Young shun careers as 'poorly paid' solicitors

STEPHEN WARD

Legal Affairs Correspondent

Fewer graduates than ever are applying to be solicitors because of declining salaries and career prospects, the latest figures from the Law Society show.

Applications for the one-year compulsory postgraduate courses starting this September closed last month, and Law Society figures show that the numbers applying are down by a quarter in three years, and 15 per cent since last year. For the first time in living memory, the profession is facing a shortage of demand. Many of the one-year postgraduate courses are running with empty places this year, and from September there will be even bigger shortfalls.

Applications for places have traditionally outstripped supply. But a virtual drying up of grants to fund the one-year postgraduate courses, coupled with a declining chance of earning enough in future to repay overdrafts, is blamed for the change. Fees are pounds 5,000 for the year, and students - many already burdened with debts from their degree course - have to find another year's living expenses, too.

Applicants for next year's courses have dropped from 8,959 to 7,595. If the same proportion as usual drop out before starting, and the same percentage fail their exams at the end, there will only be a few more successful graduates than training places, currently about 4,000 a year.

Because most graduates are not completely flexible about where they will work, or what type of work they want, the profession believes it needs a 10 per cent surplus to fill all training places. The calibre of candidate has apparently fallen already - whereas only one in fourteen used to fail the exams, now one in five do so. Only five years ago the profession was gearing up for expansion, licensing many of the new universities to provide legal practice courses in addition to the traditional sole provider, the College of Law. But the optimism of the late Eighties was tempered by the realities of the recession, particularly in house sales, which hit conveyancing income hard.

Under the profession's rules, a student cannot qualify as a solicitor until they have spent two years in an "apprenticeship" with a firm, on what is known as a training contract. Initially, when the expanded courses began to come through in 1993, there was a huge surplus of postgraduates with no training contracts to go to. Their experience has deterred their successors.

Paradoxically, the news comes at a time when the profession is trying to find a way to impose artificial limits on the numbers coming in. Martin Mears, president of the Law Society, has suggested imposing tests to weed out some applicants for the courses.

However, John Randall, the Law Society's director in charge of training, warned that there was a risk of a shortage of high-street practitioners. He said that local firms, which had already been squeezed by the recession, faced an uncertain future because of legal aid and divorce reforms, and few could afford to take on trainees.

He said it was "extremely regrettable" for the profession that only the children of richer parents could now afford to become solicitors.

Richard Holbrook, head of the College of Law, which provides more postgraduate courses than all the others put together, said that 30 years ago it was mostly the children of the wealthy who were able to become solicitors. By 1970 it had become more egalitarian, but now it was going back again.

"If you have been paying school fees for years, you won't mind paying pounds 5,000," he said. "Market forces are taking their effect."