With SRA rules preventing law firms from offering penultimate year law students training contracts until 1 September, Clifford Chance and Slaughters & May have already had to close applications for non-law grads. The firms have been so inundated with candidates that they have managed to fill their quotas for trainees with non-law backgrounds earlier than usual. The remaining places will be reserved for those studying law degrees who can only apply later in the year. Sensible planning you’d think.

Maybe, but after The Lawyer published the news yesterday, it seems that a few commenters took this as some sort of insult to the abilities of non-law students. Not considering that there are limits to every such intake and that the firms were merely being careful to conform to SRA rules and their own quota balance, the misperceived sleight against non law students led one chap to exclaim:

"How short sighted! I have been in practice for many years and some of the best of my articled clerks had no legal experience at all…"

And another lady huffed:

"As a non-law graduate I was outraged at the article stating that Slaughter & May will no longer consider non-law undergraduates for training contracts. Surely this is little less than discrimination and makes a mockery of the selection process…"

We think somehow the point has been a little lost here. As the number of applicants for all law firms shoot through the roof these days, would it not be at least a little imprudent for firms not to have some sort of quota system to ensure they did not fill all their TC places with non-law students before law students even had the opportunity to make their applications. It would be an odd situation if some of the top firms in the country didn’t have a single law graduate on their training programme because they behaved like children in a candy store when the non-law grads applied. Just a thought…