The Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) is billed as the big shake up of the legal profession, a way of tackling the age old problem of an excess of law students, in vast amounts of debt, chasing far too few law jobs in a recruitment game normally won by the most privileged. Led by an alphabet soup combination of regulators - the SRA, BSB and ILEX, with the LSB (Legal Services Board) looking in too - the LETR is trying to come up with ways to foster a stronger, more independent and more diverse legal profession. A laudable aim but a mightily tough task. This is big potatoes.

The Legal Practice Course, that dull year of learning how to fill out forms and read accounts, is of course on the list of issues the LETR is considering.

I remember my year on the LPC, it was epically boring, instantly forgettable and mostly useless. Oh, and it cost the princely sum of around £10k (now £13,550). I was lucky, I had a training contract, my fees were covered and £5k was bunged my way for living expenses. Far from enough to survive in London but with loans and part time work, manageable.

Many of my fellow students did not have training contracts and had jumped into the LPC roulette, stumping up the double digit fees from their own pockets, from generous and/or wealthy parents or through (the now long since withdrawn) professional development loans. They spent the year peppering London law firms with their CVs, attending countless interviews and trying to snag work experience. Many without training contracts ended up taking a different path. They now work in recruitment, for banks, in business affairs and so on. For better or for worse the elusive training contract was never nabbed. Their money pretty much wasted.

The LPC was crap. And as far as I can see, it is probably one of the bigger barriers to diversity in the legal profession.

It’s a tax on law firms and a tax on law students. First off it costs £13,550, by anyone’s standard that is a sack-load of cash. It delays trainees starting work by a whole year (accelerated LPC schemes aside) for very little tangible benefit. It’s a year’s worth of turgid form filling and accounts, pretty much all of which is forgotten during the two month post law school, last-taste-of-freedom holiday (often accompanied by copious amounts of drinking to mask the sinking realisation that the endless student life is, in fact, ending).

To anyone with half a brain cell and an aptitude for passing exams, the LPC is EASY (or at least it was in my day). There seems to be no reason, except from the perspective of law schools’ coffers, that trainees couldn’t learn this stuff during their training contracts. Do as the accountants do and mix classroom learning with on the job training. This would have the added advantage of allowing trainees to put into practice what they were learning. Filling out a Form 395 is a pretty abstract exercise out of context in a stuffy classroom in Holborn, but learnt during a corporate or finance seat may well make a great deal more sense. Eversheds and BPP are already trying this kind of arrangement out, maybe others should too.

It is clear that the LPC has ZERO practical application outside the law. Zero. Law schools sell the impossible dream to so many candidates who, to be blunt, don’t have a chance in hell of securing a training contract especially in this current doom. They accept too many candidates brandishing 2:1s and 2:2s from low-ranking universities, convincing themselves that they’ll be the exception to the rule. In this climate, it seems madness to spend the thick end of £14k on the LPC without a training contract lined up. If you don’t snare a rarer-than-hen’s teeth TC the LPC will, almost every time, have to be chalked up as a galactic waste of cash. Future employers in other professions are likely to see the LPC on a CV and think “failed lawyer”. That or they won't have a clue what this completely industry-specific, dead-ended qualification even is.

And doesn’t the LPC also stifle wannabe lawyers’ choice within the legal profession itself? How many opt for the City firms so they can have their training contracts paid for? I’m sure there are many out there who have longed to draft SPAs and negotiate commercial leases since they were knee high to a grasshopper, but I am sure that there are lots who would love to work in family, sports law, human rights etc. but are pushed towards Biglaw by the simple fact that Biglaw pays and niche firms cannot.

If the LPC could be integrated into a training contract, the fees would surely be much reduced. Maybe even to the point where smaller, niche firms with tighter budgets could stump up at least some of the cash to secure a more diverse set of trainees rather than simply those rich enough to pay for the LPC out of their own pockets.

Just a thought. Over to you LETR.