CORRESPONDENCE

I’HE ORMROD REPORT : VOCATIONAL TRAIXING T H E E D I T O R , Jlodrrit LaZU Review.

Dear Sir: I should like to comment on a feature that I find disturbing in both the

articles commenting on the Ormrod Report published ante (1971) 34 M.L.R. 636 and 642. Whilst both contributions contained much to stimulate, together with a number of critical comments for which there is a great deal to be said, the central problem of the objects of the proposed professional training schools and the closely associated one of how these schools can be competently staffed is not in my view tackled with sufficient realism.

Professor Wilson states with regard to the professional courses that “ the proposals of the Committee are far more ambitious and imaginative than anything of which present activities could be regarded as the seed.” Professor Arthurs takes a rather different view, since whilst conceding that the Report envisages a somewhat broader type of vocational course than the Bar Admission Course in Ontario, he concludes that even if adopted the courses proposed by the Ormrod Committee would differ “ in degree, not in kind” from the Canadian courses. These he criticises by pointing out that when a student has been engaged in deliberating the issues which have engaged the world’s finest minds during the academic stage he finds “ total immersion in the mundane quasi-clerical work of form-filling, precedent following and routine tasks” which form a large part of the professional courses results in loss of morale and idealism.

The point I would like t o make quite unequivocallly is that, whether we like i t or not, the vast proportion of the actual legal work carried on by ordinary solicitors in England ostensibly consists of just such mundane and routine tasks. What might appear to be the more glamorous life at the bar is also in reality liberally mixed with work of a highly routine nature. The Committee itself does not duck this apparently unpalatable fact though they rightly imply that a better organised system of legal education should encourage the legal profession to offer its services In wider and less well- trodden pastures. This in no way should imply that training in the proper conduct of “routine tasks’’ is not something with which the proposed pro- fessional law schools should concern themselves. If one conceives the opera- tion of the legal profession as a process of “social engineering” i t follous inescapably that an engineering project of this magnitude needs a legion of skilled mechanics. These mechanics must be trained, and it is this that is the central task of the professional law schools. An d c i e n t training s y s t m will also train its mechanics to assume the role of engineer when the occasion arises, but as in every other professional discipline the sophisticated or specialist skill must, if it is to be securely grounded, be superimposed on n sound basic technique. It must be conceded that inevitably there will be some who find this training process to some extent “demoralising,” though this effect can be mitigated by imaginative teaching. One of the problems which attends the idea of such courses is that simulation of professional work in an institution divorced from “ the real thing” is bound to be dehumanised- and i t is of course easily forgotten in the confines of a law school that even the most apparently mundane probate matter involves dealing with bereaved relatives tactfully and sympathetically, that the dullest divorce involves handling a distraught spouse and that the most routine conveyancing matter often involves helping a householder face up to the difficulties of one of the largest financial transactions he is likely to undertake. Law is about people, their activities and possessions; the attraction of legal practice is that one is dealing with people and their problems a t the “front end” of the business.

223

224 THE MODERN LAW REVIEW VOL. 35

l h e reason, then, that I personally support the substitution of the present system of apprenticeship with the shorter vocational system proposed by the Committee and the professional bodies is a perfectly simple one, namely, that it should be found that the vocational course provides education and training a great deal more quickly and, on average, efficiently than the old Imphazard system. On the debit side there is, as I have said, the lack of the human element in the otherwise simulated conditions of practice. On the credit side, and far outbalancing the debits, is the shorter more concentrated and more comprehensive training which we hope will be offered.

Finally, as to staffing. I entirely agree with Professor Wilson that univer- sity teachers have an important contribution t o make with regard to some aspects of the proposed courses. They could and should add a desirable dimension to what could otherwise be too unvaried or even, if the pro- fessional schools are not doing their work successfully, lacking in intellectual quality. I do not agree that there is any real evidence that there are anything like enough teachers at present in universities or polytechnics to provide even the basis of the “ staff officers ” needed to run the proposed courses success- fully. Two years experience in helping to run such courses at the Nigerim Law School (and acquaintance with practice and academic law in England) convinces me that the person who can boast (a) the requisite practical experience combined with (b) a high degree of teaching ability, and can successfully synthesise the two, is a comparatively rare bird. Undoubtedly a few such persons do exist currently in our educational institutions but i t is necessary to remember that if present statistics represent future trends the professional law schools are likely to have to cope with (as regards solicitors) over 1,000 students in each year. It will be an important function of the rnembers of staff to give each student much the same degree of personal tuition as his principal would or should have done under the apprenticeship system. The end products of the schools will, L t is hoped by the Committee, enter practice sufficiently well equipped to command a reasonable salary for the work that they are able to do. Their employers will scrutinise them with some suspicion initially, and it is essential that they should at least measure ~p to the technical standard of the erstwhile articled clerk. I have, alas, no practical suggestions as to how staff of this calibre can be recruited in suffident numbers unless a determined co-operative effort is made to train them by allowing interested academics to acquire experience in practice (or increase and make more current their existing practical know-how). Interested pradit6oners might also be trained in the basic teaching and research skills of the academic lawyer, so often under-estimated by them. Alternatively consideration should be given to the compromise scheme proposed by Mr. Asterley Jones (see (1971) 115 S.J. 746) involving 12 years’ articles and a 30-week training course-perhaps a more feasible proposition than “ full Orrnrod” in present circumstances. A t all events the present position is that the College of Law has seized the initiative and is plannhg to mount pilot courses for a limited number of students well before any other institution gets going.

Whatever the future holds, my central paint is that a failure by university spokesmen to analyse realistically the nature of the jobs which lawyers at present and in the foreseeable future are or will be required to undertake in practice is dangerously counter-productive. Not only may the professional law schools be inhibited from fulfilling their essential purpose (and the experiment would consequently go off a t half-cock) but the already latent suspicion of academic lawyers held by their counterparts in practice will be exacerbated. The absence of co-operation to which this is bound to lead is, as Professor Wilson rightly infers, a consummation devoutly not to be wished.

BRIAX HARVEY, ~ . . 4 . , ILB., A.T.I.I., Solicitor. The Queen‘s University, Belfast. Professor of Law