Guest blog by Gordon Davies
A little bit about me
I’m 59. Most folk are pondering at my age ‘Is now the right time to release my pension and retire to sun?’
For me it was ‘well, Baroness Hale didn’t retire until she was 75, so that gives me about 16 years at this game’, which in today’s culture it’s almost a standard career term.
‘career’… Hmm, well that needs qualifying.
Career usually means an economic endeavour where you think you’ll fit in and capitalise on your skills. For me it was different. I’d had my economic career by the time I was 50 having been a director of one of Europe’s largest car parts companies.
Way back, early 80’s, I started out as a Commercial Apprentice at British Aerospace. Luckily, they sent me off (all expenses paid) to Cranfield University for three years to do a logistics degree after my ‘A’ Levels. I progressed through the aero industry and onto automotive. By most standards on reflection, I probably could claim to have done quite well from a traditionally fashioned lifetime of work.
At 50 I could have carried on with my economic career but wanted to do ‘that thing!’ Many ideological entrants into the legal fraternity aspire to ‘make a difference’ and for me that was no different. That lofty goal often treads the well recognised pathway of Enthusiasm, Practice, Doubt, Disillusion, Retreat. Apparently 35% of police officers cite this (in precis) during their termination interviews.
But me, oh no, having just qualified I’m resolutely still in the enthusiasm phase.
How I got to be a solicitor – not the traditional route
The areas of public life that I wish to engage in with a ‘helping hand’ are not really relevant to the story. However, the restrictions and obstacles that I had to overcome, are. Reading about them, maybe of some value to others currently navigating their way through the academic or vocational stage.
This is not your typical recital of ‘how I got to be a solicitor’. It might help you with your personal pathway decision process or it might just be of interest. Hopefully it wont be 10 minutes of your life that you’ll never get back.
So there were three overriding imperatives for me in choosing how to get qualified.
- My age – time is not on my side
- I needed to spend as much of my training / vocational time on relevant matters. This remains a legacy of factor one and my desire to engage in the public square on culture and policy
- Credibility
Credibility
Taking the latter first, credibility. I have to hope that readers are sophisticated enough to realise this is only one person’s worldview. Other law students and newly qualified may take an entirely different perspective on value judgements and I respect that.
No one should have a monopoly on the public square. That said, hopefully my story will be received as just one contribution, not a matter for necessary admonishment or cancellation. That caveat out of the way, by credibility I’m referring to the option I had of qualifying. Either through the traditional law degree/LPC route or via the SQE.
I read up a lot on the pros and cons of each qualification route and despite costing around £10k more to pursue the traditional route, I chose that more expensive path.
There had been, at the time, so much professional push back from employers and interest groups to the SQE. Rightly or wrongly it was deemed as a dumbing down of the profession for ideological reasons. I couldn’t risk being perceived by practitioners, clients and the general public as ‘that other type of solicitor.’
My view of the SQE
My view of the SQE is that it was forced through for all of the wrong reasons. For me merit is all that counts, not identity politics. I’ve not seen the syllabus of any of the SQE training providers. It might be just as good as a law degree and LPC. Centralised testing is a good thing for consistent assessment of standards despite the selective research advocated by the proponents of the SQE.
That said, I cannot reconcile the testing methods as being comparable to the time proven system of the Law degree / LPC. One thing is for sure, what the SRA has fashioned is a memory test instead of a critical analysis legal test. That I suggest has to change. The concession that allows you to complete your vocational training with up to four providers, without the requirement for it to be paid employment, is indeed a positive development.
My chosen course
So back to the imperatives – the first, time not being on my side. I resolved to do an online MA Law degree through ULaw which would only take 11 months. The prospectus advised prospective students to set aside at least 45 hours per week for study. I had to put in at least 60 hours a week to get through the volume of work, tests, assignments and exams. Out of 25 students on my intake only 7 passed. That means passed all the exams first time round with no resits. Fortunately, I was one of the 7.
When the SRA used to publish training provider success rates, there never was enough information to make an informed decision on who best to study with.
- Did the provider’s success statistics include all those who eventually passed the course regardless of resits?
- Did the baseline start from the point of examination or from enrolment
- Did it include concessions etc?
I can at least say from my course, the pass rate was 28%. The LPC, which again, I did by means of a ULaw online 11 month course had only a marginally better achievement level.
Burn Out
Towards the end of each course, regularly I’d be the only student submitting assignments on time and attending virtual classrooms, such was the burn out. I remember two fellow student personal requests for advice which struck me. Both requests were on the lines of ‘how could I stay on top of the workload’.
- The first came to me from a lady who had recently given birth. She said that the maternity leave would be a great time to fit in the 11 month course but then found that the baby wasn’t ‘co-operating’ with her planned schedule. Now I’m no paediatrician, less so a woman but think I could have foreseen that lack of kindly cooperation.
- The second was a chap who simply could not keep up because of his full time job. I couldn’t offer him any hope.
When the prospectus said a minimum 45 hours a week commitment, that should have sunk in. I guess in too many student cases they think that their mates who went to a physical university for 3 years, with tales of eventually bumbling through the course also applied to an MA Law degree. This, to the contrary, has more content than an LLB, a stricter grading system and a significant research project to complete.
