How To Become A Lawyer

My name is Martin Meenath from City Tutors Limited, and I am a non-practicing barrister, a lector and a tutor. One group of barristers, barristers are trained and practice differently from solicitors. If we take barristers first, barristers don't have to have a law degree.

But they do have to have a good upper second or first class qualification in a legitimate subject. Barristers then take a graduate diploma in law, and then if they wish to proceed, they take the bar professional training course. Both the graduate diploma in law and the bar professional training course last a year.

Of course, if you already have a law degree, you don't have to do the graduate diploma in law course. After you do the bar professional training course which involves advocacy, negotiation, conferencing and evidence skills and which assesses them by a mixture of role plays and essays, you move on to pupillage. Pupillages are hard to come by but once you have one, you typically perform in two 6-month blocks under the care of a pupil supervisor before qualifying as a barrister.

The bar, even then, is not a necessarily secure environment and sometimes it takes people a great deal of time to find tendency in chambers. Once tendency is established, a person is an established barrister. Solicitors have things a little different.

Solicitors can again do a non-law degree and then a graduate diploma in law, but they then undertake a legal practice course. It's a good idea if you intend to be a solicitor to see if a company will sponsor you to the legal practice course because you don't qualify as a solicitor at the end of that course, instead you have to have a training contract lasting two years with a law firm before you can describe yourself as a solicitor and start up businesses on your own. There are some 15,000 barristers in this country.

There are some 80,000 solicitors at the time I was last looking. A good few of them are non-practicing, a great many are academic, and a good many combine the law with other work. Debts are quite high at the moment and times are quite hard, but the profession is rewarding and the money should not discourage you because scholarships and incomes are available from a variety of sources.

It's a rewarding and worthwhile profession but one shouldn't go into it thinking that it will be an easy reprise of LA Law. .