Knowledge Centre

Love him or loathe him, Boris Johnson has a great big majority and his Conservative government is set to bring about major changes over the next five years.

 

Brexit now looks a dead cert (although expect more flurries of legal action as activist lawyers look to hold the government to account as the UK thrashes out new trade deals), with the focus now surely turning to implementing the Johnsonian vision for the future of Britain.

 

What will this mean for the legal profession and those seeking to enter it?

 

Perhaps the biggest feature of the Tories’ win was their spectacular defeat of Jeremy Corbyn in many traditional Labour strongholds in the north. To retain these seats Johnson will have to channel funding outside the M25. Serious state investment in infrastructure, healthcare, green energy and technology will generate substantial amounts of legal work for the big commercial law firms. As they chomp through it, and become reliant on it, expect their attitudes to the north to start to shift — don’t be surprised if some firms start to drop the ‘northshoring’ language of outsourcing and start referring to their hubs in Manchester, Leeds, Belfast and elsewhere as proper offices.

 

Quick plug here for our LegalEdCon North event in Manchester on 30 January 2020.

 

Labour’s plan to scrap undergraduate tuition fees would have been great news for students while posing a problem for the new Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE), which was designed partly to allow a cheaper route to qualification for debt-burdened future lawyers.

 

The Conservatives’ win means that the prohibitive cost of qualifying as a lawyer remains very much an issue that will negatively impact access to the profession unless pro-active steps are taken to mitigate it.

 

To this end, expect pressure to be put on big law firms to start using the money they are forced to set aside under the apprenticeship levy (which at many firms is just sitting there dormant) to help students from less privileged backgrounds to become lawyers.

 

Under the solicitor apprentice model being developed to dovetail with the introduction of the SQE in 2021, rookies complete a law degree and then professional skills training part-time while working four days a week as paralegals. At the end of six years they are qualified solicitors. As the success stories from this new route start being told, more firms will surely jump on the bandwagon.

 

Although the Tory manifesto pledges to end austerity and splash cash on the NHS, it is almost silent on legal aid. Indeed, other than mentioning a pilot scheme to evaluate the return of legal aid to cover early advice in some areas of social welfare law (as removed by Chris Grayling when he was Lord Chancellor in the Coalition government), there’s barely any mention of it.

 

Instead, Johnson and co have been banging the law and order drum by talking loudly about being “tough on serious crime”. What does that actually mean? “Making prison sentences a bit longer”, says legal aid whistleblower the Secret Barrister. SB’s suggestions for fixing the criminal justice system sadly look likely to go unheeded.