RollOnFriday recently reported that BPP is in talks with the government to design an apprenticeship scheme. If all goes to plan it means people without a degree will be able to qualify as solicitors. It could revolutionise the profession, bringing in people who want to be lawyers but can't afford university.

And probably bringing in some who can afford uni, but don't want to spend a Mercedes-sized sum on a three year zipline of daytime TV and experimentation with MDMA. After all, if you know you want to be a lawyer, why waste time flicking bubblegum at the dean (that happens right?) when you could be learning in a firm and getting paid for it. Maybe get to skip the LPC, too, dodging an abstract infodump as useful as greased loo paper. But even as ministers hunkered down in a Whitehall situation room pushing models of BBP's breaded cat logo around a giant map of England, a minority decried the plan.

Some of them point out that CILEx already gives school leavers a route to become Chartered Legal Executives. Which is true. Except it doesn't make them into solicitors (for its part, CILEx issued a slightly panicky press release "reminding Skills Minister Matthew Hancock that he need not look to completely reinvent the wheel"). But the real fear lurking in the background (and, in some cases, dancing about in the foreground wearing a top hat) is that the quality of the profession will be eroded. That without the requirement for a degree, oiks and scoundrels will pour into the country's esteemed law offices. They'll be unburdened by the civilizing influence of halls, ignorant in the absence of two taught hours a week on Wide Sargasso Sea, and every last one, male and female, will turn up for meetings in double denim. And wear pyjamas the rest of the time.



This panicked reaction seems rather unfounded. Firstly, as one Roffer shouldn't have had to point out "the smartest bloke I know, far smarter than any lawyer I know, is a plumber. He did an apprenticeship." Secondly, there's no evidence that a degree is a necessary ingredient for a good lawyer. In fact, the reverse is true: a generation ago apprenticeships, in the form of articles, were a well-trodden path into the law (and today legal execs, who don't need to hold a degree, are rocks in many practices).

And what's a degree to a firm? It's another clue the applicant might be hiding a mind behind the stock answers they've trotted out at interview. But just because a degree is a recruitment crutch doesn't mean it should be enforced as a bar to entry into the profession. Now as ever, law firms' requirements for competence should be sufficient quality control. It would be surprising if any of them opposed the chance to snap up top-grade workers even earlier in their life cycle.



Of course there is the danger that green school-leavers will suddenly realise what they've gotten themselves into and change their minds, popping out of their legal apprenticeships like escaped POWs, wide-eyed, filthy and crying wordlessly for blankets. But at least they'll have some practical work experience for their CV, and presumably (otherwise the apprenticeship route is a bit pointless) be unburdened by uni and law school-sized debt. If people want to go into law on that basis, let them. They'll find out the rest later.