I have blogged many times on the introduction of the new Solicitors Qualifying Examination.
To recap. To qualify as a solicitor under the new regime candidates must:
• pass both stages of the
SQE assessment
- SQE1 focuses on legal knowledge and SQE2 on practical legal skills and knowledge
One of the founding policy considerations in the development of the new way to qualify is how the regulator can satisfy itself that every candidate that passes meets the minimum standard to practice as a safe beginner, while delivering as little restriction on how they get to that as possible. That is what leads to centralised assessments and much less prescription about how candidates study. The SRA is saying very firmly that it is interested in standards achieved rather than how you learned or studied.
I want to focus here on what it means for General Counsel.
There are certain flexible features within SQE that GCs should be aware of.
• There is no obligation to do the four elements in any specific order, other than SQE1 assessment must be passed before candidate can sit SQE2. The degree, work experience and preparation for assessments can be interwoven.
• The obligation for a degree or equivalence opens up the opportunity for post 19, long term investment in work based training and study without student debt.
• The work experience is much more flexible than a formal training contract. There is no need for ‘seats’ in different practice areas. And no pass or fail – the candidate just needs a solicitor to sign off that they had the opportunity to develop some of the competencies.
• That supervision can be close and direct solicitor supervision, or it can be through the systems of management and supervision that exist in the GCs’ legal team and alternative legal practices.
• There is no requirement for the work experience to be in England & Wales. No reason why outsourced centres in Poland, India, South Africa cannot take advantage of this. GCs may want to collaborate with alternative providers to develop joint programs for their paralegals to widen their experience.
• The flexibility is combined with lower cost education and training – because more can be done virtually and more can be combined with work and tailored to individual candidates or companies own workforces.
• That tailoring may be utilising graduate training that a business already offers its non-lawyer graduate recruits. Many of the skills and competencies are generic to professions, at least at the foundational level.
• The absence of a legal practice course reduces costs significantly. That will matter to the many candidates that have gambled on funding their own LPC in the last 15 years but never managed to find a training contract.
• The choices for education are increasingly varied – it was always absurd that the sheer number of trainees at city firms and those firms’ economic power could dominate the education provision to all other types of trainee solicitors and firms. There is no reason why GCs cannot collaborate to get the right training in place for in-house trainees.
• Flexible reward packages can be built that share the cost of training and exams with candidates – increasingly loyalty and getting away from the winner takes all model of training contract competitions.
Where should GCs start given this flexibility and choice? It would be easy to lament the prescription as this is just another thing to think about. But what would we think if the rest of the business had little control over the training and development of its talent? Where would innovation come from, how would firms compete, how would new ways of doing things emerge if everyone was trained in the same way? As GCs are forced to do more for less then they need to find new ways to build talented teams that collaborate with alternative providers and traditional law firms. The strategy for your business, the strategy for the legal team should drive the approach to recruitment, development, and retention of talent. SQE can help GCs develop a workforce strategy that is tailored to their business and helps set them apart.
What sort of mix of people, process, platform, technology does the GC need? And are the people employed, or at least some from a flexible platform such as FLEX or Axiom? How much work is delivered by a managed service provider such as Elevate, Factor, EY, KPMG? And what use of technology is made from businesses like
LEGL, or a single tech aggregator like one of the Big Four? How are panel law firms that provide vertical integration like Pinsent Mason and its Vario offer or BCLP and Cubed used to support the GC function?
These questions shapes the in-house legal team, the combination of paralegals and solicitors, and the skills they need. And that should shape the way that solicitors are trained – the knowledge may be core but how they deploy that knowledge and how they work and collaborate will be different. And the need for additional skills such as project management, data skills or understanding your business are all different. If GCs operate teams of homogeneous solicitors all trained in the same way, then it won’t be a surprise that they don’t make the leap from cost centre to profit centre.
The reality is that GCs operate in ever changing circumstances, responding to major shifts in business strategy, ever reducing costs and pressure to work differently. Law firms may think that they do the same but the irony of the recent round of bumper profits at law firms won’t be lost on GCs that have spent the last year cutting their budgets yet again. City law’s routine offer on transactional work can sometimes feel like a tax on the efficient operation of businesses.
Given that so much shifts so quickly for GCs the flexibility that SQE offers should be seized upon. The SRA is prescribing a minimum core level of competency, but the GC can continue to flex the context for that learning to meet the needs of the team and business. And the GC can speed up or slow down the conversion of paralegals into solicitors much more subtly than with the inflexible and expensive training contract and LPC.
There are many different models for training future lawyers in house.
• Recruit at age 19 as paralegal with a route to lawyer.
• Recruit post law degree (perhaps including SQE1) and offer on the job training and internal courses supplemented with tailored online study and exam preparation.
• Offer formal apprenticeships in partnership with an education provider
• Develop a replacement for the training contract that is formal and very structured.
• And many more options designed around the GC’s team and the rest of the business.
There are also lots of resources to help GCs develop and deliver all of this, including me of course. There are great value educators with deep tech and expertise – I particularly like Barbri, Arden and College of Legal Practice. The SRA maintains a
list of education providers on its website. And great platforms are emerging for managing work experience - you can support your paralegals to do this without committing much.
FLEX
is the market leader in my view. It’s track record working with paralegals, GCs and law firms has enabled it to build the
FLEX SQE journal
that any aspiring solicitor should be considering using and GCs should be insisting upon for their paralegals and trainees.
What FLEX offers also puts paralegals and trainees in control of how they collect, manage, and record their work experience – regardless of their employer offering them a training contract. If a GC does not support that then talented paralegals will simply leave.
My expectation is that SQE provides an opportunity (but no guarantee) to improve diversity in the solicitor profession. That will depend upon the decisions that firms make, how they find and attract talent and how they make their training accessible to those without wealth. The earn and learn model is much more flexible than the LPC/training contract route. In fact if the SRA is brave enough to make access to SQE1 and subsequently SQE2 available internationally, then the many paralegals working in global businesses and alternative providers will find routes to qualify as English & Welsh solicitors. The SRA has some
short case studies
of what select employers are offering that is worth a read too.
It may feel like this is hard work, but it is not. It is about investing in the talent around the GC and ensuring that the team is trained to deliver what the business needs. It is what leaders outside the legal function do all the time - be they professionals, regulators, consultancy or shopkeepers. How to get the talent you need now and in future is a key business question and should be a central one for GCs this year.
