There is no right or wrong path into law

Summer has ended. GCSE, AS and A-level results have been announced. Vacation scheme students are no longer sitting at your colleagues’ desks while they are on holiday. The children are back at school (and the resulting traffic has added at least 15 minutes to your commute even if you don’t have any children of your own).

New trainees are settling in. And all across the country parents are piling their cars high with the essentials for student life – bedding, posters, pots, pans, laptops – because the university term is starting and thousands of budding students are settling into their halls of residence, making new friends and signing up for a whole array of freshers week activities.

Once the campus tours,
pub crawls and student union parties subside, the students
will start, we hope, to turn their attention to the subjects that they have chosen to study for at least the next three years. Some will have chosen law; others will not. And, of those who have not, many will nevertheless aspire to qualify as lawyers in a few years’ time.

Traditionalists may argue that lawyers should have a degree
in law. Possibly a reasonable statement in the first instance, but not one that is backed up by the statistics: broadly speaking, half of all trainees now have non-law degrees.

Alternative degrees can include subjects which may be seen to fit naturally with law, such as history and English literature, or be as diverse
as dance, which was the background of one girl
who I trained with.

I studied economics and can honestly say that the skills I learned throughout my degree have benefited me during my career. Not least because I am not afraid of numbers and can interpret graphs and spreadsheets, skills not to be taken as a given in the legal profession.

Pub quiz knowledge

Equally, not all LLB students aspire to be lawyers. And rightly so. A law degree is undoubtedly a well-respected qualification which will stand graduates in good stead when it comes to finding a job in an increasingly competitive market. Although law graduates who take jobs outside of the legal profession will probably never use their Roman law knowledge again, except, perhaps, in a pub quiz, the skills that are learnt from studying law include research, concise writing, attention to detail and problem solving, to name but a few – all useful skills for almost any workplace.

And then there are those without a degree. Most readers will be familiar with CILEx. This route to qualification calls for exams to be passed and qualifying employment to be completed but provides a more flexible option than the traditional route.

Apprenticeship expansion

And now this alternative option is being expanded. Last month saw an international law firm take on two apprentices in its London office as part of the Trailblazers Apprentices in Law initiative. The initiative, which is being supported by a number of large firms and in-house teams, is an employer-led group designing new apprenticeship standards for occupations in the legal sector. The apprenticeships are aimed at school leavers and will enable them to train as they work with a view to qualifying as solicitors, paralegals or chartered legal executives.

The moral of the story, for aspiring lawyers fresh out of school, or those who are soon to be considering their options for the future? If you want to study law at university, study law. If you would rather study another subject, study that subject.
And if getting straight into
the workplace sounds more appealing, then apply for one
of the alternative routes which are becoming increasingly available.

Some of the best advice that I was ever given was to do what makes you happy because then you will perform at your best. That advice has driven many
of my decisions and, so far, everything has turned out as well as I could have hoped. Not that it stopped me from agonising over my UCAS form for days on end many years ago. SJ

Kate Davies is a solicitor at Wedlake Bell