This week, with customary bombast and social media warblings, Eversheds announced that it was going to trial a whole new way of training.

As was widely reported, the new system will see future trainees reducing the classroom-based bit of the LPC to just a few months. They'll complete the compulsory bits - the turgid, prosaic stuff like solicitors' accounts and letter writing - at BPP, and then pull on suit and tie and join their firm. Where they'll get paid as much as all the other trainees, at the same time as finishing off the bits of the course corporate firms actually care about (the electives which may bear some passing relevance to BigLaw practice).

It's fair to assume that doing the Private Acquisitions elective will make more sense if you can do it at the same time as an actual, real-world bit of M&A, rather than the stultifying artificiality of playing at lawyers in a grim white-boarded classroom. OK, so you've have to do some exams whilst getting the customary training contract beasting. But it's still the LPC which, for anyone with the nous to get a TC at the 'Sheds, should be a cakewalk. And - when you're doing it for real - it's just got to make revision easier.

For the firm, it's a no-brainer. Assets to sweat even earlier than expected, and a chance to recoup some of those otherwise sunk LPC costs. For the trainees, it's also a boost, because they get to cut the LPC short. Sure, you don't get quite so much of the student lifestyle, but getting out of BPP early has got to be good. As much as I loved every minute of my LPC year, that was in spite of the course, not because of it. I had a great time hosting week-long BBQs and playing endless Nintendo64 with housemates and - just occasionally - doing just enough work to pass the bloody awful course. A couple of week's hard graft at the end, and it was all over.





Legal recruiters react to Eversheds' combined LPC/TC








The more interesting question is whether this new system will be taken up by the rest of the legal market. Recruitment in law typically moves at the pace of a three-toed sloth, and looks with keen suspicion on anything which could be labelled "innovative". But what if it does, and makes training more like that of accountants (which - unlike the LPC - is notable for its rigour)? For a profession which is increasingly becoming divided between the haves (training contracts) and have-nots, what does this say to self-funders?

Those lucky (or talented) enough to be fully funded are increasingly kept completely separate from their less fortunate peers by their pushy-parent firms. As if coming into contact with the great unwashed masses of jobless LPC students would leave them soiled. The future Shedders were already being rushed through on an LPC fasttrack (an option which has only recently become available to non-TC types). And in 2013 will be taken out of circulation completely. If everyone else follows suit, what will be left behind in law schools? Waifs and strays, each struggling to find a berth in a career in which everyone else has finished the compulsory course - to their own enormous advantage - on the job.