The many routes into Law – and the resulting problems

Ann Thanaraj, Chloe James, Jane Ching, Jonathan Bourne and Michaela Hardwick

2 December 2024

What do you get when you put some legal educators, the managing director of an apprenticeship provider and some legal compliance specialists together? 

Well – several months ago this group started meeting regularly with shared concerns about the pathways into law and the confusion and problems it causes for those trying to enter the professions in England and Wales that are regulated under the Legal Services Act 2007. Those professions are barristers, CILEx, costs lawyers, licensed conveyancers, notaries, patent attorneys, solicitors and trade mark attorneys. Some accountants also have rights under the act but we have omitted them from this blogpost.  

This group involves: 

•   Ann Thanaraj, Associate Professor and Assistant Director of Digital Transformation at Teesside University
•   Chloe James, Compliance Analyst at Beyond Compliance Ltd
•   Jane Ching, Professor of Professional Legal Education, Nottingham Law School
•   Jonathan Bourne, Managing Director, Damar Training
•   Michaela Hardwick, Solicitor and Director of Beyond Compliance Ltd

We decided that one of the first things we needed to do was to create an up-to-date map of the various routes into the profession – this was actually quite an intricate and mammoth task which needed the expert skills of Chloe James, Compliance Analyst at Beyond Compliance Limited to create a map which was as straightforward as the project would allow. 

You can see the resulting map below and can download it here:  Lawyer Entry Routes map

This map was developed following review of an earlier map devised by Skills 4 Justice, and review of Alec Hancock’s blog as well as the group’s own knowledge. We accept that there may be aspects missing or  that are inaccurate – we submit that this is due to the complexity of the current system!

Introduction 

The convoluted routes into the professions mean that individuals have to make a decision and commit at an early stage and cannot transfer easily between routes. 

This decreases their chances of achieving what they are hoping for and can create unrealistic expectations. For example, an individual may say they want to be a barrister but actually work experience in a law firm or in house legal department shows they are more suited to a solicitor role. 

However, when someone has committed to achieve one role and also invested the time and money to do so, the “consistency principle” (Robert Cialdini’s influence Science and Practice) kicks in, which essentially says that humans have an inbuilt desire and drive to be (and appear to be) consistent – so if we say we want to be a barrister, we then feel internal pressure to achieve that. 

This means that those that don’t achieve the desired outcome become demotivated and dissatisfied. As can be seen from the example below, these feelings can continue into practice, even if ultimately individuals do achieve their goal, and can contribute to an unhappy work environment.  

Self determination theory (originally developed by Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci in 1985 and applied by them to the workplace in 2000) says that individuals need three core things to feel psychologically safe in the workplace. These are summarised as the ABC of wellbeing:

•  Autonomy

Individuals need freedom to be autonomous and make independent decisions. This gives them a sense of control; they feel trusted and respected. This impacts upon wellbeing through increasing a sense of self-worth and motivation. It also creates open and honest communication, freedom to learn from mistakes, and supports development of competence. 

•  Belonging

When people feel they belong, in an environment such as work, this again supports motivation, the building of strong relationships and healthy dynamics. Again, a sense of belonging contributes significantly to wellbeing, as well as increased productivity.

•  Competence

Feeling competent significantly impacts an individual’s confidence and self-worth and this is even more relevant in professional and regulated environments. Individuals have a better sense of responsibility, commitment to tasks and resilience

The effects of these were examined by Lucinda Soon and others in 2021 in the International Journal of the Legal Profession. 

The problems 

 As a legal educator, Ann Thanaraj shares some thoughts about student’s aspirations in studying law degrees: 

During my time in teaching undergraduate law students, I found a theme emerging around students’ aspirations to enter the legal profession. In the first year of the law degree, students were so sure about wanting to become a lawyer, perhaps not yet whether it would be a career as a solicitor or a barrister, but they were sure that they were going to work hard and become a lawyer, in the area of criminal law. That was 95% of the students I have seen over the past eleven years as a law academic. As they progress into the second year, I come across something a little alarming. Many, who so loved the aspiration to become a lawyer, and that too a criminal lawyer, become unsure, being questioning around the possibilities and opportunities to actually train as a lawyer. 

This is borne out historically by Melissa Hardee’s work on Career expectations of students on Qualifying Law Degrees in England and Wales | Advance HE

As an academic this is a concern to hear as preparation to enter the legal profession starts as early as in the first year, ensuring a strong CV developed containing a wide variety of law and non-law work experiences, that cater towards a holistic and interdisciplinary mind and skillset that are so much in demand. Typically, it is also in a students’ second year that vacation placements and training contracts are applied for. 

What, in fact, is happening is that students are exploring, with the support of their academics, how else they might be able to use their law degrees, exploring new and different career options where the aptitude of a law graduate is seen as a distinguishing factor in a competitive market. The hundreds of conversations I have had with second year law students to explore the ‘what else’ always makes me think how important it is that interdisciplinarity – both in learning the law and in undertaking practical experiences outside of the law – are vital. 

