"What is the Cheapest way to get into law?"
Entering the legal profession is without doubt one of the
most expensive career options apart from becoming an airline pilot. It involves
investing thousands of pounds in education that may or may not lead to a
position at the end of the road.
Unfortunately there is no simple answer to which is the
cheapest way to get in because there are all sorts of implications as to the
different paths you choose to go down.
The Legal Executive route is the cheapest option. Quite a
few people go down this particular route following on from an undergraduate
degree, whether law or otherwise, or straight out of school. The Legal
Executive route in terms of monetary cost is considerably cheaper than the
Graduate Diploma in Law/LLB degree and the Legal Practice Course (the solicitor
route).
We did a bit of research and the current cost in 2013 to
complete both parts of the Legal Executive training (Part 3 and Part 6) is
about £6,500 (course fees, exam fees etc..) The current cost of the Legal
Practice Course at the University of Law is £11,000-£13,000. If you combine the
Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) and the Legal Practice Court (LPC) the overall
cost is about £18,000-£20,000.
If you combine the Legal Practice Course with the cost of
completing a law degree then the usual overall price is around £25,000 to
£30,000, which is gradually creeping up to around the £40,000 mark as law
schools start to capitalise on the willingness and ability of potential lawyers
to pay.
In the past people have been down the vocational course
route or alternatively the New York Attorney route, but these are options that
are now in the past because, as we understand it, the Law Society still require
you to complete the LPC and a training contract or training contract
equivalent, which makes it senseless to plan to do either of these two in order
to become a lawyer.
So if you look at the different options, the cheapest one by
far is the route through the Institute of Legal Executives and becoming a
chartered legal executive before then either moving on to being a solicitor
simply remaining a legal executive.
The various borders between all the different types of
lawyer (legal executive, paralegal, solicitor and Barrister) are becoming
distinctly blurred. Solicitors can now do work that was exclusively reserved
for barristers. Barristers can see clients directly. Legal executives can gain
the Rights of Audience that solicitors and barristers previously exclusively
enjoyed. Legal Executives can now become partners of law firms and so can
barristers. Solicitors can practice as Advocates without ever needing to take
instructions from clients themselves.
However one thing remains very clear and that is that in the
minds of lawyers themselves there is still a hierarchy in terms of both fee
income and status.
At the bottom of the pile is a paralegal and this is very unlikely
to change for a good few years yet simply because paralegals have no rights at
all in terms of advocacy, and similarly cannot practice on their own without
another type of lawyer being with them.
Second in the pile are Legal Executives who are starting to
enjoy more status in recent times but similarly hold lesser standing in the
legal profession as a whole than solicitors and barristers. It is partly
because of the old-fashioned view that most people who have become legal
executives are former secretaries trying to work their way up. this is still
very much the case for some people and perfectly understandable as a very easy
way in.
After all, being a solicitor requires you to do quite a bit
of academic study at some point or other whereas becoming a legal executive is
mostly something you can do on the job with a few evenings a week at night
school or weekends at doing distance learning spread over a considerable length
of time.
Second from the top are solicitors. Make no mistake, in the
legal professional solicitors are definitely considered second rate by just
about everyone including themselves, even when they are commercial lawyers
earning considerable sums of money and more than the Barristers they instruct.
Solicitors are seen more as wheeler-dealers and go-getters than actual lawyers,
and the profession itself over time has determined effectively that solicitors
are the monkeys to barristers' organ grinders.
At the top of the pile are the barristers. The vast majority
of barristers I suspect would class themselves as upper class. They are often
very sharp, extremely intelligent, usually residing in exclusive villages or
streets reserved for premier league footballers, doctors and senior businessmen
and with cars to match.
Barristers see solicitors as a necessary evil as
traditionally the solicitors obtain clients for the barristers and the
barristers did their best for them even though they usually have not met the
client before the date of their first hearing and have absolutely no interest
at all in their welfare or personal situation.
Barristers are pure law at the end of the day and are not
interested (quite understandably) in their clients' welfare or wellbeing.
These are traditional views on the legal profession and the
way it is structured. How you choose to interpret the above article is a matter
for yourself, but it is based on my own experiences in law, whether as a lay
person undertaking cases myself or as a qualified solicitor working with
barristers and other solicitors.
