In September 2007 I was President of the Law Society of England & Wales and called upon to give an anniversary lecture to celebrate 100 years of Halsbury’s Laws of England. My fellow lecturer on this occasion was Geoffrey Voss QC, then Chairman of the Bar Council, now Sir Geoffrey Voss Chancellor of the High Court of Justice and an Appeal Court Judge. An examination of the respective careers of Sir Geoffrey and myself since the both of us retired from office tells its own story. I am looking forward to meeting him again when we speak at the Liverpool Law Society Dinner on the 1st November this year as I found him a very able and also very generous and kind person.
For my speech, I undertook some research into the qualification process for Solicitors through history. The oldest examination paper we could find dated from 1932. The paper was, to say the least, rather general containing questions such as:-
- God made the country, man made the town, but the devil made the suburbs; discuss.
Or –
- Write a correspondence between two exceedingly polite gentlemen each of whom is convinced that the other is trying to swindle him.
Or –
- Write a ghost story which need not be original. (I kid you not.)
No doubt the Law Society then saw their lawyers as men of affairs but how this sorted out the men from the boys I am not quite sure. By the time I qualified in 1970, cramming law schools had become the order of the day. How much legal facts could you cram in and then regurgitate in a very short period of time. The courses were six months long and covered 12 separate modules. A final examination was undertaken after which you crawled away for a couple of weeks to recuperate. The results were published in the Times some months later. To my amazement I passed the lot first time before scooting off on VSO to teach English to tin miners in Indonesia, a much more satisfactory method of education for me (not sure about the miners).
My method of qualifying as a solicitor was hardly an improvement on the system in 1932. It replaced the ability to write creatively with the aptitude to store facts for a limited period of time. The level of lawyers produced was quite another question. So in 1993 the Legal Practice Course (LPC) replaced the Solicitors Final Examination. This was heralded as a much more practical test of a person’s aptitude to provide legal services to the consumer. The Law Society delegated the Exam to the Law Colleges and Universities and the cost of the provision of the course has continued to rise. A Law Degree now followed by the LPC makes this a test in ability to fund the courses as much as anything else. The size of the purse or the stamina to work whilst studying is the real test to be able to qualify as a Solicitor.
The SRA are now about to introduce the Solicitors Qualifying Examination. They are moving back to a unified test which seeks to be academically challenging whilst testing your knowledge of the practical application of the law. We have no idea about the cost of this exam, nor have we seen any examination papers, but there is already criticism of the multi choice question format proposed. On the whole, a move away from the strangle hold of the academic institutions I think is wise.
However the most important aspect of legal education is, as it has always been in England and Wales, a period of two years’ experience of working in a solicitor’s office. Fortunately this will not change although the formality of the training contract is removed. For our part, Jackson Lees will continue to develop its own Training Academy. We know what we want our lawyers to be able to do. Yes they need to know the law but they also need to handle cases efficiently, understand the point of view of our clients and speak to them properly. These skills are unlikely to be high on the agenda of the SRA but they will remain top of ours.