Slug it out over costs
The Sunday Times and a unique university are launching a contest for would-be lawyers to win a dozen scholarships
Isabella Sharpley, pictured with her dog, Doodle, chose to study law because she sees it as a ‘rock solid’ career (BNPS) After working for several law firms during her gap year — “doing everything from helping draft contracts to an awful lot of photocopying” — the 19-year-old made a different choice. “I decided to try to become a lawyer. It seemed realistic and a rock solid career,” she explains.
Today Sharpley is in the second year of a two-year undergraduate degree course at the University of Law. She has also secured a training contract with Dechert, an international law firm, which will pay her fees for the postgraduate law course she needs to complete as the next step in becoming a solicitor. The final step to qualification will be a two-year on-the-job training period with Dechert.
Sharpley was offered a place to study for an undergraduate law degree at several leading universities, including Exeter, Cardiff and Nottingham. She chose the University of Law course — a relatively new degree — because she believes it offers her a better chance of a job in the profession and she plans to stay at the university to complete the postgraduate legal practice course (LPC).
“I like the degree here because it’s a very practical rather than an academic course: you get taught by practising lawyers and quite a few work for the top London firms,” says Sharpley.
It’s a point reiterated by Nigel Savage, the unversity’s chief executive, who says: “My version of a law school is like a medical school: you come here to train to be a lawyer from day one. It’s not like some other universities, which offer a traditional liberal education. In your very first week you do a moot [a mock court case] to give you confidence.”
Today The Sunday Times is teaming up with the University of Law to offer 12 scholarships for its undergraduate law degree courses starting in 2014. (For details of how to enter the competition, see below.) Eleven of the awards are worth £6,000 towards the first-year fee of £9,000, and the twelfth is for the same amount in the second year. They include a work placement with one of six leading law firms: Irwin Mitchell, Linklaters, Macfarlanes, Ogier, White & Case and Clifford Chance. Each is funding one scholarship, with the university paying for the other six. In addition, up to 14 runners-up will win a work experience placement with a law firm.
“We want to find students who can think laterally, think creatively and find solutions to problems. That is the primary motive behind this scheme,” says Savage.
Laura Yeates, graduate recruitment manager at Clifford Chance, which is offering a scholarship and several work placements, says the company is keen to recruit from a wider pool of talent. “This is a non-traditional university and a new degree. A scholarship geared around getting people to demonstrate different types of thinking is very exciting to us,” she says.
In tough economic times, there’s always a rush to professions such as law and medicine as graduates jostle to find a secure, well-paid job. At £39,000, median graduate starting salaries in law are the second-highest across all industry sectors — second only to investment banking.
Savage is bullish about the future of graduates from his university, which has 7,000 students in eight UK centres. Nine out of ten of the full-time LPC students who graduated last year secured work in the legal profession, he says, up from 83% in 2011. “A third of the 2012/13 LPC students are set to earn a minimum of £61,500 upon qualification,” he says.
However, earlier this year Des Hudson, chief executive of the Law Society, warned that thousands of graduates who spent years trying to qualify as solicitors would never secure jobs in the legal profession and would instead end up saddled with thousands of pounds of debt. He said young people were not being warned about the shortage of legal jobs on offer.
“We think there is an oversupply of graduates and that inadequate information is being provided to parents and students,” he said. “Many young people do not understand the risks they face in trying to become a trainee solicitor. After doing a first degree, youngsters are spending £10,000 on postgraduate law courses.
“We estimate 2,000-3,000 people a year are emerging from those courses with no immediate prospect of a training contract with a law firm and becoming a solicitor.”
Beth Williams was a case in point. Despite applying to 10 law firms for a training contract, the 22-year-old said earlier this year that she had been rejected by all of them. Competition was so fierce that some firms were requesting applications even to attend open days.
“We had to fill in an online application for the open day of one Bristol law firm and it was like a job application. Three of us got turned down,” says Williams, who gained a 2:2 in history and architecture from Cardiff University before embarking on a one-year law conversion course.
Nevertheless, Savage insists: “The best students will always have a choice and the other sectors are working hard to sell their professions.” He believes that the University of Law, with its emphasis on learning how to be a lawyer from the very first day and its close links with law firms, has the recipe for success.
“We are trying to establish an alternative route into the legal profession and so far we are doing just fine,” he says.
Chris Kenny, chief executive of the Legal Services Board, the independent body that oversees the regulation of lawyers, says: “There may be a shortage of training contracts but there is no shortage of need. All the research shows that one third of the public and half of small businesses, when they have legal problems, don’t know how to address them and don’t use lawyers. There is a massive unmet demand.”
Win a £6,000 law scholarship and a top work placement
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