The reason I put this level of detail into this article is
to show you that if you decide to go in the cheapest way into the legal
profession there is always a catch, and at the moment the catch is that your
status for the remainder of your time in the profession will be diminished by
the decision you have made now.
Once a legal executive always a legal executive. The lawyers
recruiting you at the moment are usually "pure" solicitors. They will
hold your status as a legal executive against you and probably for the
remainder of your career. Your salary will often be affected as solicitors
traditionally believe that legal executives are worth less money than qualified
solicitors. I would estimate that over the time of your career remaining you
will lose around £5,000 to £10,000 per year at the very least through your
decision to go down the Legal Executives route, at least up until you have been
in a solicitors job for 5 years min.
Furthermore, certain doors will be shut to you from then
start. If you qualify as a legal executive you very often have to qualify into
an area where legal executives are used and practice. This invariably means
debt recovery, some types of employment - usually contentious, crime, family,
conveyancing, wills and probate and sometimes commercial property. Whilst some
of these are not known to be too bad in the long term - commercial property and
wills and probate are not too badly paid at the moment - it does mean that the
majority of commercial law for example is going to be outside your remit.
It is very difficult to move from one field to another once
you have specialised in one particular area of law. So for example if you
qualify as a legal executive undertaking crime work and have 5 years'
experience you cannot then use your legal executive status (or indeed your
solicitor status) to move across and practice in corporate finance.
If you are an able student or graduate with excellent grades
then you should almost always make an effort to go down the solicitor or
barrister route. Going down the solicitor route is not as expensive as people
think it is.
For example you do not need to pay the College of Law or BPP
to do the Legal Practice Course or the Graduate Diploma in Law. There are far
cheaper alternatives and regardless of what the more elite institutions tell
you, the vast majority of law firms don't care two hoots where you do your LPC
because most qualified lawyers view these courses as burning hoops to jump
through in order to qualify than any sign of your ability.
Employers are always interested in your undergraduate
degree. For the rest of your career. Forever!
They are also interested in your A level grades. Forever!
This plus your A- Level grades will determine whether you
are a student or graduate with excellent academics. If you have straight A's at
A Level or AAB or possibly ABB then you will be an excellent student to come
into law.
If you have a 2:1 Degree in anything other than pop music or
country dancing (my first degree was pop music), then you stand a very good
chance of training and becoming a qualified solicitor.
If you have less than this then your life as a lawyer will
be considerably harder to start out with. The Legal profession do not view 2:2
degrees as being something that entitles you to practice as a lawyer. It will
go against you for the remainder of your career and there is no way round it. I
suspect that if you are sat there reading this with a 2:2 degree you have been
badly misinformed by anyone who has told you to go into the legal profession.
It is not impossible - I have trained and coached many students and graduates
who have 2:2 degrees (sometimes even a 3rd) and they have gone onto enjoy
rewarding careers as lawyers in some capacity. However, their road into law has
been considerably harder as a result of their inability to obtain a 2:1 degree.
So getting back to my statement that if you have excellent
academics you should always consider becoming a solicitor so as not to damage
your career in the long term by going down the Legal Executive route.
If you do not have excellent academics then you should
always consider alternative options and one of these will be to go down the
legal executive route.
However I would not recommend paying to undertake a legal
executive course until you have legal work experience, you are able to use in
the longer term to secure yourself a good legal career.
By this I mean that if you are a student or graduate you
should definitely not go straight along to the Institute of Legal Executives
and sign up for any legal executive course. If you are going down a
non-conventional route into law then academic study once you have completed an
undergraduate degree or your A-Levels is completely immaterial. Experience is
what matters and nothing else will do. Legal work experience is the key to
gaining a successful start into law.
You cannot skip this, circumvent or navigate round it as so
many people try every year.
This is why academic institutions have been bought out by
overseas companies looking to make a quick buck.
There are a lot of people out there undertaking postgraduate
and undergraduate courses with no hope at all of ever finding a job in the
profession they are going into.
Furthermore, there are lots of people out there who have the
academic qualifications but lack any work experience or activities or interests
who similarly are very unlikely to ever get ahead in law or get through the
easy way.
