Member Article

Sunderland Law School launches Training Contract Scheme

Sunderland Law School is launching a Training Contract Scheme aimed at enabling small to medium firms and in-house legal teams recruit graduates from its new LLM Legal Practice LPC as Trainee Solicitors in the North East.

Sunderland Law School launched its new LLM Legal Practice LPC in September 2016 with 38 students. The programme aims to enhance the traditional LPC by requiring all students to spend a year practising law under the supervision of qualified solicitors in Sunderland Student Law Clinic, a full-service pro bono clinic. The programme is the first in the country to be approved to assess the LPC Course Skills of Writing, Practical Legal Research and Interviewing and Advising in a live client setting and most students will have spent two years in the clinic by the time they leave university, making them ready to have a positive impact on employers’ businesses as soon as they start.

Students are competing at the business end of recruitment processes of firms like Watson Burton and Bond Dickinson LLP but the programme is primarily aimed at readying students for employment in the many small to medium firms and in-house legal teams that make up the legal market in the North East.

Many small to medium firms and in-house legal teams often do not recruit Trainee Solicitors because of the two year financial commitment it entails and because they might not be able to offer training in three areas of English law including at least one contentious and one non-contentious area as required by the SRA Training Regulations.

Under the Scheme, Trainee Solicitors are employed by Sunderland Intern Factory Ltd and paid an annual salary of £17,000 at a total annual cost of £20,049. The University of Sunderland is registered as the Training Principal accountable to the SRA for the quality of training that the Trainees receive. The Trainees then go on placements of between 3-24 months with placement providers able to provide a quality training placement in at least one area of practice.

Placement providers are invoiced by Sunderland Intern Factory Ltd pro-rata for the time the Trainee spends with their organisation.

If an organisation qualifies as a Small to Medium Enterprise (’SME’) then Sunderland Intern Factory Ltd may be able to make a £6000 salary contribution to the cost of a 12 month placement, meaning an organisation could recruit a Trainee Solicitor for 12 months at a total cost of just £14,049.

In a further effort to give confidence to organisations to recruit, and to improve security for Trainees, in the unfortunate event a placement needs to end early due to changes in financial or staffing circumstances then the placement provider need only give 2 weeks’ notice and the Trainee will return to continue their training with Sunderland Student Law Clinic for a short time before being allocated another placement.

Chris Smith, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Sunderland, said “This Scheme aims to boost the employment and retention of young lawyers in our region. Our graduates, by and large, live locally and want to work locally and that presents an exciting opportunity for our region to retain superb young talent in an effort to grow small to medium firms and develop in-house legal teams in the North East and counter the increasing trend for our young people to take their talent to the larger organisations in the big cities.“

He went on “the Scheme is flexible and we want to talk to any potential employer interested in finding out more about how this could help their organisation“.

For more information contact Chris Smith at chris.smith@sunderland.ac.uk or on 0191 515 3182

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Chris Smith .