News
Call for radical changes to legal training
- 24th November 2010
A legal think tank has called for a major shake up of legal education and the training of solicitors, including the abolition of the training contract, in a paper just published.
The Legal Services Institute (LSI), funded by the College of Law, calls for regulation of the Qualifying Law Degree to ensure better preparation for students embarking on the vocational stages of training. The LSI wants to make the LPC the ‘gateway’ to the legal profession and urges the Legal Services Board to act to ensure the quality of training by regulators of ‘reserved legal activities’, such as probate, litigation or commercial conveyancing, to cooperate in setting common minimum standards of competence.
Professor Stephen Mayson, director of the LSI, says: “The time is right for reform of legal education for solicitors. It is two decades since the LPC replaced the solicitors’ Final Examination, and much has changed in that time, in both the market for legal services and in the regulatory framework.”
In the paper, the LSI says: “Preparation of students for the demands of the LPC should be improved….there is considerable scope for the main LPC providers to indicate, within the modular degree structures, which are now common, the pathways which would best prepare students for the LPC.”
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