There are few practice areas more interesting than crime, says David Green, Academic Manager and criminal law lecturer at ULaw Birmingham

“Crime attracts a certain type of person. You need a particular type of personality to survive a career in criminal law because although it seems sexy, the reality in practice isn’t quite so glamorous,” says David Green, Academic Manager and criminal law lecturer at The University of Law (ULaw)’s Birmingham campus. “The hours are long, and it’s a really adversarial area of law, so you need to be able to cope mentally with the fact that you’re always up against somebody else: whether it’s the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the police, or the courts service. You’re always in that ‘rough-and-tumble’ and that’s not for everyone,” he says.

Having had a “fairly traditional” route into legal practice, Green undertook the LPC with The College of Law (ULaw’s predecessor) before beginning his career in criminal defence. “I worked my way up through a specialist criminal law firm, becoming a partner and later a Higher Courts Advocate before making the step over to legal education at ULaw,” he tells Legal Cheek Careers. “I always tell my students: given that we’re all likely to be working until we’re 75 now, everyone has time for two careers! For me, moving over to ULaw just felt like the right time for me to try something different.”

Digging into his attraction to life in criminal law, we’re keen to ask Green his reasoning behind forging a legal career in this direction. “I had done quite a lot of work experience during my degree, especially in mixed practice firms, and I think this is one of the best ways as a student to get a good sense of whether you will actually like certain areas of law,” he says. After having completed some work experience in criminal legal practice, Green says he just fell in love with it. “In order to adapt to such an intense daily working environment, it helps if you can learn to make light out of often dark situations,” Green explains. “I think the closest profession to being a criminal defence solicitor is being a doctor. You need to be able to find the humour in the horrible things that happen, and still be able to switch off at the end of your shift, go home, and be present in your personal life.

 “What really drew me to crime was the fact that it’s fun. There’s no other area of law where you find such odd things that have happened to people! I have a fascination in how seemingly ordinary people can often find themselves caught up in the criminal justice system,” he says. “There’s a huge range of clients you’re dealing with, which is brilliant. I love the cut and thrust of it; the adversarial nature of the practice—and no two days are ever the same!”

Speaking on his experiences of becoming a partner in a criminal defence practice, Green explains that naturally, his responsibilities ratchetted up a notch. “Attaining partnership meant not only taking on more complex and high-level cases, but also taking a new responsibility over the business itself. In a legal aid practice, this means trying to be as efficient as possible,” he says. In contrast to many commercial practices, Green explains that criminal firms have to stay flexible and agile. “No matter what the government threw at us in terms of legal aid reforms, we had to think about how we could continue to make money in a new and changing system.”

Given current political events, we ask Green how he imagines the general election is likely to impact criminal practices in the UK that are reliant on legal aid cases. “The sad reality is that there are no votes in legal aid. The only people voting that have an interest in legal aid reforms, are for obvious reasons, legal aid lawyers. Many people never consider that they will have the need for legal aid, and therefore this issue remains rather invisible,” he says. “Nobody asks to be dragged into the criminal justice system; whether you’re a victim of a crime or accused of a crime, you’re pushed into that system by the state. So, I think it’s fundamentally wrong that the state doesn’t have a system in place to properly provide for legal representation in every situation,” he explains.

“Unfortunately for many who need legal aid to access justice, it’s not really on the agenda of either of the big political parties, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see an improvement in legal aid policy in the near future,” he says.

Nevertheless, the introduction of the SQE is opening the doors to publicly funded practice for law students. Rather than having to bag ‘golden ticket’ training contracts in criminal law, students can now build their two years’ qualifying work experience (QWE) in criminal practice and qualify as a solicitor through this new route. We ask Green how ULaw is preparing its students to succeed on the SQE and to hit the ground running in such a demanding legal practice. “For SQE1, single best answer questions (SBAQs) assess far more detailed or niche areas of law and procedure than were being assessed previously. So, our teaching has become much more specific by delving into all of the detailed areas of criminal practice much more than we did previously, to ensure that our students are prepared,” he says. “Students are now being assessed as a day one solicitors rather than as trainees. So, the level of knowledge taught on our SQE programmes has also shifted up a couple of degrees; we’re teaching to a much higher level.”