No careers adviser will give you this advice, but the main
thing to do to get into law is to get experience, more experience and even more
experience. This may cost money in itself, and you may say that I have my fees
to pay and I have to live. This gets me to my point that if you want to invest
in your career then spending money on academic qualifications is not the way to
go. Getting experience is and this in itself will cost you money.
To give you a quick example, as I write this a vacancy has
come in from one of our central London law firms. They are looking for a fee
earner to go and assist for a month or two with a load of admin work. They will
pay well for this, and it is a job probably most suited for an LPC graduate.
I have one in mind.
It is not an LPC graduate with a 2:1 law degree or good A
levels. It is not an LPC graduate with an LLM from a good university or some
sort of summer school academic qualification. It is an LPC graduate with
similar experience to that the firm are seeking.
The firm will not give two hoots what the LPC graduate has
in terms of additional qualifications but they will study the LPC graduate's
work experience to date to decide whether or not to take them on for this
particular role.
It is so important to understand this that when somebody
says what is the cheapest way into law that there is no easy answer. You cannot
just take a decision now that will affect the rest of your career simply on the
basis that it may cost one or two thousand pounds more to go one way into the
legal profession rather than another.
You will notice that so far I have not mentioned anything
about barristers. This is because in my experience training to be a barrister
is almost always a complete waste of your money and time. You would probably be
shocked to hear this and perhaps put it down to my natural bias against
barristers having been a solicitor myself. I would grudgingly accept that
probably I am a little biased against barristers having run around courts for
them, I've dealt with some pretty awful ones over the years (as well as some
absolutely fantastic ones) but the barristers' strand of the profession is
pretty much tied up and it is very important to understand this.
The word nepotism could almost have been invented for this
part of the profession. Let me give you an example.
Back many years ago when I had just qualified as a solicitor
our practice used a local chambers which had a very good reputation in the area
and was probably the top set of barristers by a considerable distance. I cannot
remember any of their barristers being unsuited or incompetent and most being
incredibly talented advocates.
At some stage in my first year after training I remember
that they advertised for two pupil barristers to join them. There were a considerable
number of applications, as you would expect because this was a top quality set
of chambers, outstanding reputation with quality work coming in, in an area
where there are not many barristers' chambers.
I do not know how the recruitment process occurred but I do
know that the two pupils selected were children of one of the senior barristers
in chambers and one of the more junior barristers. I am afraid that the
barristers' profession can talk about diversity and equal opportunity to their
hearts content but when recruitment like this occurs in a chambers of that size
it is completely irrelevant.
It is always going to be the case that if chambers at that
level recruit their own then anyone else will either have to set up rival
chambers or alternatively work for a lesser standard of chambers.
It may be that the two children of the barristers already in
practice were the best suited for the role, and I am sure they went on to be
absolutely outstanding barristers but the point is these two people gained their
pupillages with chambers to which they were already affiliated through their
parents.
Without any sort or recruitment process that eliminates this
(and after all why should it - I would have done exactly the same myself as a
barrister if my children wanted to practice as barristers!) then this is not a
strand of the profession to go into unless you have family or extremely good
friends who are able to assist you in your search or pupillage.
The vast majority of people who complete the Bar Professional
Training Course do not end up as barristers. They end up working as paralegals
or non-qualified lawyers with a views to taking the Legal Practice Course at a
future point in their career, costing even more money.
This is a false economy because the cost of completing the
Bar Professional Training Course and the Legal Practice Course is verging on
the ridiculous for the returns that you will get at a later stage in your
career.
So in summary I recommend anyone coming into the profession
to do one of two things.
1. If you have excellent academics and the ability to add
legal work experience to your CV to bolster this then go and try and qualify as
a solicitor. Do not go down any other route.
2. If you do not have excellent academics do not go down the
route of qualifying to be a solicitor. You can go and get work experience and
prove me wrong (and I hope you do) but you would be better suited to a life as
a legal executive with a view to cross-qualifying at a later stage by competing
the Legal Practice Course or simply being happy doing what you are doing as a
legal executive.
Always think - why are you going into law? What do you want
to get out of it? How much will you need to earn in order to get what you want
out of life?
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