Jane Ching & Natalie Byrom grapple with the present & future demands of legal services education
Happy new year, happy new legal services landscape. With the first (conveyancing) ABSs already in place and others to follow, ever-present changes to legal aid, and university applications decreasing, predicting where the legal profession might be in even the very near future is an enormous task. Then work backwards to work out what kind of education and training system might be needed to equip people to work in the new landscape and to deal with future changes to it. And then suggest how that system might best be regulated (by, for example, regulating training providers and courses; by regulating outcomes; by regulating how individual legal services businesses are conducted, or some combination of all of the above?). All of this is the challenge with which the legal education and training review research team has been grappling since the middle of last year.
Question marks
You may well have seen the research questions we
