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Clifford Chance signs training deal with CoL

19 November 2008

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Corinne McPartland

Clifford Chance has signed up the College of Law (CoL) to run every aspect of vocational training for its future trainee solicitors.

The school, which already provides a bespoke Legal Practice Course (LPC) for the firm, will now deliver tailor-made vocational programmes for its trainees over a five-year period.

It will now be the sole provider of the Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL), the Trainee Litigation Programme (TLP) and Professional Skills Course (PSC) for all Clifford Chance trainees.

The pair are also joining forces to provide the Qualified Lawyers Transfer Test (QLTT) to qualify the firm's overseas lawyers for practice in England and Wales.

Head of HR development at Clifford Chance Tony King said: "By partnering with the College of Law, we can ensure our people will receive the high quality training which will prepare them for handling challenging client work and providing the best service to our clients."

The move comes after BPP Law School was named as the sole GDL provider for a consortium of five leading City firms made up of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Herbert Smith, Lovells, Norton Rose and Slaughter and May (http://www.thelawyer.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=134561). The consortium had already signed up BPP as its preferred LPC provider.

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Readers' comments (1)

  • Anonymous | 19-Dec-2008 10:45 am

    Specified GDL provider

    I was somewhat concerned to read this article.

    It is the issue of a specified GDL provider which troubled me. Although the rationale behind the tailored LPC is clear and reasonable, it seems unnecessarily prescriptive that a firm should specify where its future trainees should do the GDL. Many people, for personal reasons, want to do their GDL outside London -- they might simply prefer to stay on in their university town, for example, or have other, more pressing, reasons to be elsewhere in the country for the year. Still more, after years of mounting student debt, will want to save money by living with their parents for the year and commute to the local law school.

    Also, there are various reasons why it doesn't make any sense: many non-law applicants don't get their training contract offers until a matter of weeks before they start the GDL (or even up to a couple of weeks after starting), by which time they may well have accepted a place (and arranged accommodation) somewhere other than the specified law school. What would they do in that instance? Presumably they'd have to let the person go elsewhere. Added to that are the many students who only apply while already on the GDL -- presumably their applications wouldn't be refused just because they were at the wrong law school. This would effectively make a bit of a mockery of the idea that some benefit might be gained from having all future trainees at a certain law school. As for the reasoning behind it, it can't really be in order to have their future trainees close at hand, as analogous final-year law students will be at universities all over the country. And I can't really imagine the GDL could be 'tailored' for a firm in any meaningful way.

    Essentially, I feel this is worthy of examination/criticism in the next issue of Lawyer2B as it is an issue which should be of genuine concern to many potential trainees.

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