Reply to Fast track law school options

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Fast track law school options"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is a terrible idea. What people really hire lawyers for, ultimately, is their judgment. Knowing how to research the law is not that hard. But being able effectively to counsel clients about how to use the law to achieve their goals requires some seasoning and maturity. No one will hire a kid for that.  [/quote]

This.  College is for finding who you are -- and a job -- maybe.  You do not know enough to practice law after just a few years.  In the UK you do undergrad and then need to get a job as a trainee for two years.  They call the status NQ for non-qualified.  You largely do grunt work.  If the firm likes you you get an offer to come back as qualified.  But in my experience, British lawyers that come up this way are crap until maybe there 5th year past qualification.  US associates get there (if they do) about 2-3 years after law school.  So I think the US is actually faster.  By the way, until recently NQs did not get paid that much by US standards.[/quote]

As a dual qualified UK/US lawyer, I just want to correct this. English lawyers do undergrad (could be law, or could be anything else), and then either 1 or 2 years of law school (depending on whether they did law undergrad or not) and then 2 years of a training contract, which is on the job training at a law firm. The training contract is a structured process - you absolutely do grunt work (similar to a US first year associate) but there is a lot of training, including classroom based training, built into it too, and you have to spend 6 months in 4 different practice areas learning different areas of law. In my experience, and I’ve seen many NQs and many US trained attorneys, an NQ (who, if they worked for a US firm, would be paid as a 1st year associate) is far, far superior to a US first or second year associate, who usually has literally no idea what they are doing. It evens out after a few years, of course. Essentially, it is the same time period in each country though - after undergrad it is 3 years (or 4 in the UK if you did not do law undergrad) before you are a first year associate. It’s just that in the UK, two of those years are job-based learning (they are paid, but not as highly, although most have no law school debts because their firms will have paid for law school too). [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics