For years Roger Waite dreamt of being an ace reporter, scooping his rivals and landing front-page stories. One of his proudest moments came as a student reporter at Oxford, when he exposed Alexander Fellowes, nephew of Diana, Princess of Wales, as a member of the exclusive drinking society the Bullingdon club.
“They had organised a drunken evening and a pub was smashed up. Getting the story was quite satisfying,” he said.
Having worked most of his holidays for media organisations, Waite was delighted when, aged 22, he landed a staff job on a national newspaper. Within three years, however, he had quit to go to law school.
Today Waite, 28, is a trainee solicitor at a central London law firm — one of a growing number of graduates in their twenties who are deciding that becoming a lawyer is one of the safest and most lucrative career paths in these uncertain times.
Some are giving up their first career choice to go back to college and study law. Others are realising that their arts degree has not helped them secure the job they had hoped for and are embarking on postgraduate study to become a solicitor.
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“I knew I wanted a family life, and journalism did not seem to fit with that,” Waite, a history graduate, said last week. “I had a very exciting time in newspapers and learnt a lot. It was a brilliant education in so many ways, but pay was an issue and so were the hours. I thought law would be better suited to me.”
Since 2007 the number of students on both undergraduate and postgraduate law courses has risen from 88,780 to 92,950. To keep up with the soaring demand, law courses are expanding.
According to Peter Crisp, dean of the private law school BPP, recruitment on to the undergraduate law degree (LLB) is now undertaken at three points during the year, in September, January and May.
“This May we have had 126 students enrol on the LLB, which is astonishing,” he said. “Last year we had around 24. You would not think May was a popular time to start a degree and yet we have this number of people. I am surprised how strong the market is.
“It reminds me of a recent line in the Financial Times, ‘Investors’ flight to safety’. What we are seeing, I think, is a flight to safety. In a recession, law seems a relatively safe bet.”
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Competition for jobs, particularly in the “magic circle” of top five firms — Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Linklaters, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Slaughter and May — is ferocious, with hundreds of applicants chasing each traineeship. The situation is not helped, says Crisp, by some firms “delaying offering contracts because of the recession”.
How do you become a lawyer? To start with, to become a solicitor, law graduates must study for the legal practice course (LPC), a postgraduate qualification. Then they need to complete a training contract (previously known as articles) with a law firm. Non-law graduates must take the graduate diploma in law (GDL) before taking the LPC.
According to Crisp, most London firms pay a salary of £30,000-£40,000 to trainee solicitors. “There’s a guide to salaries at the website rollonfriday.com,” he adds. “But as a rough rule of thumb, by age 28 you could be on a six-figure salary in London, half that in the provinces.”
To become a barrister is even more competitive. There are 450 pupillages a year, and about 1,700 students compete for them, says Crisp. If you do get a pupillage, pay is about £40,000, which can rise to six figures once a successful practice is established, particularly in lucrative fields such as commercial law. Following cuts to legal aid budgets, however, Crisp says he does “not advise going into criminal practice at the bar”.
Waite was offered a training contract with Withers, an international commercial law firm. It sponsored him through the LPC, paying his fees of about £20,000 as well as a salary while he completes his two years on the job.
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He was “fortunate” to get a contract in 2009 and worries that, without sponsorship, graduates risk running up large debts. “There can be an issue with people who fund their own way through the two-year course but then are left without a job. It is very, very competitive,” he says.
Nonetheless, some graduates do decide to pay their own way. One such is Sarah-Jane Davis, who is planning to leave her computing job to complete the GDL at her own expense. A year ago Davis was offered a summer placement at a law firm and narrowly missed out on a training contract. “I think I stand a good chance of getting a job in a law firm once I have qualified,” she says, “and it seems like one of the few proper careers with a structure and opportunities left to my generation.”
Crisp advises taking a good hard look at your abilities. “For the right people it’s the most satisfying career in the world. But for many, reading a set of papers and having to think hard about a problem is not fun.”
Is the market already saturated? Not according to Nigel Savage, chief executive of the College of Law. “The Law Society is saying there are too many youngsters coming into law, but to be honest the number of training contracts is increasing too,” he says. “The legal market for services is expanding globally as the middle classes grow in China and India; 84% of our students get jobs straight after finishing — about 60% on training contracts with law firms, the rest secure high-level paralegal jobs.”
For Waite the next test will come in 18 months’ time, when his firm decides to which of the 15 trainees in his year to offer jobs. At present he has no regrets. “So far it’s been very enjoyable and I feel I have made the right decision. You would have to talk to me again in a couple of years to get a definitive answer.”
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Some names have been changed