All tomorrow's parties?

It's been results day for our finalists in Warwick Law School today. Lots of smiley happy people... and some rather less so. The bustle of term is coming to an end and a bit of a holiday atmosphere is starting to pervade, well amongst the students at least. We laid on celebratory drinks in the reception area, another School was doing much the same on the grass below my office window, and there was live music outside the Students Union. All in all it seems a pretty good place to be - which got me thinking about what all those happy smiley faces might be doing in three, four, five years from now; whether they'd still be doing law, and still be happy smiley faces. (I'm really not a miserable git, honest!)

Yesterday I was fielding questions in an e-mail from Zara - an A level student wondering about her degree and career options. I don't get a huge number of such e-mails (probably just as well), but I always feel a bit wary of doling out advice and opinions - not least because I think its getting increasingly hard to generalise about legal education and legal careers - and I'm never sure I've pitched it right. The big firms and chambers are great at putting out the glossy recruitment brochures (definitely happy smiley faces there) and doing the milk round to cream off the brightest and the best, and a lot of potential students are clearly happy to be seduced by the status and money. I'm not sure they get to see enough of the other side though - the long hours culture, and the pressure in those organisations, nor the changes we're seeing to high street and legal aid practice, and its potential impact on access to justice. I'm not saying it's all bad, but I do think, as jobs go, there is quite a lot about legal practice that borders on the dysfunctional - indeed sometimes seems institutionally designed to be dysfunctional (but then that's probably why I'm an academic...). When I've taught undergraduates about the legal profession and legal ethics, I've always tried to draw on research that gives the whole picture, to present the problems and challenges involved in pursuing a legal career, as well as acknowledging the plusses. I have no doubt this is sometimes seen by students as an unwelcome intrusion on their perception of reality!

Anyhow, this is what I wrote to Zara. I'd be interested to hear what anyone thinks about my advice:

Dear Zara

Thank you for your e-mail; sorry it has taken a while to respond, but as you will appreciate this is a busy time of year for us.

There isn't an easy answer to your question. The first thing is, whatever your degree, if you are thinking of entering the legal profession (particularly in a competitive, high status/high income, area of work, like corporate and commercial practice) you need a good class of degree - a minimum 2:i, plus relevant work experience and anything else you can find interesting and distinctive to put on your cv (a gap year herding lamas in Peru or whatever it may be!) that will make you stand out from the dozens of other bright and enthusiastic candidates for legal jobs. Consequently I think it is important to go with the degree subject that will interest and motivate you - simply because most people do better at studying things they like than things they don't. That said, where you go to study can make a difference, and you would also be foolish to ignore that: Oxbridge, and a few other institutions probably do give you an edge in most situations. It is debatable how far down the "league table" that edge continues, however. Moreover, the legal profession is becoming more aware of equality and diversity issues in its recruitment practices and that is starting to reduce the power of the 'old boy' (and girl) network.

As for the Graduate Diploma (GDL) [the conversion course for non-law graduates who wish to qualify as lawyers], it's swings and roundabouts. Most firms and chambers, so far as we can tell, don't in any way discriminate against the GDL. Some people say it can give you an edge on the basics - eg you will have finished studying contract only a year before you start training, for most law graduates, that knowledge will be three years old, plus you will have the breadth that studying another discipline gives you. On the other hand you don't get the same depth and range of legal knowledge from the GDL. It is more intensive and narrower than a law degree, and you may have to work harder under training to close that gap. Obviously be aware also that the GDL adds an extra year to qualifying and so adds significantly to the costs (unless you are lucky enough to get sponsorship). With university fees as well plenty of students today are entering training with debts of £25K-£30K+.

From what you say you are unsure at this stage whether to go for the Bar or the solicitors' profession, and that's not something you have to decide yet. What I would say is, don't even consider a career in the law unless you are really motivated to do it. It is a demanding career, though one that many do find fulfilling. At the top end, as everyone knows, the financial rewards are substantial, but you will be expected to earn every penny. On the other hand the future for traditional 'high street' areas of work (crime, family, etc) is rather more uncertain and the rewards much more variable. There are a lot of regulatory and market changes in the offing, some of which will potentially increase competition faced by traditional legal practices. The Bar in particular is a high risk career path these days, with about three BVC graduands currently chasing each pupillage (training place). I'm not trying to put you off, but I think you should know the risks.

I hope this is helpful. Good luck!

IP and communities of practice

I spent a long but interesting day yesterday in Birmingham with a group of Intellectual Property teachers (OK, that may not be your notion of interesting, but, please, suspend your disbelief for a moment, not least because they were a nice group of people....)

The event was the inaugural workshop of the European Intellectual Property Teachers' Network, an informal grouping that has grown out of an equally informal UK-based group that has met fairly regularly over the last six or seven years. The event itself was pretty packed, with two keynotes (from Steve Rowan, Director of Intellectual Property Policy at the UK Intellectual Property Office, and Marielle Piana from the European Patent Academy of the EPO) and four panel sessions. The spread of subject matter was also quite broad, with much discussion of appropriate content, design and delivery: the place of history, generalist vs specialist modules, problem-based learning, virtual delivery, and so on. Interdisciplinarity was a strong theme (music to my socio-legal ears!), recognising the extent to which an understanding of IP policy and practice benefits from, perhaps even necessitates, a strongly interdisciplinary approach. The need to teach IP management skills and issues also emerged from a couple of presentations, including an impressive example from the Technical University of Munich of the way in which student motivation and learning could be stimulated by a deep, problem-based, approach to learning using case studies based on real high-tech companies.

