that is assuming there are the same amount of places. I think this will generate more opportunities, but this could just create the bottle neck at the qualification point rather than the start of the career. One of the major issues that restricts the number of opportunities now is all the regulation firms have to commit to, including the two year commitment.
I think this is a much fairer process as it will combine, graduate, apprenticeship and foreign qualified lawyer routes. It will look and feel a lot more like other professional qualifications - this feels a bit like accountancy or how surveyors qualify.
The main concern I have is it will create a “trainee purgatory” - there will be plenty of people who pass the exams but don’t gain the work experience, and others who gain the work experience but don’t pass the exams. It will also lead to people being over experienced/under qualified or under experienced/over qualified for NQ roles, which could impact their employability.
My biggest issue with the new system is that there is no longer a requirement to pay people for their qualifying work experience, which in my personal opinion is a completely stupid decision from the SRA. They only did this so qualifying work experience can be gained in voluntary law clinics, particularly at university.
The GDL/LPC route was flawed in many ways. But the key reason the system had to change was that they needed to amalgamate the new apprenticeship routes that had started 4-5 years ago, along with the graduate route and qualification process for foreign qualified lawyers. Everyone was concerned about creating a two tier system, so ensuring there was a consistent benchmark for all qualifying people (including foreign qualified lawyers) made sense - and that’s how we got to the SQE.
In addition to the above, they also needed to ensure there was more quality control on the work experience piece - basically someone could coast through a training contract and actually be pretty useless and they would still qualify because it was practically impossible for firms to get rid of trainees unless they did something that warranted serious disciplinary action. This will mean firms are no longer held to ransom to sign off someone’s work experience if they haven’t actually been good enough.
