Law graduates face a bleak future at the bar

With 65 students applying for each training place, many would-be solicitors face not finding a job within the five-year post-graduation limit.

Youth aside, clean-cut law students don't appear to have much in common with the Occupy London protesters. But last week there was a glimpse of the level of their anger when an unemployed bar school graduate launched a campaign to occupy the inns of court.

"Through no fault of our own, a generation of bar professional training course (BPTC) and legal practice course (LPC) graduates find ourselves with no jobs – or no jobs as lawyers anyway," wrote the graduate under the pseudonym OccupyTheInns on Legal Cheek, a blog I edit, after making contact with me on Twitter. "The lucky ones are paralegals," the graduate continued. "The unlucky ones work in bars (not the bar)."

While support for the campaign appears to have been very limited – many law graduates strongly criticised the sentiment behind it – the broad message of discontent has struck a chord. One poster wrote: "the losers (myself included) are beginning to sense their own strength. We are the majority. And the majority rules in the game of 'democracy'." Similar messages of support appeared on Twitter.

Certainly, the situation facing those graduating from law school is bleak. Only around a fifth of all graduates of the BPTC (the year-long course law graduates must take to become barristers) will ever practise at the bar. In the solicitors' branch of the profession, recent research by the Association of Graduate Recruiters found that 65 law students apply for each training contract place. In the context of rising general youth unemployment – joblessness among 16- to 24-year-olds hit 1 million between July and September, with one in five young people now out of work – it's no wonder wannabe lawyers are feeling pessimistic.

Not that it has ever been easy to enter the profession. While the impending legal aid cuts have seen barristers' chambers take on fewer recruits, changes to the bar's funding model under the last government have made the quest to become a barrister an increasingly uphill struggle for well over a decade. Indeed, Adam Fellows, a BPTC graduate with a 2.1 from St Andrews who was called to the bar in July but has yet to find a barrister traineeship, says a one to two year spell doing CV-bolstering legal support work has been the norm for some time. (Fellows is working as a legal researcher for a publishing company while he applies for jobs.) "The bar is extremely competitive," he explains. "I always knew how hard it was going to be, and having invested a lot in this, my plan is to keep going until the clock runs out [in five years when the BPTC expires]."

Similarly, graduate jobs at the top solicitors' firms have always been hard to come by, with places at magic circle City firms long the preserve of really high achievers. What has changed is the graduate hiring pattern of commercial law firms outside the elite bracket. Before the 2008 crash, the media law firm Olswang took on more than 20 trainees a year; this year it cancelled its 2013 graduate recruitment altogether. (Like many other large law firms, Olswang recruits two years in advance).

Krish Nair, an Edinburgh University graduate (2.1, history and politics) who completed law school this summer, is the sort of candidate who would have been snapped up during the boom years. Unable to find a training contract, he works four days per week as an unpaid volunteer at Citizens Advice in London while living at home with his parents. Nair is scraping by writing some paid blogs for law firms, while attempting to build a profile through his personal blog, The Training Contract Hawk.

"My strategy is to keep building my CV and show law firms that I might be able to add value to them in a way that sets me apart from other graduates," he says.

The last time unemployment was so high was in the early 1990s, when Thomas Laidlaw, head of academic development at LexisNexis UK, was attempting to bag a trainee lawyer position. After a series of paralegal roles and a spell in a law firm's post-room, Laidlaw secured a job at the Encyclopaedia of Forms and Precedents. He hasn't looked back since, and has no regrets about not becoming a lawyer. His advice to today's graduates is to think outside the box.

"The 90s recession proved a blessing in disguise for me," he recalls. "Once I'd entered legal publishing, I found myself fairly quickly working with senior people in the legal profession and getting far more responsibility than my friends who had become solicitors."

The economic situation may be worse than the 1990s, but Laidlaw is far from gloomy about jobless law graduates' prospects. Indeed, he reckons there are some unique opportunities for open-minded legal wannabes.

"The liberalising effect of the Legal Services Act, allied to technological developments, means we're seeing a blurring of areas like law and IT. The status of actually practising as a lawyer may well begin to decline, and graduates who recognise this early on could find themselves well-positioned in the future," he says.

Other than a possible increase in non-legal options for law graduates, are there any other rays of hope?

Well, earlier this week Wilberforce Chambers, an elite group of barristers, announced it was raising its starting salary to £65,000. As with other areas of society, the very top rung of the legal profession continues to do rather well, with the commercial bar, in particular, benefiting from a wave of financial crisis-spurred bank-versus-bank litigation. Don't expect to find its members camping out in the inns of court any time soon.

Source: Alex Aldridge, Guardian.co.uk, Friday 25th November 2011