The Return of Legal Apprenticeships
Following the report of the LSUC task force on articling, there has been a lot of discussion in Ontario about how entry to the legal profession will look in the future.
This is a hot topic in the UK too, but for a different reason.
Deregulation brought about by the UK Legal Services Act is reshaping entry to the legal profession there. More school leavers are now opting to enter the profession via the apprenticship route rather than through law degrees. School leavers can join firms as litigation executives and train to become lawyers on-the-job via the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives.
Instead of saddling themselves with student debt while they take a degree, they earn salaries. At the end of the four year programme, once trained as legal executives , they have the opportunity to take a conversion course and qualify as solicitors.
The UK government recently announced funding to create 750 higher legal apprenticeships. It intends to to make further investments to support an annual flow of legal apprentices. According to the Guardian newspaper, “If this first phase of the scheme is a hit, the legal profession could be on the brink of a major change to the way it recruits its young.”
Not that there’s anything new about legal apprenticeships in the UK or in Ontario. At least one lawyer at the firm I articled at in Toronto in 1986 did not have a law degree because he had qualified through an apprenticeship.
I am not aware if the return of apprenticeships has been broached in Ontario as a possible solution to skyrocketing law school tuition fees, declining articling positions or the need to widen access to the legal profession. Perhaps the developments in the UK will add steam to a move in that direction here.
Great plan. Not only will you be debt-free, but you will have actual on-the-job training.
If there are insufficient vacancies for articling students, where are the job opportunities for legal apprentices without a law degree going to come from? Does the UK now have a system of (relatively) low paid legal assistants equivalent to our articling? Or will the new class of ‘legal executives’ (a horrible title) fill a new niche of that kind?
When legal competence was acquired by apprenticeship in Ontario, in the days before everybody went to law school then to articles and Bar Admission course, the apprentices had half-days of classes as well as practical experience. Is there any indication that the ‘legal executives’ contemplated in the UK will get formal instruction outside their law offices, or will the law offices be expected to make that up as they go along? In that case it would seem more efficient for them to pool their resources into a common classroom with a common curriculum, which produces a kind of practice-oriented but possibly cut-rate legal education. Sounds a bit like what Ontario abandoned (with a fight) in the late 40s and early 50s of the last century.
I’m only sorry this wasn’t available back in the mid-1980’s when, as a 30-something assistant/clerk (without “the piece of paper”) and fairly new to Canada, I probably had almost as much ability and interest as the lawyer I worked with. He suggested I go to law school but without an undergraduate degree and with a child in daycare, how could I have afforded that route? There are many good legal assistants who might like to advance, when they decide the law is the career for them. Unfortunately, too late for me but a wonderful idea and I applaud it.