free Solicitors, why bother

enry

Just wondering what anyone thinks of the following:
So a friend of mine calls over to my house tonight and he brings with him a letter he received from the law society this letter was advertising Diploma courses run by the law society. Note my friend is not a solicitor or a barrister he is a manager in an office; most people working with him don’t have any third level qualification. The letter stated that anyone within his office who wanted to apply to attend one of these Diploma courses could do so, as long as they send in a cover letter with their C.V and a couple of grand.
The correspondence also enclosed another advertisement which had the following heading
“TRAINED SOLICITOR FOR WORK EXPERIENCE PLACEMENTS IN YOUR ORGANISATION”
It went on to say:
“You will be provided with a solicitor who has extensive training in law and who has completed one month’s intensive training to ensure they can function effectively in the work they do within your workplace.
The solicitor will be placed with your organisation for a six months period and she /he can assist existing staff, do project work or develop a new area of business. No salary payable by the employing organisation”

nuac

Haven't heard of this intern scheme. Would not learn a lot in one months training no matter how intensive.

guerito

I don't know, the work these interns are likely to be trusted with wouldn't be hugely involved, at least at the beginning. An NQ with a decent level of training could learn the basic tools for most industries in a month. Anything that gets people working and able to broaden their experience base is a good idea. We advertised a legal intern position in work recently and the amount of applications from immediately-available NQs was scary.

Manach

Speaking from an IT POV, there might be role for legal types in some roles. For instance as program managers who'd be responsible for planning and allocating human resources for a project. Given how legal types are trained bring structure to disparte elements to create a legal case, a training conversion to program management could be done.