In the latest bout, the College of Law has thrown a solid uppercut to BPP and reached an agreement with Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton’s City arm for the College to become the firm’s exclusive provider of all three stages of training. Cleary trainees will be able to study the GDL, the LPC and the PSC in any of the College’s centres but most are expected to attend the one at Moorgate, where the LPC and PSC electives will be taught in firm-specific groups. Clique anyone?

This is the first exclusive agreement that covers the full spectrum of training from the conversion course to the PSC. Shaun Goodman, graduate recruitment partner at Cleary, told Legal Week : “We found our trainees were arriving with different levels of knowledge and took the view that doing all three courses through a single provider would let us remove duplication and also better tailor our own internal training.”

Ding ding…

This hots up the rivalry between BPP and the The College which also has exclusive agreements for LPC training with firms including Clifford Chance, Linklaters, Allen & Overy and Weil Gotshal & Manges. BPP, meanwhile, has agreements with firms including the City consortium of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Slaughter and May, Herbert Smith, Lovells and Norton Rose.

Not afraid to be bruising on several fronts; The College of Law has hit out at the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) after it proposed scrapping compulsory higher rights qualifications for solicitor advocates. It has proposed a new scheme of voluntary accreditation and self-audited compliance with the code of conduct, with an emphasis on what many in the profession call ‘after-the-event’ professional discipline.

Stephen Mayson, director of the College of Law’s legal services policy institute, commented: “There is a clear case in the public interest and in the interest of clients that those who claim competence in higher courts advocacy should be certified in advance as having demonstrated the appropriate knowledge and skills. This would minimise the risk to an unsuspecting client and promote the effective and efficient administration of justice.”

"Taken in the round, the SRA proposals seem to us to leave too much to market forces and client choice, in relation to services where the risk of incompetence or poor service is not adequately addressed after the event by sanctions on the practitioner or compensation for an aggrieved client.”

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