In a way what was most exciting for me was not so much the content (I'm not an IP lawyer) but that the event happened at all, and that it brought together people teaching aspects of IP from different countries, different disciplinary backgrounds, and for different purposes. In my experience its quite unusual to find a group of HE people from across a field of study like this meeting to talk about teaching and learning. There was certainly a sense of interest and engagement in the debates and a willingness to sharing ideas, and I have little doubt that the shared IP context enhanced the feeling of participation in a common enterprise. Full credit to Claire Howell (Aston Business School) and Duncan Matthews (Queen Mary, University of London) for pulling it all together.

The event has got me thinking rather more concretely about something that I've come across increasingly frequently lately - the idea of communities of practice (CoP). The term itself seems to have been coined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger and used extensively in their book Situated Learning (Cambridge University Press, 1991). (In a later book -Communities of Practice. Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge University Press, 1998 - Wenger goes on to explore the notion of a CoP in much greater depth.)

Lave and Wenger's work starts from the supposition that all learning is social and comes primarily from our experience of participating in daily life as a series of engagements with others in joint enterprises. From this perspective, at its simplest, a community of practice is a group of individuals participating in shared activity which is characterised by collective or collaborative learning. This process of “mutual engagement” in fact comes to define both the practice and the community itself. Communities thus develop over time around things that matter to the people involved. They develop a 'shared repertoire' of communal resources and symbols that carry the accumulated knowledge and experience of the group. Rather instrumentally, they interest me because they sound like potentially powerful mechanisms for sharing knowledge, solving problems and innovating.

I'm not sure that I know enough about CoPs yet to differentiate this concept from a lot of other work on organisational learning, but Wenger's sensitivity to social complexity and what seems to be a strongly constructionist view of the world are, for me, intuitively appealing and I think the label itself is quite powerful. At UKCLE we are very much focussed on supporting the needs of our subject community. While I think that's an important focus and a useful shorthand for us, not least to remind us where our primary responsibility lies, it is descriptively and developmentally rather a blunt notion. Even within law as a single discipline there is a multiplicity of more or less well defined 'communities' and interests which overlay what I suspect may still be a pretty individualistic sense of what it is to be a 'law teacher'. Could CoPs be a useful way of not just thinking ('sociologically') about how sub-disciplinary cultures evolve, but a means of actually constructing and developing sub-disciplinary interests and activities? (The Society of Legal Scholars' Subject Sections in the UK - broadly akin to AALS Sections in the US - perhaps perform some of that function already, but probably not all of it). Indeed, can you construct a CoP or is it more an emergent property of a field or organisation? What features appear to sustain and grow a CoP? One of the questions at the end of yesterday's event, not surprisingly was, "what next", and the CoP literature might generate some interesting ideas. I'll try and write some more about this when I have more time, and have been able to do some more spadework!

Higher, wider, further, deeper, oops....

So, Higher Education minister Bill Rammell is prepared to admit that, six years on, the success of government widening participation strategy has been less than spectacular. OK, I admit he didn't go that far, preferring to blame the "scatter gun" approach of Aimhigher instead, (he would wouldn't he?) but come on, a little reading between the lines is surely permissible. The news from the Higher Education Careers Service Unit that a young person is twice as likely to attend university if they have graduate parents is also less than surprising (both items reported in The Guardian Education section 12.06.07) . I draw attention to this not because I'm against widening participation (on the contrary it was one of the reasons I hung on in the polytechnic/new university sector for 20-odd years), but I do think it is a particularly intractable problem for HE institutions to deal with. The middle class 'parentocracy' still win the game for all the obvious reasons - a history of family expectation that normalises a university education, the economic and cultural capital to exploit school and university admissions systems, better access to information, etc, etc, and, if all else fails, the inclination to shout loudly to the Daily Mail whenever they become aware of any university admission policies that could possibly be conceived of as positive action, let alone discrimination.

The problem, of course, is that the solutions are (as we all - including Government - know) much harder and more expensive to achieve than slapping a target of 50% age participation on HE. Effective outreach programmes, summer schools, strategies to target talented and gifted kids, and embedding really effective advice and guidance in secondary schools and communities are massively time and resource intensive activities. Particularly in a context where resources are already scarce, and teachers are often struggling to deal with an overloaded and frequently changing curriculum. To be sure the government has targeted money on WP initiatives, but the data suggest we are still swimming against a tide of relative ignorance and indifference in many communities.

Perhaps even more critically, if widening participation strategies are going to make a material difference beyond university, schools, universities and employers also need to think very seriously about the steps they should be taking to prepare non-traditional students for the graduate workplace. One of the problems we continue to see in the legal profession is the tendency for employers to recruit, on the basis of their social and cultural capital, 'people like us'. Given the relational nature of much legal work, these shared cultural values and assumptions often 'oil the wheels' in what is an increasingly competitive marketplace, but they also act as a powerful exclusionary tool in recruitment processes. The situation is improving, slowly. But my sense is that widening participation strategies need to focus more on what can be done both to develop some of that cultural capital, and to co-opt employers into delivering a much stronger pull effect, to support the push that the education sector is already working hard to provide.