Legal aid work won't mark you for life, trainees

I am currently interviewing prospective candidates for
a training contract: young people, with excellent GCSEs, great A-levels, and, for the most part, 2.1 degrees from good universities. In fact the CVs all look very much the same. Where they start to differ is in relation to work experience and, to a certain extent, life experience.

Life experience can be a guide to how successful a trainee might be. Trekking around South America for six months on a limited budget shows the ability to deal with problems, manage money, and deal with difficult situations; telling me about their time as a waitress
in Bolton does not impress me.

I have noticed that the questions trainees ask me
have become increasingly sophisticated. Trainees want
to know what the firm’s future plans are. They want detailed information on retention rates and (this is rather worrying) they ask what proportion of the work is legally aided and what is privately funded. Trainees are beginning to get wary of legal aid firms. They understand that the future does not appear to be good and indeed that there may not be a future at all.

I worry sometimes that top candidates do not even apply to firms that do a certain amount
of legal aid work. Sadly, this is a recent and rather unexpected development. In the old days
I used to have trainees transfer their training contracts to my firm because they were with bigger firms (and earning more money) but doing deadly dull work, such as aircraft mortgages, with no client contact.

Nowadays, there is a very real perception that if you do your training contract with a legal aid firm you will be branded with a mark of shame for life and have difficulty getting a job. How sad. The fact is that working in a small high street firm gives you the thrill of client contact, the ability to do your own advocacy, and the means to deal with often very unexpected situations.

My firm has been in existence for nearly 60 years. We have
had nearly 90 trainees over that period. Some are now judges, senior partners in their own firms, and extremely successful solicitors, literally all over
the world.

The fact that we can offer trainees the variety of legal
aid and private client work means they turn out extremely well-rounded members of
our profession.

Our reception area can sometimes see an interesting group of clients, ranging from
a lord and a lady in to see our private client department
to a Somali refugee family desperate to obtain accommodation from the
local authority. They all get
on excellently.

The future of training in the profession is something that is currently under review. Will we continue to have trainees? Will we take on more apprentices? Or will the new paralegal route become the new way? Whatever happens, I will still have to ask the most important question at interview: are you allergic to dogs? Because Cosmo needs the love of the trainees! SJ

Russell Conway is senior partner at Oliver Fisher