UK Law Articles
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The Times
October 20 1998
New training will benefit solicitors and barristers, says Nigel Savage
A future together
Barristers and solicitors will soon be brothers in law. After years of posturing between the Bar Council and the Law Society, we are on the brink of radical change in the way we train our future lawyers. And it could lead to common training for the legal profession.
The Lord Chancellor has published proposals that pave the way for the removal of lawyers' last restrictive practices. In particular they will enable all lawyers, on qualification, to obtain rights of audience for all courts.
Solicitors and barristers take different routes into the profession. Would-be solicitors complete the one-year Legal Practice Course (LPC) and a two-year training contract with a law firm. In that time, they take the Professional Skills Course (including advocacy) and are then admitted to the Roll. If they want to practise advocacy in the higher courts, they must follow a six-year route to qualification in higher advocacy rights, and they must undertake education for the rest of their careers.
Aspiring barristers complete the one-year Bar Vocational Course (BVC) and a six-month pupillage, by which time they can theoretically appear in the House of Lords. Continuous training is not required.
In June the Lord Chancellor's Department published a consultation paper, Rights of Audience and the Right to Conduct Litigation: The Way Ahead. Its essence is that the reforms introduced by the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990, which was aimed at extending rights of audience to solicitors and employed lawyers such as Crown prosecutors, had not worked. The Act, the paper said, "has achieved virtually nothing".
It proposes that all barristers and solicitors obtain full rights of audience on being called to the Bar or admitted to the Roll.
What will this mean? The Law Society will have to review its three-year pre-qualification period in order to deliver more training in advocacy, evidence and procedure. This can be done without major structural changes to the LPC. The College of Law, in its response to the Lord Chancellor's paper, sets out an educational and training structure with three different routes to full rights of qualification.
If implemented, the Government's proposals will have the inevitable consequence that an increasing number of young lawyers coming into the system, including aspiring advocates, will opt to qualify initially as solicitors.
In doing so, they will obtain the benefits of the broadly based foundation training in litigation tactics, case management and risk analysis that the pre-qualification training of solicitors provides, as well as advocacy, evidence and procedure. Some lawyers will then become specialist advocates, remaining as solicitors or transferring to the Bar.
If the judges continue to be recruited from the ranks of senior advocates, those who learnt their skills in a modern litigation department with an increasing emphasis on case management will be better equipped to function as judges in the post-Woolf environment. This model operates in some states in Australia. Far from it being an attack on the Bar, it clearly acknowledges the predominant status of the Bar as specialists.
The current recruitment process and policies of the Bar Council will only hasten the pace of change. The Bar will survive - indeed, it could continue to prosper, but it will require a structural and strategic review. Some students will still favour the traditional route of the BVC, followed by pupillage, and those course-providers with chambers links will be well placed to support those students.
But the prospect of a system modelled on the medical profession is a tempting one. Lawyers seeking a career in litigation would be taken through a general training into a specialism, whether a litigation department or at the Bar. It is all the more tempting because it can be achieved without any radical change to the current system of vocational training.
One hopes that the Bar Council will resist the temptation to respond defensively and that it will help to create a system in everyone's best interest.
- The author is Chief Executive at the College of Law.
