On 12th March 1829 undergraduates at the University of Cambridge sent a challenge to their counterparts at Oxford and started a tradition which continues in more or less the same form to this day.
If you missed it last Saturday, imagine 16 heavy athletic men, plus a smaller man and a girl, afloat on the Thames in two boats so flimsy that the slightest mistake will result in thousands of pounds worth of boat having a large hole in the hull and everyone getting rather wetter than they had hoped or in the case of the winning crew’s cox, as wet as he knew he would become once the race was over.
The 157th Oxford v Cambridge Boat Race was rowed in near perfect conditions and Oxford’s impressive win means that they have now won 76 times to Cambridge’s 80 (one race was a dead heat). This is significant, because if you are an Oxford man, as I am, you have spent all your life seeing Cambridge’s once commanding lead in the overall statistics dwindle to almost parity. Dare I dream that in the not too distant future Oxford will overtake their rivals in the total number of wins? If so, I will have to make a real effort to attend a Dinosaurs’ Dinner again; for those unfamiliar with the Dinosaurs it has nothing to do with prehistoric times and everything to do with eating and drinking too much at my old college where the rowers’ dining club is called the Dinosaurs!
Tradition is something that we in this country do well. Examples abound: the pageantry of the State Opening of Parliament, the Grand National, winning the Ashes and losing humiliatingly to Sri Lanka in the World Cup, the way we conduct litigation in this country, perhaps even the forthcoming Royal wedding. We do it all well and for the most part, in style, so it is something of a surprise when we are told that tradition is to change.
Last week I was invited by the University of Nottingham Trent Law School to attend one of their regular series of Distinguished Lectures. (I, and they, mean of course that the lecturer is distinguished and not necessarily the lecture. In this case it was both!) Lord Saville delivered an excellent talk on how to run a public inquiry and for me, sitting in the front row with one or two of my former colleagues who had worked on the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, it quickly brought it all back and with it the renewed determination to get to grips with the 10 volume report sitting on the floor of my office at home.
It was after the talk and over the dinner which followed that I was first made aware of proposals to update the training of solicitors, something which appears to have been set in stone for more years than I care to remember. Apparently the University of Northumbria is offering a course to enable students to qualify as solicitors without undergoing a training contract. It is called ‘work based learning’ and is a 5 year course which will superficially appear to law students to be attractive. After all the present career path takes 6 years because the university course is a minimum of 3 years, followed by a year doing the LPC and 2 years of a training contract.
I say superficially because while a student may qualify a year earlier than by the traditional route, they will have to spend 5 years at university for which they will shortly have to pay increased tuition fees and whereas law firms often help with the fees of the LPC and pay their trainees during the training contract, there is no obvious way in which they are going to pay for a 5 year course. Also it is too early to say what view law firms and indeed other lawyers will take of these “untrained” qualifiers.
It remains to be seen what happens to this proposal to change the traditional route to qualification but it will certainly arouse interest in the ranks of those coming into the legal profession who have seen the number of training contracts decrease year on year for the past three years. I see this first hand as I have spent some considerable time in the past months interviewing and employing new LPC graduates to help us and our clients manage litigation in perhaps untraditional ways.
From a standing start in November we now have a complement of 11 paralegals, all of whom are LPC graduates and aspiring lawyers. The position for them is stark, however, when you learn that despite excellent degrees from good universities and despite having completed the LPC often with distinction, only one of the 11 we currently employ has the offer of a training contract. What is more, in interviewing these bright and sparky individuals, not one of whom has yet been deterred by the apparent difficulty they face, I hear stories of deferral of training contracts and even contracts not on offer before 2013-14.
One of Lord Saville’s points in his talk was that the judicious use of technology can help in the efficient and cost effective running of a public inquiry. He has come in for some criticism for presiding over the longest and most expensive public inquiry in English legal history but that does not in any way detract from the valid point he was making, namely that lawyers can and must be aware of advances in technology which can and in most cases will assist in dealing with matters such as disclosure at a time when the emphasis is rightly on the need to reduce the cost of litigation/contentious work.
Which made it all the more poignant to read the letter by His Honour Judge Simon Brown QC in the Times on my way to Nottingham by train. Simon Brown is of course well known to the reader of this blog as the Judge in charge of the Mercantile in Court in Birmingham and the man who handed down the seminal judgment in Earles v Barclays Bank .
He kindly sent me a copy of his letter entitled “Technology is slow in assisting justice” – you can read it here. The thrust of his comments is that whereas other countries namely Australia, Singapore and the US have ensured that electronic service delivery at least by Government is now a reality, in this country the situation is the converse. In these straitened times the learned judge expresses the hope that we will see “a public-private partnership on public service technology advancing us into the 21st Century envisaged a decade ago by senior judges, the Civil Service and the Government alike.”
It seems clear to me and indeed most commentators and most litigators that we have got to take the issue of using technology seriously. I say “most” because I still occasionally receive comments from lawyers expressing surprise at the suggestion that they should consider the use of technology as part of their strategy for conducting litigation and even (although rarely) the comment that “I don’t think we have any need for this at present.”
The CPR and the courts are making strenuous efforts to nudge litigators in the direction signalled by the advance of technology and the clients will certainly want to add their weight if it means lower fees and a quicker resolution of their disputes.
I am all for the continued success of the Dark Blues and our ability to help a small number of would be lawyers to achieve their goal by learning different skills while waiting for a training contract, but I am not sure that I am as yet convinced by pure work based learning as a means to qualify as a solicitor.
The case for the use of technology has been made and the means to access the expertise is there, but no training contracts? That is a tradition which I suspect has some way to run yet.
The Natural History Museum lists some 333 known types of dinosaur in its Dino Directory. Not a lawyer among them (as far as I am aware) though, in view of my comments above, perhaps I am a dinosaur after all.