The UK Centre for Legal Education is currently accepting entries for its annual essay competition. The winner will receive a Dell Laptop and an invitation to the Higher Education Academy Annual Conference at the University of Hertfordshire in June.
The essay question this year is: How might a legal education enable students to contribute to the improvement of society?
The word limit is 1000 words and the deadline for entries is 12 March 2010.
This is a great opportunity to try out your writing skills and would be an impressive thing to add to your CV to make you stand out from the crowd of other applicants when it comes to applying for vacation schemes and training contracts.
For further details of the competition together with tips on what you could address in your essay, and to read previous winning essays, visit the UKCLE website.
Unless you have been living under a rock in recent times, it will come as no surprise to you that there are definite risks and challenges for those who decide to pursue a legal career.
These have reached such a level that the Law Society’s education and training committee has introduced an information campaign to try and address the gap between the numbers of training contracts being offered by law firms each year and the number of people graduating from the LPC.
Figures from the Solicitors Regulation Authority make for difficult reading for anyone seeking a training contract in the current climate. The figures indicate that 9101 students started the LPC in 2009. In the same year the number of training contracts being offered by firms dropped by 32% to 4320 from 6321 in 2008.
The Law Society is currently considering what action it might be able to take to ease this situation. One idea being floated is that they provide support or incentives to encourage law firms to provide more training contracts. Additionally, they are considering whether they might be able to introduce ways to qualify without having to undertake a training contract.
My view is that the more information out there highlighting the risks of pursuing a legal career can only be a good thing. However, I think this information needs to be clear and perhaps broken down more so as to address where the greater risk lies. For example, I do not see a huge amount of risk in doing a law degree as this is a very valuable qualification to have even if its owner doesn’t go on to pursue a legal career.
The risk, as I see it, is more associated around the LPC which can be expensive and is fairly limited to training students solely for legal practice. If finding a way into legal practice then proves hard, there will be many who become victim of this risk.
Perhaps it is time to re-visit the notion of students having to have secured a training contract before they are permitted to do the LPC. I know this has its critics but surely we need to start a fresh debate on this given there are less than half the number of training contracts available at the moment than there are candidates looking for them.
National law firm, Addleshaw Goddard, is running its Diversity Access Scheme again this year for the fourth year running.
This scheme is aimed at available to anyone who has fallen below their normal training contract recruitment requirements when it comes to A-Level grades but who are able to show they have gone on to prove their academic ability at university.
The firm has a separate application form for these candidates to submit and has gone on to recruit 5 trainee solicitors from the scheme since 2007.
The scheme is run in collaboration with the BPP Law School and is open to BPP students currently studying for their GDL or LPC. Further details on how to apply for the 2010 programme can be found by contacting the BPP careers service.
The closing date for applications for the scheme is 31 January 2010.
The number of applicants accepted onto law courses grew to a new high this year, according to research published by admissions service UCAS.
The total number starting a law course at university or college in September 2009 increased by 1.2% to 18,394, after the figure passed the 18,000 mark for the first time in 2008. In 2007, the number of applicants for undergraduate law degrees rocketed by 33.6% to a new total of 26,539. Acceptances for those places over the same period grew by 31% from 13,499 to 17,702.
For the full story on the Legal Week website click here.
