A paradigm shift

Social media is full of surprises, not least the one presented by LinkedIn which prompted a colleague to congratulate me on my 21st anniversary with Nottingham Law School—really a rather terrifying anniversary. I know I had registered my six-year anniversary, on the entirely self-serving basis that that meant the limitation period had expired on any messes I had managed to leave behind in practice. A group of us, all recruited for the first year of the LPC in 1993, had also had a survivors’ lunch once we hit our 20th anniversary. But 21 is a rather different kind of watershed, marking, as it does, the coming of age of a particular form of vocational legal education for solicitors in England and Wales: what I will call the shift from the “knowledge era” to the “skills era”.

Days of yore

In June 1993, we still didn’t have a building to put our new LPC in. Even when we did, it