How To Become A Solicitor

My name is Tim Welsh. I'm a university law lecturer, a barrister and a law tutor at City Law Tutors, and I'm going to talk to you about how to find legal jobs. I'm now going to talk to you about how to become a solicitor.

The way to become a solicitor will start with the academic stage of training and will then involve a vocational stage of training before going onto a two-year on-the-job training. The academic stage of becoming a solicitor involves doing either a law degree which is typically a three-year course known as an LLB or sometimes a BA for example in University of Oxford or you can take the graduate diploma in law. The graduate diploma in law is a one-year course used by people who already have a degree but not in law to convert that non-law degree into a law degree or otherwise known as a qualifying law degree.

The qualifying law degree has seven subjects which must be studied on it. So for example, you will need to study the law of contract, the law of torts, land law and trust law. You will also need to study public law otherwise known as constitutional and administrative law, criminal law, and you also need to know about EU law and also the English legal system.

The vocational stage in training to become a solicitor involves taking a one-year course known as the legal practice course or a two-year course which is the legal practice course taken part-time. The course involves vocational skill type subjects such as drafting or advocacy or writing of letters as well as knowledge-based subjects such as business law and practice. Once you've finished the vocational stage training in the legal practice course, you may then apply to a firm of solicitors to undertake what is known as a training contract.

A training contract's taken over two years of period set by the law society or the solicitor's regulation authority. The period of two years will often, if you're in a city firm, be broken into four seats. So you may take a seat in, say litigation and in corporate law or in employment law.

Whichever you do will depend on the firm you're working. You must though do something contentious and something non-contentious. For example, something contentious might be litigating in a court and something non-contentious might be doing something such as drafting a will.

In any case, you must cover those two aspects before your training contract will be a training contract accredited by law society. Once you have completed your two-year training contract, you will be given a practicing certificate, you will be added to the row of solicitors, you will then be able to practice as a solicitor in a firm. City Law Tutors regularly train students in all of the stages in becoming a solicitor and if you want to find out more as to how we can help, visit our website on www.

citylawtutors.co.uk. .