By Kate Wellington, Law Society CEO
Let me take you back to the mid-1970s. For our young lawyers, that’s akin to the contemporary Middle Ages. To be fair, I hadn’t quite been born then either. So I’ll give you a hand: think Nixon-esque tailored suits, fading chintz wallpaper and an emerging WA mining boom. Something like this:
Around this time, Brief was tracking the evolving crisis of articles training. In 1974, the profession feared there would not be enough lawyers to service WA’s client base. But this fear was short lived, and by 1977 Brief began to receive opinion pieces warning of overpopulation within the legal profession. One such article, entitled “Lawyers to Burn”, took a particularly dim view of this development and what should be done with the influx of new qualifiers.
Numbers at the Law School (yes, the one Law School) had risen significantly, and the Law Society’s President reported that the Society was “actively seeking the assistance of its members in placing articled clerks”.
Firms were surveyed and it was found that many didn’t want a different system, but time and cost factors meant they didn’t want to take on articled clerks either. There was an emerging consensus that articles would not survive. The Law Society’s Council appointed a special committee to plan and submit an alternative scheme, should the need arise.
Around this time, the Law Council of Australia held its first National Conference on Legal Education in Sydney. New South Wales and Victoria had already established practical legal training courses through the College of Law and the Leo Cussen Institute respectively. The trend was unmistakable.
Geoffrey Miller – as he then was, prior to his appointment as QC and later appointment to the Supreme Court bench – attended the conference on behalf of the Law Society. He wrote in his report of the matters discussed at the conference:
“I believe we can devise a Legal Practice Course of this type, to be conducted at the University of Western Australia Law School … In essence it would be a substitute for articles.”
Don’t like PLT? Blame Geoff. No, just kidding, the story continues …
The issue gained traction and various alternatives were considered and debated. For example, the Hon Hugh Guthrie MLA, a keen contributor to Brief, suggested a form of training that could be run by retired practitioners in which students would mock-handle actual matters; simulated articles, so to speak.
Emerging from this discourse came (what appears to have been) consensus. Appended to a Law Society report of 1978 was a detailed plan for a practical legal training course, to be run at the Law School. The remaining states were in the process of creating their own schemes, and WA was on the edge of the cliff, ready to jump. And then … it didn’t. Apparently cost was a factor, despite the demand from the wave of new graduates.
The debate persisted with varying degrees of enthusiasm, however there seems to have been less urgency in the 1980s due to changing economic circumstances.
It wasn’t until 2007 that practical legal training became a formal pathway to admission in WA, after many years of consultation by the Legal Practice Board. This also followed an anecdotal rise in the number of West Aussie grads opting to complete practical legal training in NSW or Victoria rather than undertaking articles in their own state, for a variety of reasons.
So, the conversation around practical legal training in WA is not new. Equally, practical legal training in WA is not very old. As the debate rages nationally about what the new era holds, we must ensure WA doesn’t teeter too long on the proverbial cliff and get left behind. The Uniform Law will help with this, but it’s not the whole answer – as is evident from NSW’s intention to do its own thing if the Uniform agenda doesn’t keep pace.
The Law Society is again at the coalface of the debate. The Legal Profession Admission Board of NSW – on the initiative of Chief Justice Andrew Bell – issued a discussion paper in October proposing sweeping changes to how law graduates enter the profession. The idea is to make the admission pathway more affordable, streamlined and practice oriented.
Last week, the Law Society, with our Young Lawyers Committee, contributed to the Law Council of Australia’s response to the discussion paper. Currently, Law Societies nationally are united on this issue and speak with one voice through the Law Council. We will, of course, keep the needs of WA graduates, employers and educators at the forefront of our policy work. If it’s necessary to take a different road, we’ll do so. But national consistency brings many benefits and is the obvious starting point.
At the same time, the Law Admissions Consultative Committee and the Legal Services Council’s Admissions Committee have launched a national survey on practical legal training, seeking feedback from practitioners (outside of NSW) on how well PLT prepares graduates for practice. The survey is the next step in the national review of PLT – which is running parallel to what’s happening in NSW – examining the cost, quality and consistency of current programs and whether they continue to meet the needs of the profession.
While it might feel as though the debate is just beginning, in reality it has been ongoing in WA for at least 50 years, and probably longer. Perhaps in another 50 years one of my successors will be writing an article for Brief, referencing the wallpaper and suit choices of the mid-2020s, and marking the 100th birthday of what is likely to be a perennial debate. And rightly so. The needs of our legal profession and its clients are continually evolving; it is axiomatic that the way we train our next generation of lawyers must continually evolve to keep pace.
