The Gazette 1978

JULY-AUGUST 1978 Education and Training of Solicitors Apprentices Some Comments on the New Law Course Professor Richard Woulfe, Director of Education, Incorporated Law Society of Ireland seven years or more prior to their application for exemption may fall into this category.

GAZETTE

School leavers are not eligible for entry to apprenticeship The normal method of entry is by obtaining a University Law Degree and subsequently passing the Final Examination First Part: accordingly, school leavers should apply for admission to the University of their choice. Graduates in disciplines other than law will have to spend a year studying die six subjects set in the Final Examination First Part. No person may, of course, become apprenticed until he or she has passed the Society's First Irish Examination, which examination has to be passed by all intending apprentices irrespective of where they were born. The student's remaining hurdle is to secure a master. The Society's Education Committee will entertain applications from solicitors of five years standing to take an apprentice and also applications to take second apprentices. Sole principals or partners in firms are asked to take apprentices when possible and to notify the Society of their willingness to do so. Once apprenticed, the student embards on a half year's Professional Course in the Society's new Law School at Blackhall Place. The Law School will open its doors to the first students under the new system in mid-February 1979 and the students will pursue a 9.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m. five day a week course of study in the school until the end of July 1979: the second of the professional courses will, subject to demand, commence in early September and finish in mid-February 1980. This strange looking February-September-February cycle arises because most students will be completing their final degree examinations in September/October and the entrance examination to the Law School will be in December of each year. Furthermore, August has traditionally been the principal vacation month for the legal profession and the instruction in the new Law School will be given almost entirely by Practising solititors. These instructors will be divided into Consultants and Tutors. The Consultants have been drawn largely from members of the twelve sub committees established early in 1977 each of which sub committees considered a major area of practice and decided what aspects of that area should be taught on the professional course. These voluntary sub committees worked very hard and have now moved on to the preparation of course materials. The first group of Consultants — some 40 in number — have already undergone ('enjoyed' might be too coloured a word) a series of four week-end training sessions at which the motto of the new Law School "learning by doing" was applied. A typical instruction module will have the Consultant prescribing the advance reading which the student must do before the entire class, and their tutors, gather in the assembly hall where the Consultnat then demonstrates that skill stating his

The publication in 1967 by the Society of Young Solicitors of its report "The Education of a Solicitor" opened a debate on the education and training of solicitors in the Republic of Ireland. There had been a growing body of criticism of the existing system which allowed apprentices to qualify without any experience or any adequate experience of the day to day practicalities of being a solicitor. The publication in England in 1971 of the Ormrod Report and of the Armitage Report in N. Ireland in 1973 gave impetus to the move for reform based on separating the academic stage from the practical stage of legal education and training, with a buttressing of apprenticeship as the traditional means of imparting legal skills by introducing a practice orientated course of intensive instruction by legal practitioners to impart to apprentices the skills and procedures which they would need in the early years of their professional lives. The first step in the change was the introduction in 1975 of a university degree as the normal method of entry to apprenticeship. This change was taken further by the Solicitors Acts 1954 and 1960 (Apprenticeship and Education) Regulations 1975 (S.I. No. 66 of 1975) — "the New Regulations" — under which the Incorporated Law Society's new Law School has been set up with a new course of instruction and new style final examination and, subject to completion of the necessary statutory instrument, a new fee structure. The first part of the Final Examination uhder the new regulations is effectively an entrance examination and will be held in December 1978 and each subsequent December, the subjects for examination being Property, Contract, Tort, Constitutional Law, Company Law and Criminal Law. The Society recommends that intending apprentices, other than 1975 and 1976 entrants to Irish University Law Faculties, should not become bound as apprentices until they have passed the Final Examination First Part and thus secured a place in the Law School. Because of uncertainly in the minds of some practitioners, it is as well to re-state the qualifications for apprenticeship. Only the following may become apprentices:— (i) Persons holding a degree of Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Law of an Irish or United Kingdom University. (ii) Persons holding a university degree or other qualification which, in the opinion of the Society's Education Committee in the particular case, is equivalent to the degree referred to at paragraph (i). (iii) Persons who have passed the Preliminary Examinations of the Socity held in the year 1976 or in any subsequent year. (iv)Persons who have been exempted by the Society's Education Committee from the Preliminary Examination. Persons who have served as bona fide Law Clerks for

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