Students are keen to be employed as soon as possible, and the lack of inclusivity within law firms, especially for students from outside a ‘select’ group of universities, puts them off seeking opportunities in the profession. Students embark on a variety of initiatives to determine what to do upon graduation during their second year. In the third year, most who have set their sights on becoming a lawyer have an excellent CV to showcase, some have already lined up training contracts, qualifying work experience and other legal work, most have been interning for over twelve months at that point, and are excited to see what the future holds in the legal profession for them. Those who were never sure, typically explore routes into management, teaching, third sector charities and entrepreneurship. 

Jonathan Bourne shares his expertise on the legal apprenticeship pathways and some of the frustrations: 

Since the mid 2010s, the academic and  work-based routes into the legal profession(s) have been joined by several legal apprenticeships. Apprenticeship routes into the Law are not new (in fact, previous iterations predated the so-called “traditional” routes), but government funding support for apprenticeships has widened the range of employers offering training for new and existing staff. They also allow candidates to progress without the additional pressure of self-funding their studies (often on top of existing student debt) or having to study in evening and weekends alongside a full time job.

However, apprenticeship routes remain overwhelmingly tied to traditional pathways and there is little flexibility if a student needs to change direction. Apprentices who start on the Chartered Legal Executive or Solicitor programmes (both of which can require 5-6 years’ of study) cannot change professional pathway part-way through. Ditto for the barrister pathway (under development), the costs lawyer apprenticeship, or for the legal technician, licensed conveyancer or licensed probate practitioner apprenticeships (tied to the CLC conveyancing and probate technician routes). This, despite the fact that core competencies for lawyers overlap significantly, regardless of professional body or branch of the legal profession.

Some progress has been made. The paralegal apprenticeship can be used as a stepping stone for progression to shorter-form versions of the solicitor or Chartered Legal Executive apprenticeships, and shorter solicitor programmes are also available for  paralegals (including law and non-law graduates). The advanced paralegal apprenticeship (in development) is likely to permit specialisation in, say, costs, conveyancing or probate, as well as other areas of law and so will increase choice and flexibility for employers and students alike. But there is no current prospect of a “professional lawyer” apprenticeship at level 6 or level 7 (that focuses on competence, without being formally “tied” to a professional body or title), despite the fact that solicitors and CILEX lawyers do almost identical work and have much of the same underpinning knowledge as barristers.  

 Michaela Hardwick shares her experience from working in and advising many law firms and barristers chambers for over 25 years of the ongoing impact of the (probably unintended) consequences of these routes into the professions:  

This battle to get into the professions but perhaps not at the level they wished, or taking significantly longer than hoped, no doubt feeds into the so called ‘toxic’ cultures within the legal professions as individuals feel dissatisfied and feel they: 

•  don’t have control of their own career; 
•  are not valued or wanted by the professions; and
•  are not good enough to undertake the role they aspire to. 

The exact opposite of the ABC of wellbeing, we mention in the introduction. 

This is reflected to some extent in my own career. Unlike some, I never had a burning desire to be a solicitor, but I did work hard to achieve it, once I’d decided that’s what I would do. This involved working (more than) full time and studying part time over a ten-year period. My hard work and dedication, including 6-day weeks and 10–12-hour days, secured me a training contract at a top national firm. Despite working for the firm for 3 years by that stage, I competed through the firm’s training contract recruitment assessment alongside the other candidates and was successful. I was then repeatedly told how lucky I was to have secured a training contract at that firm given that I had not attended a ‘red brick’ university. 

I continued to work long hours and a few years later, got ill and had to take some time off work. Whilst it was a physical illness, with hindsight, I have no doubt that there was an element of burn out. I returned to work but (at that stage) did not have a medical diagnosis so full recovery was unpredictable. My then boss told me “You are no good to us until you are well.”

Nevertheless, I continued working in or close to practice for another 5 years after that but eventually realised that I was not enjoying working in private practice and that my hard work was not recognised or valued. I left practice and worked away from law for a short time but got drawn back to compliance work and set up my own business. I now enjoy the benefits of working alongside and not in practice and in terms of the ABC, this gives me: 

•  control of my own business; 
•  I only work with organisations or people who value what I do; and 
•  I am confident in my own competence. 

My story is not unusual and many individuals have an unusual or convoluted route to or career in the legal profession and often these routes are scarred with bad experiences, unnecessary challenges and toxic work environments. I speak to and hear stories from so very many talented individuals who have battled to get to into the profession only to become quickly disillusioned by the toxicity of the environments in which they work. These people may leave the profession or spend longer than needed in finding that their niche is perhaps in a slightly different area to the traditional role they trained for. 

Summary 

Technology and changing client expectations mean that employers are increasingly seeking diverse and multi-disciplinary, multi-talented individuals. We would argue that the complexity and rigidity of the current legal  qualifications system is no longer fit for purpose. It does not support employer or client needs as it should. Nor does it do as much as it could to support the many talented individuals, of all ages and backgrounds, who are battling to gain access to the legal professions. This is despite the best efforts of many committed employers and education providers who have built excellent programmes, but ones which can only ever be as good as the system allows. 

As a group, we have committed to advocating for more flexible and accessible ways into the legal profession, ways that ensure that quality is maintained but where access is truly equitable and meets the needs of talented future lawyers and their employers. 

We don’t have the perfect solution but are committed to playing our part. We would be delighted to hear from anyone who shares our commitment or has ideas on how we can achieve a more flexible versatile future for training for the legal profession of the future.