The Legal Education and Training Group (LEGT) has hit out at the Law Society’s plans to revamp legal training in its response to the controversial Training Framework Review.


The Legal Education and Training Group (LETG) has hit out at the Law Society’s plans to revamp legal training in its response to the controversial Training Framework Review.

In its paper published yesterday (6 June), the LETG says that at an open meeting of 28 law firms, two-thirds of the firms were against the abolition of the existing legal practice course (LPC).

“The TFR [Training Framework Review] Group’s assertions can only be seen as a triumph of naïveté over experience,” the report states.

The LETG said: “One of the golden rules in any change project is that you need to create an overwhelming vision for change – and in the context of the TFR it is not clear that the Law Society has managed to do this.”

The paper adds that several commentators have warned that a move to an outcomes-based approach to training would encourage “crammer courses” at the expense of more thorough study.

Examining the Law Society’s proposals in more depth, the LETG suggests that the assessment of trainees’ “portfolios” of experience should be done by law firms, to avoid a backlog of marking. It also warns that training supervisors could be costly to the profession.

Concluding, the LETG says that the LPC could be redesigned to take account of the changes in the legal profession, while still existing in some form.