Since all the fuss surrounding Laura Spence and her admission (or not) to Oxford, elitism is a hot topic at the moment.
The public perception, both of barristers and solicitors, remains that of being white and middle class, if less male dominated than they once were. When Cherie Blair addressed the American Bar Association meeting in London last summer, she told them: "The profession should find suitable tests to identify people who would be good at the job and get away from the idea that you cannot be a lawyer unless you are a white middle-class man in a suit. There is an increasing danger that access to the law would only be available to the privileged few and that working-class students will be denied access to a legal education".
Nobody is suggesting that law firms or chambers overtly discriminate against ethnic minorities or those from less privileged backgrounds. In some respects, as law becomes more international, the recruitment of foreign students is increasingly popular. But certain factors have made it more difficult for those without private means to enter the legal profession.
Initially, there is the high cost of training which (in addition to the cost of going to university) can total £38,000. For solicitors at least, the cost of going to law school can be part-funded by their law firm paying their fees and providing a grant of between £4,000 and £5,000. But to get this funding, students must first gain a training contract. And it is here that the root of the problem lies. While the proportion of ethnic minorities in solicitors' firms is improving (in 1998 it was 16% of new entrants), they are not evenly distributed throughout the profession, being over-represented in small, High Street practices and local government and under-represented in large law firms. Research carried out by the College of Law this year found that while 75% of its students had training contracts by the time they had finished their LPC, only 45% of those from ethnic minorities did so.
Makbool Javiad, a partner at DLA, says that while the situation has improved over the past few years, there is still a long way to go. "Ten years ago, there was a real problem over entry to the profession," he says. "Careers advisers were steering people [from the ethnic minorities] away from it. That problem has been identified and the number of law students has gone up significantly.
"But the difficulty now is moving up the profession. The majority are working in smaller, often legal aid practices that invariably have only one or two partners. There are substantially fewer in larger firms and very few at higher levels. The glass ceiling is still there."
Although it has been a Law Society rule that firms should have an equal opportunities policy since 1995, the last study the Law Society carried out (in 1998) found that only 26% of firms recorded the ethnicity of their staff.
But the main culprit, it seems, is the recruitment policies of the biggest firms. A study, Law Students: Investing in the Future, by Professor Phil Thomas and Alison Rees of Cardiff Law School, found that most of the big firms recruit almost exclusively from Oxbridge and a select band of elite red-brick law departments. These are primarily Oxford; Cambridge; the London School of Economics (LSE); University College London; King's College, London; Manchester; Cardiff; Nottingham; Sheffield; Southampton; Warwick; Durham; Bristol; Exeter; Leicester.
The firms' argument is that the best law departments produce the best students and, to a point, Thomas agrees. "Historically, when there were only 20 or so law schools, there wasn't much to choose between them. Now that there is something like 120, there is a big disparity."
But Thomas also points out that, since the introduction of university tuition fees, it cannot be automatically assumed that the best law schools have the best students. Many from lower-income backgrounds cannot afford to choose a good university many miles away from home, even if their results qualify them to do so. "Take someone from Solihull, who has good grades and an offer from the LSE," he says. "But he cannot afford to live in London and therefore goes to Wolverhampton; he is automatically excluded from being considered by the magic circle."
The current debate over the so-called 'City LPC' – the legal practice course designed for those headed for the top eight law firms – has fuelled the 'elitism' debate. Due to commence in 2001-2 academic year, the City LPC will add more 'black letter law' modules to the existing course. It was developed in response to the fact that the biggest firms – Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Freshfields, Herbert Smith, Linklaters, Lovells, Norton Rose and Slaughter and May – consider that the practical, skills-based LPC is not producing trainees with sufficient pure legal skills when they start work.
However, Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf has already indicated that he is concerned about a 'two tier' system developing. One charge laid at the door of the institutions that will provide the City LPC — The Oxford Institute of Legal Pratcice, Nottingham School of Law and BPP Law School – is that the lion's share of the places will be snapped up by those who have already been awarded training contracts by the top eight firms.
This is also the view of Nigel Savage, chief executive of the College of Law, one of the law colleges not asked to teach the new City LPC. Instead, the College of Law is to introduce its new commercially orientated electives to its LPC from the academic year beginning 2001, provided it receives Law Society approval.
The charge of elitism is refuted by Peter Jones, dean at Nottingham Law School. He says that, at his institution, at least half the places (650 full-time students) will be available to people who have training contracts outside the big eight or are self-funded. He is also keen to dispel the misconception that the City LPC will be run separately to the current LPC.
"There is no question that all students will not study together, even at the elective stage," he says. "All that will be different is that there will be addtional electives available to anyone who wants to study them."
At the Bar, the arguments over elitism are very similar, and the situation is compounded by the fact that many pupillages are unpaid. Although many of the biggest commercial sets have generous pupillage awards – up to £30,000 for the 12 months in some instances – some smaller sets pay nothing at all.
At last year's Bar Council conference, the then chairman of the Bar Council, Dan (now Lord) Brennan, himself a product of a northern state school, argued that the Bar "must never become elitist again". He promised that a levy would be introduced on practising barristers to fund less-privileged candidates for the Bar. At the same time, one barristers' chambers was appealing against a court decision that ruled that, as apprentices, pupil barristers over the age of 26 were entitled to at least the statutory minimum wage (currently £3.70 an hour). In March, the Court of Appeal overturned the original decision, ruling that pupillage was not an apprenticeship but rather a 'contract for training and education'.
The Bar Council already 'recommends' that chambers pay their pupils at least £5,000 a year. At present, the promised levy seems to be some way off, but the Bar Council is in the process of consulting its members over introducing a compulsory minimum wage for pupils as the Law Society already does for solicitors. A decision is likely next year.
But on the academic front, the Bar has traditionally been regarded as being more Oxbridge-dominated than the solicitors' profession. The Bar Council recognises that the issue is sensitive and, argues its chairman of training and education, Nigel Bastin, it is far too simplistic to assume that chambers only consider those from the top universities. "The overwhelming majority adopt a very open-minded and constructive approach to recruitment," he says. "They will not be influenced simply by the fact that somebody went to Oxbridge."
But privately, many at the Bar defend its Oxbridge bias, pointing out simply that Oxford and Cambridge are the best and claiming that its graduates emerge with more poise and self-confidence than those from elsewhere. If the profession is discriminating by concentrating on the best universities, they say, then it is the Government's job to ensure that the best education is open to all.
As far as solicitors are concerned, Javaid disagrees with this view. "The legal profession has gone through tremendous changes such as globalisation, mergers, more competition and the nature of the work itself," he says. " Despite this, firms still have very traditional recruitment policies. They are effectively recruiting in their own image.
"The senior people were recruited and trained 20 or 30 years ago and the world is not the same place as was then. The people you need today are very different.
"Now you need people with interpersonal skills, presentational skills and they have to be entrepreneurs; the nature of somebody from a different background may be more dynamic. You need freshness and new blood to keep up with changes. You need a true meritocracy – and I do not think that all firms have that."