engineering as well as in law, the everyday practise of the professions owes much to the “academic” study of the subject, without which neither will develop. There is already much debate about the value of degrees which are awarded by institutions which only teach, but which do not carry out research.
Whle there is no immediate problem with a professional body setting admission criteria, focussing on those at the expense of development of the profession is short-sighted and could lead to sclerosis. The legal profession cannot be centred merely on practise and procedures and applying laws mechanically. Engineering isn’t, we can imagine what would happen if someone decided that we’d discovered enough technical things and we would be better off just making do with what we already have – as has been suggested many times in the past, and immediately proved wrong!
However the regulation of the law develops, it seems to me that, as with engineering, a holistic approach encompassing academia and practise is more likely to nourish that development and that of its practitioners, which I think is the general tenor of your post. In fact, for that reason I rather like the US approach of only being able to study law after having done something else – but that’s for another day.
One problem remains, from my point of view. We have a shortage of engineers but too many damn lawyers. Any ideas on how to change that? Or should I get my coat as well 😉
Hi Charonqc
Did you ever track down Simon A Cole to do a podcast?
I made a request a while ago but I can’t find the link in your comments section.
Anyway, considering, “Fingerprint identification evidence questioned by senior judge“, it would be interesting to hear one of your infamous podcast’s with Dr Cole.
‘if the goal of medical school were to teach students not how to be doctors but how to think like doctors, would you want to be a graduate’s first patient?’.
The trouble with most contemporary UK medical courses is that they spend more time on teaching, sorry, facilitating learning, about managing bereavement than on managing the causes of bereavement.
With the benefit of degrees in another social science and in law, the influence of the professional bodies over the content of a law degree is very apparent. The prescription of syllabus content leads to a box ticking vocationally oriented degree and not one that facilitates either a proper understanding of the subject matter or the acquisition of the wider academic skills that a graduate should possess.
The emphasis on vocational relevance not only leads to students viewing a degree in law as nothing more than the first step to becoming a lawyer but, just as, if not more, worryingly, in the current climate, leaves law graduates short of transferable skills which would leave them well placed to look at other career paths.
Whilst not being my field, one could say the same about nursing and medical degrees but the difference is that the medical profession trains, broadly speaking, only what it needs in the way of new entrants.
The reality is that much of big City law is tedious document turning and paper management, especially at the junior end. Checking and re-checking documents, filling in the odd form, photocopying – the sort of grunt work which requires neither great intellectual ability nor rigorous training.
I did five years hard grind in corporate M&A for a couple of big firms. Never had to engage my brain – I just had to be prepared to still be at work at 3 in the morning. As regards the academic process? Well, I did a month of revision for the (anti-intellectual) GDL and the same on the (utterly pointless) LPC after two splendid years of complete sloth and came out the other end (with very low-grade passes – who cares when you’ve got a training contract?) at no disadvantage whatsoever.
Law may well have some intrinsic interest (I, as a history grad, can see how – with a greater depth of study – some of it might be worthy of study). Problem is law school doesn’t prepare you for anything. Firms would – I am sure – rather do away with the expense and time-wasting, and being a solicitor (in the City at least) no longer requires much brain, just a propensity to be prepared to sweat over a hot spreadsheet and ‘draft’ (i.e. change square brackets) on completion deliverables until the wee hours.
Ever wondered why attrition is so high?
Because it’s a bloody awful job. Find me a junior solicitor who enjoys it, and I’ll show you someone who is either deluded, lying, or autistic.
Webby – Thanks for comment and insight.
I suspect that this experience is not highlighted by the firms or the law schools which provide tailored courses.
Law continues to be needed for lawyers in general practice, though 🙂
The universities should have told the profession to stuff their qualifying law degrees and bear the cost of training solicitors themselves. More pins would have dropped and possibly the penny too…
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