The essay-writing firm reaching out to graduate lawyers

A couple of years ago, a controversial essay-writing company caused a storm when it broadened its services to assisting wannabe lawyers with their traineeship applications.

Behind the consequent stern warnings issued to students against resorting to paid-for assistance, and a suggestion from a senior lawyer that to do so equated to "cheating", was concern that a trade in graduate job application assistance could take off in the way it had with essay writing. After all, the company involved was Oxbridge Essays, whose model-answer essay business has caused universities more than a few headaches since its launch in 2006.

Two years on, though, and the legal profession's fears have proved to be largely unfounded, with Oxbridge Essays admitting earlier this week that the legal graduate job application market hasn't turned out to be as lucrative as it had hoped. In 2009, Oxbridge Training Contracts (OTC) – as Oxbridge Essays' law graduate job application spin off is known – claimed to be assisting 75-100 law students a month on tasks ranging from model application form essays and cover letters, to a £500-an-hour "chaperone" service that provided students with a "specialist" to escort them to their interviews.

But Oxbridge Essays' head of sales, John Foster, says "a commercial decision" has recently been taken to "focus less on the training contract and pupillage side of the business" – despite this being the busiest time of year for graduate legal job applications and the junior lawyer graduate recruitment market facing a surge of candidates.

So what went wrong? Foster is reluctant to elaborate on his basic explanation that the "pool of people wanting this type of assistance is relatively small", adding that the few inquiries OTC has had over the last few months have "tended to come from people using other services offered by Oxbridge Essays".

It's not easy to find someone who will admit to using OTC, and Foster refused my request to be put in touch with any clients on confidentiality grounds, but the suspicion among law students is that the prices charged aren't justified by the results. Ekaterina Zelenova, a paralegal at Attwood solicitors, sums up the low esteem that the OTC is held in by many recent law graduates when she describes some of its work as "hilarious".

This criticism is borne out by the bizarre nature of some of the model answers posted on the company's website. For example, OTC's customised answer for an inns of court scholarship interview, which costs between £300 and £1,000 depending on the level of seniority of the lawyer commissioned to author it and the length of time it is required to be provided within, begins:

"It may not be the best thing to say but all the Inns are beautiful and offer fairly similar services. I wanted to go with whichever Inn I felt a greater attachment to and that was Lincoln's Inn, primarily because I used to walk through New Square past Wildy's each day on the way to university and was able to picture myself working in the gardens for which Lord Denning used to care from time to time in his later years, or drinking tea in the newly refurbished MCR!"

Confusion about who exactly writes these model answers may also have acted as a turnoff to students. On one page of OTC's website the company states that it "uses a growing team of skilled and experienced Oxbridge-educated and Magic Circle-trained lawyers, trainees, pupils and top lawyers-to-be", alongside "a small number of other specialists such as HR personnel." But elsewhere on the site the company seems to suggest that it uses lawyers at less elite firms.

Doubts over the legal expertise of these "specialists" is compounded by the argument that a lawyer providing some of the services offered by OTC could risk breaching their professional conduct obligations (barristers, for example, must avoid conduct that would "diminish public confidence" in the profession or "bring the bar into disrepute"). But even if law's governing bodies were prepared to take a relaxed view about their members getting involved with OTC, it's still unclear why someone earning big money, and working long hours, at a top law firm or barristers' chambers would choose to spend their limited free time in pursuit of a few extra quid writing covering letters. Foster puts it down to "altruism".

The biggest factor behind OTC's failure to make it big, though, may simply be the sheer volume of free information out there available to assist wannabe lawyers. Sites such as Lawcareers.net and Lawyer2B allow students to build up a very detailed picture of the profession just by spending a few hours in front of a computer. Perhaps it's no coincidence that one area of OTC's business that has continued to perform relatively strongly is its one-to-one interview coaching – a service that free websites are not able to offer.

OTC isn't the only player in the law interview coaching market. Over the last two years, Judicial Appointments Training (Jat) has extended its services preparing senior lawyers for judicial appointments and silk applications to assisting law students looking for their first jobs. Co-founder Mark Eldridge, a former barrister, says the company sees at least a dozen students a month, despite not advertising its trainee interview preparation services. As with OTC, Jat refused my request to be put in touch with a student who had used the service – which costs £150 per hour – on confidentiality grounds. There is, however, a favourable review of it posted by one customer on the "Pupillage and how to get it" blog run by barrister Simon Myerson QC.

The danger for students using this kind of service is that they risk being penalised, with some organisations, including Inner Temple (one of the inns of court), explicitly asking graduate applicants to disclose if they have received outside assistance at any point of the application and interview process. Neither Eldridge nor Foster thinks this is fair. "The question arises as to what is outside assistance?" asks the former. "Is it outside assistance to receive some kind of advice from a friend or a family member who happens to have a connection to the legal profession?"

It's a fair point. And with grey areas like these, I don't imagine companies which target student job hunters will disappear any time soon.

Source: Alex Aldridge, Guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21st July 2011