Benefits of online study
The number one advice for anyone thinking of cramming in a law programme in one-year is:
Don’t get behind!
You simply can’t catch up if you lose a week. Study hard from day 1 release of materials and try get ahead. Inevitably over 11 months something will disrupt your study, a personal or family illness or other critical issue. Hit the road hard with 60 hours a week from day 1 and don’t let up. That necessitated hiatus will come, and you need that sleeve in the bank.
One of the reasons I chose online as opposed to physical attendance was threefold in advantage.
- Travel time -Travel time to college would have been a wasted resource given the 45-hour minimum study commitment for both the degree and LPC.
- Control the tempo – In group physical sessions, failing to grasp a lecture point can lead to wasted time for the remainder of the session. By studying online at your own pace, you can control the tempo and optimize your limited time.
- Online research – I found that I didn’t understand or was not clear on at least one third of all the teaching materials, not least because of impenetrable terminology. So I had to do a significant amount of online research outside of the course materials to properly understand concepts.
One problem
The facility of asking your allocated online tutor for clarification on a matter of materials taught was ineffective. The response time, along with the lack of interaction i.e. questioning the answer given and finally frankly because most often your tutor did not fully grasp the question that you were posing anyway.
It’s not to say that the lecturer did not understand their remit, more a point about when you don’t understand something, you don’t know how to explain what you don’t understand – catch 22. I remember spending a week just trying to work out the difference between Issuing and Serving. Either the lecturers couldn’t see the wood from the trees or they didn’t fully grasp the differences themselves.
So I’d got myself a law degree – What now?
So I’d got myself a law degree and LPC. Now came the tricky part. Ordinarily as a twenty something year old I’d write a hundred letters to high street Practices enquiring about training contracts. If I felt ambitious or more aptly, well connected, I’d apply to one of the Magic Circle firms.
Neither option suited my purpose for engaging with law. I didn’t want to spend two years in seats of conveyancing or immigration or personal injury etc. As I said earlier my engaging in law at the outset was a vocation with specific goals to practice in public law. Therefore, the route I settled on was to register with CILEX. A law degree holder with an LPC can qualify straight in with CILEX as what they call an Advanced Paralegal. From there, you need in a nutshell two years vocational training and you can then apply to be a Fellow (Chartered Legal Executive). A CLE with an LPC is a straight code swop under SRA rules to admission as a solicitor.
The key differences between the CILEX vocational route and SRA period of recognised training is under the PRT:
- You need to be paid and;
- Must serve nominally 37 hours a week under an employment contract.
It was disappointing to learn under the new SQE regime that a law graduate with an LPC cannot take advantage of the SQE relaxed rules. Those rules were – being on seats with no need for a salary as part of the vocational stage. I could not construct my own vocational deployment path as an employee under an employment contract, then the CILEX route was the only one open to me. Given how hard it is to find training contracts in the first place, it simply would not have been possible for me to approach prospective employers demanding that they took me on, on my terms of legal interest.
The CILEX Vocational Route
The CILEX vocational route as stated does not demand a paid salary over the two years and does not require four seats. Instead you have to prepare a portfolio of evidence meeting experience thresholds and defined competency standards. This in itself is a mountain to demonstrate. My portfolio ran to 450 pages of evidence and it was strictly audited. The bar for approval is set high and the time it took me to simply chronicle the portfolio evidence was over 240 hours.
Thus I needed to find an organisation or legally qualified individual who would accept me as their CILEX student for two years. This would be post academic stage, so was no easy feat. Nonetheless made much easier by the removal of need to be paid whilst training. I tried hard to persuade key organisations and practitioner ‘activists’ to take me under their wing as my supervisor.
Eventually, I found the perfect partner and spent two years engaged in pubic, defamation and related employment law. These were very specific assignments all connected with particular advocacy in what might be described as matters of contemporary debate and culture.
How does the story end?
Following my Portfolio approval, I immediately applied to the SRA for admission. True to my appreciation of the rule book, admission was granted on August 10th 2023.
The story ends there? Well, not quite. There would be little point now trying to find a job as an NQ. This would negate the last four years specifically avoiding working for a high street practice.
Final Hurdle
The final hurdle was choosing how to practice. The two options were:
- As a Recognised Sole Practitioner
- Search for a post three year qualified lawyer who would come in with me to form our own law firm (Authorised Body).
Even as an RSP, you need a minimum three year PQ lawyer to align with as your ongoing advising supervisor. With this in mind, the logical choice was to see if I could forge a partnership with a willing established lawyer, to set up our own standalone law firm. Fortunately through my vocational network experience I found an ideal lawyer who was ready for such a collaboration and consequently an application was sent to the SRA as I write this.
In summary, on looking back on nearly five years of planning and execution, my journey is quite unusual. As I said at the outset perhaps most people at my age would be winding down their legal career not starting out on it.
I also said that Baroness Hale was still making waves at 75 years of age in the Supreme Court. For sure, I’ve left it too late for such heady aspirations. That said, in 16 years I might manage to gain a citation or two in Lexus as having indeed ‘made a difference’.
