Charles Plant: 'LETR brings outcomes focus to legal education'

As he encourages solicitors to endorse the LETR's recommendation to scrap minimum CPD hours, the chair of the SRA board welcomes the greater emphasis on outcomes and professional ethics

With 26 key recommendations ranging from scrapping minimum CPD hours to the possible voluntary certification of paralegals, the much-delayed report by the Legal Education and Training Review team is the first to address the issue for the sector as a whole since the 1996 report by the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct (ACLEC).

Coming as part of a set of recommendations on CPD and continuing training which reflects on the "considerable cynicism and doubt" in relation to the effectiveness of current schemes, recommendation 17 sets out an alternative to the current hours-based CPD that should be measured in terms of personal outcomes.

No minimum hours

In a departure from the current system, the proposal in the report is for individuals to set out their personal development objectives and link that to an outcome. "Models of CPD that require participants to plan, implement, evaluate and reflect annually on their training needs and their learning should be adopted where they are not already in place," the report says. "This approach may, but need not, prescribe minimum hours."

"We've have accepted that the current structure does not work well, and because it works very much on the basis of the prescribed minimum hours there no doubt the scheme can be abused," SRA chair Charles Plant says. "The suggestion is that the firms themselves should spend more time supervising this and satisfying themselves that the personal objectives of each solicitor is the right outcome for them. This is how it is done in other jurisdictions - it's very much linked to personal development plans with designated outcome that individuals can understand."

However, the former Herbert Smith partner says large City firms were probably better equipped at this stage to deal with the new flexible approach to CPD because they had dedicated in-house resources to set up and monitor compliance.

"There would always be several talks a week you could go to, but what the report recommends is that instead of focusing on accumulating hours, you should focus on your own personal development," he says.

How then, would the SRA go about ensuring that all firms and individuals have drawn up and meet their own plans?

"We cannot be overly prescriptive in this," Mr Plant replies. "We haven't got the resources to be checking out on this. One has got to proceed on the basis that people do want to develop in the areas that assist them in advancing their career and in providing clients with a good professional service."

By contrast, "it could be a challenge for smaller firms". "It is a cultural point;" he says. "I understand the predicament they're in but individuals have to appreciate that they will benefit from it".

Asked whether firms would not just default to the present hours-based system, he replies that this approach could work, but only "as long as it is part of the personal development plan".

The only way is ethics

Much of the background to the report joins up with the SRA's outcomes-focused approach to regulation, making individuals and regulated organisations responsible for setting up their own pathways that comply with evolving regulatory requirements.

To Charles Plant's satisfaction, ethics, in particular, feature strongly in the recommendations, alongside with greater emphasis on management and business skills at an early stage. So instead of narrowly prescribing the content of the LPC, the report recommends making it more flexible and tailored to prepare future lawyers for what the report refers to as "a stratified and increasingly specialised marketplace". Less breadth and more depth is how this would be achieved: reducing the number of practice areas covered and making room for teaching of legal business and professional ethics.

"In comparison with jurisdictions such as Australia and Canada, where they seem to have ethics engrained both at university, vocational stage and with CPD, we do not in the same way but this is what we need to do," Charles Plant says.

Whether lawyers in such jurisdictions are professionally and ethically better is a matter for debate, but Mr Plant believes all solicitors - and certainly compliance officers - must have a thorough grasp of professional rules as a matter of course. If anything, this is because law firms are now much bigger and have different structures. "When firms were smaller, issues such as conflicts would be decided by the partners as they arose," he says. "These days these issues are escalated to risk committees. Younger people are divorced from some of these issues, so you have to engrain it within them."

But for all the talk about a new marketplace, the report seems remarkably silent about alternative business structures and do-it-yourself law, and how the new system should prepare future lawyers for the challenges. Throughout there is a call for greater management and commercial awareness - take Recommendation 12, for instance - and some worrying "widespread concerns" about trainees' difficulties with writing, research and reasoning skills. But there is little about the possible impact of new providers on solicitors. The only acknowledgment of the changing structure of the market is the recognition of the role of paralegals. Mostly, this is done indirectly. There is an assumption that the role of regulated lawyers will change, combined with the acceptance that the role of paralegals will continue to be significant. Paralegals may have a role in delivering "well-priced quality services outside the currently regulated market", but the report only suggests that "further work should be undertaken to explore the potential of licensed paralegal schemes".

Rise of the paralegal

On paper, this paves the way for solicitors taking on more managerial roles while paralegals deliver the day-to-day service. And in truth, it is difficult not to feel that not regulating paralegals while accepting the fact they carry out the greatest chunk of legal services work creates a sense of a two-tier profession. Charles Plant agrees, but only up to a point. "What the report says," he interjects, "is that within a regulated body - which would include an ABS or any organisation providing work which is repetitive, including law firms - those firms should set up proper training procedures."

He is also not troubled by the fact that paralegals would be the official engine room of the legal services sector. First, because working as a paralegal is another access route to the profession, and secondly because it is already the reality of life in today's law firms. "Look at City firms - the majority of the work they do is not reserved work. There is no reason why paralegals couldn't do that".

Meanwhile, there are no recommendations specifically addressing concerns over the rising numbers of LPC graduates without training contracts and facing a growing mountain of debt. Are we not pushing too many graduates through the system? The report's only answer is that wannabe lawyers should be given more information about job prospects, even before they embark on their law studies. Charles Plant agrees, rejecting the proposition that there is an oversupply of law students and LPC graduates - or solicitors, for that matter.

"My view is that the market is oversupplied not with solicitors but with solicitors' firms - there are too many small firms," he says. "But to some degree the marketplace is dictated by the number of training contracts. Legal aid will cut sections of the market off, but no evidence that the market is saturated with solicitors."

While the report predicts a lesser role for solicitors and barristers, "it's in terms of balance, not numbers", he says. "One has to assume that the demand for legal work will increase. Look at the number of people without a will who own a house worth more that the inheritance tax. There will be more legal work about. The question is who is going to do it. But the commoditised work will go to the paralegals - who are already doing it within firms as it is."

This being said, his response that the ratio of applicants to training contracts is too much is not entirely convincing - "some fail the LPC or decide to do something else" - but he is clearly concerned about the findings that graduates coming out of elite universities still stand a far better chance of getting on the legal ladder. Still, he says, people need to understand that getting a law degree is no guarantee of getting a training contract.

The very concept of the training contract encapsulates the challenges in the report. "The report says that training contracts are essentially a good thing," Charles Plant says. "But they don't have them in the US, and it's very short in Australia. Ours is two years. What the report suggests is that we should look at training contracts not in the context of a fixed period but in the context of when outcomes are achieved." And there you have it. The concept of outcomes, pioneered by the SRA about two years ago and translated elsewhere in the report as 'day one learning outcomes', is finding its way into the fabric of the profession, from university and LPC through to the first stages of a solicitor's career and his ongoing development. This may not be a bad thing, but quite how firms and individuals will satisfy themselves that they comply with the new regulatory mindset - and how the regulator assesses compliance - will be another matter altogether.