Normal
As long as you have some legal work experience and the firm is one that recruits a non-negligible part of its trainee cohort from the direct TC route, I would say yes. Two of my friends got TCs via the direct route in their penultimate year, and they were among the few who were applying for anything but vacation schemes. One of them had no prior VS or paralegal work experience and had only done an internship in a foreign country. As such, I cannot believe the success odds of a penultimate year application to be so low so as not to merit an application.
