Practice relevant legal education: lessons from the evolving 'City' Legal Practice Course

The past ten years has seen important changes in the Legal Practice Course (LPC), with the entrance of new providers and the development of ‘bespoke’ versions of the generic LPC for City firms and, more recently, for individual firms. Here, James Faulconbridge, Andrew Cook and Daniel Muzio draw on insights gained from an Economic and Social Research Council funded project which explored both the role of the LPC and firm-based training in developing the competencies of new recruits to the legal profession. They consider what can be learned from the approaches taken in these bespoke LPC courses, and consider some of the implications arising from such developments.

This article draws on the research project Professional education, professional service firms and cultures of work.

Dr James Faulconbridge is a Lecturer in Human Geography, and Dr Andrew Cook a Research Assistant at Lancaster University. Dr Daniel Muzio is Senior Lecturer in Employment Relations at Leeds University Business School.

Since 2001, LPC courses tailored to the needs of City firms generally and most recently to the specific needs of individual city firms such as Clifford Chance or Allen & Overy have been developed, notably by BPP and the College of Law. Programmes are tailored in four main ways:

• Content – Firms have been able to decide on the way compulsory elements of the course are taught and, most importantly, the choice and content of electives available to their recruits. This has meant replacing non-City relevant options such as family law with specialist options such as business law or capital markets as well as developing new forms of skills-based training.
• Precedents and standard forms. – Firms provide their own precedents and standard forms to the training providers to be used throughout the different LPC modules. This helps students to familiarise themselves with their employer’s systems and processes and to develop the necessary practical skills for dealing with the basic day-to-day tasks they will be expected to complete during their traineeship.
• The simulated office. – One technique developed by certain providers is the simulated office whereby LPC students are provided office space by their sponsoring firm and complete a variety of tasks in simulated but realistic situations. Simulations involve, for example, fielding telephone calls and emails from fake clients and conducting face-to-face interviews with partners or actors playing clients in order to gain a realistic semblance of life as a lawyer. The aim is to make the LPC course part of the process of learning to work as a lawyer in the firm, not just learning to be a lawyer in the abstract context of the legal profession in general.
• Meeting the students – socialisation. – Throughout the tailored LPC programmes many firms involve partners and senior associates either through formal presentations, or through social events. Such involvement further allows trainees to learn about the realities of work from a practising lawyer who will soon become a colleague. Moreover, completing training with their future colleagues is thought to help recruits to develop a series of working relationships which will be useful throughout their training contract.

Implications

The aim of the LPC according to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) (2004) is “to prepare students for practice… to provide a general foundation for subsequent practice”. Our research suggests that, from the perspective of City firms, the aim of the LPC is more likely to be met thanks to the opportunities offered by tailoring, although there is still some way to go to make the course completely suited to the realities of City practice. One interviewee described the situation as follows: from a City firms’ perspective, originally the LPC got people to about 1.5 out of 10 in terms of understanding; the City LPC increased this to 4 or 4.5; firm-tailored LPCs get people to 5.5 but more radical changes, relating to content particularly, would be needed to get anywhere close to 10.

This was mirrored in junior lawyers’ descriptions of their experience of the LPC. In summary:

• Those having completed an ‘off the shelf’ LPC before the development of the City and firm-tailored programmes suggested some of the generic skills were useful but the broad range of the content and the lack of focus on City related specialisms and skills was problematic.
• Those having completed a firm-tailored programme noted the benefits in terms of developing an understanding of what it means to ‘do law’ in the firm they were heading for. This was both in terms of how to do law in a pragmatic sense – the kinds of standard forms that will be encountered – and in a cultural sense – the way they would be expected to approach legal issues and deliver advice to clients.

Our research thus emphasises , from the perspective of large firms and their trainees, that in order for the LPC and legal education more generally to be relevant to the realities of work as a lawyer it is essential that courses are tailored more to the realities of legal practice in the ‘real world’. This raises a number of questions that we do not seek to answer here but we suggest deserve further research:

• Should all LPC courses be tailored to the realities of work in a particular type of law firm? Should courses be available that reflect the diverse array of practice settings in England and Wales, from high street, through small-medium firm corporate practice to City practice?
• Should the Graduate Diploma in Law, which is already available in a ‘City’ orientated format, be similarly available in bespoke forms?
• Should law degrees do more to deal with compulsory content through an ‘applied’ approach, perhaps using material and scenarios provided by firms? Could mandated parts of qualifying law degrees be developed in partnership with firms and involve the active contributions of lawyers?

Some reflections

Of course, we must be aware of the risks associated with tailored and ‘applied’ approaches to legal education and in particular of the danger of producing solicitors who only understand the realities of legal practice in a limited context. It is important to maintain the transferability of the LPC and GDL whilst also making it as relevant as possible to life in the legal profession. A balance has to be struck, and further research about how to maintain this balance seems essential.Furthermore, questions still have to be answered about the importance of all lawyers, as members of the legal profession, sharing a common training experience and developing allegiance to a common set of values and ideals, and the role of training in this. Can tailored courses maintain such an esprit de corps or is this feature of traditional legal professionalism likely to be lost? (And would its loss really matter in light of the changing role of professions in society?) We suggest there is much more work to do to get to grips with the challenges of making legal education relevant and appropriate for the 21st century.

References

• Solicitors Regulation Authority (2004) Legal Practice Course: written standards

Last Modified: 9 June 2010