Blog: 6 May 2022 - Helen Edwards, LLG President

When I became President of LLG I said that one of my key areas of focus for this year was to open up access to the legal profession to champion equality, diversity, inclusion and social mobility. I am keen to encourage and support individuals from all backgrounds to forge a successful career in law, and in particular, a career as a local government lawyer.  

In her blog last week, LLG’s Training Director, and my colleague at Norfolk County Council, Fiona Anthony, explained the various routes to qualification using the new Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE) procedure. I hope everyone found this helpful as I know from some conversations that not everyone has yet, fully got to grips with the options.  

Here at Norfolk, we have a long history of successfully training lawyers. We currently have 5 trainees on traditional training contracts at varying stages, with 2 more due to join us in September. We are actively encouraging our existing legal officers to qualify using the apprenticeship route and recruiting new legal officers with this as an offer to them on completion of six months successfully working as a legal officer. We have just appointed our first graduate level apprentice, and we are working on plans to offer a full solicitor apprenticeship to those who do not have a degree. Of course, the ability to offer quality training is limited by the capacity of existing lawyers in the team to support and train them, and we are keen to get the balance of numbers right.   

I am proud of the progress that we are making in opening up our legal team to a wider range of people, and I know that this will make a real difference to the careers of some people for whom a traditional entrance to a legal career would be difficult. But our reasons for this approach are not only altruistic. Like many councils we are struggling to recruit lawyers to key roles, and for some time have adopted a “grow our own” approach. The alternative methods of working post pandemic have brought benefits, but also challenges. People are less willing to relocate to take up a new role if full-time office attendance is not required. Hybrid or remote working also gives a much wider choice of geographical location for colleagues we might once have recruited.  So we are having to work much harder to attract good candidates, and we hope that targeting people who already live locally and are keen to qualify as lawyers will be a win/win situation, opening up exciting career opportunities for candidates and giving us a stronger pool of local government lawyers for the future.  

I would be interested to hear from colleagues in other authorities as to how you are making the most of the range of options for training lawyers. LLG is in discussions with CILEX about proposals to provide targeted training courses to enable qualification into a specific area of law, and we will bring you more on this exciting project as it develops.