For students who are keen to embrace the “rough-and-tumble” of criminal legal practice, they are not only taught by qualified criminal lawyers, but they can also gain first-hand experience at ULaw, says Green. “Students can go to our pro bono clinic at ULaw and gain legal work experience actually dealing with real clients. This is a great way very early in a legal career, to feel the pressure of having a real person in front of you with a real legal problem that you’re trying to solve,” he says. With employability skills at the core of ULaw’s student offering, Green is keen to emphasise the part that advocacy plays in building the skills that future criminal lawyers need in practice. “There is no other area of law where advocacy is so fundamental to practice as in criminal law. I also teach advocacy skills as part of ULaw’s Bar Practice Course (BPC) for future barristers. Advocacy, though a skill which students are often afraid of, is taught at ULaw the same as any other skill like riding a bike. It’s a case of practising, reflecting on your practise, and practising again!”

Discover more tips on succeeding in your legal career this afternoon at ‘Secrets to Success Birmingham — with Pinsent Masons, Reed Smith, DWF, Browne Jacobson and ULaw’ an in-person student event running tomorrow, Thursday (27^th June). Apply for one of the final few places.

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Nearly half cite lack of info for not switching

Just over a quarter of small and medium (SME) law firms are yet to take up the Solicitor Qualifying Exam (SQE) as a route to qualification, new research has shown.

Of the 27% who haven’t yet adopted the pathway, nearly half (44%) cited a lack of information for not making the switch. A quarter additionally reported a lack of “buy-in” internally as a barrier, with 6% concerned about the cost.

With the transition windows from the Legal Practice Course to SQE running officially until 2032, nearly a third of firms (31%) said that now was simply not the right time to make the transition across to the new scheme. “However”, the report states, “the reality is that the LPC window of opportunity is closing quickly with a real shift expected over the next couple of years”.

The research, undertaken by legal education provider BARBRI, also noted that 53% of SME firms have taken on apprentices, with the majority doing so to bring in new talent and up skill existing lawyers, and a smaller number only looking to achieve one of those objectives.

Of the 46% of firms not to take up the pathway, 36% said that they “prefer more traditional routes”, with 28% concerned about the time required for recruits to acquire skills, and 16% worried about the quality of candidates on offer.

The report surveyed 127 figures across SME law firms, 84 of whom were senior decision makers, with the other 43 paralegals or people in similar roles.

SME law firms were defined as those with less than 250 employees and an annual turnover under £50 million.

More than double previous year

The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has revealed that next year’s income from the Solicitor Qualifying Exam (SQE) will be a whopping £66 million.

Contained within the SRA’s consultation paper on a draft business plan and budget for 2024-25, the regulator states that income from assessments will more than double from the £30.3 million in 2023-24.

Whilst the exams are currently setting students back £1,798 for SQE1 and £2,766 for SQE2, totalling £4,564, this is set to rise by 5% from September, bringing the new total cost to £4,790.

The income in 2024-25 won’t include this rise, however, with the accounts covering the exams from the previous year, i.e. 2023-24, before the increase has come into effect. The figure will include an earlier, more sizeable, price increase of 11% implemented in September 2023.

Price increases alone don’t account for the growth in income; this is primarily due to a sharp uptick in the number of people taking the exams each year. This income is spent purely on assessment costs.

Within the consultation the regulator has also stated that it will deliver a year-three evaluation of the SQE, and make the exam available in Welsh from January 2025.

The exams have received significant backlash from students, most recently focussing on a marking fiasco which saw 175 candidates told they had failed SQE1, when they had in fact passed. If that wasn’t bad enough, Legal Cheek later revealed that a number of students impacted by the blunder had seen their training contract offers revoked.

Could request super regulator investigation

The Junior Lawyers Division (JLD) has slammed the £250 offered by assessment provider Kaplan to SQE students affected by last week’s major marking blunder, arguing that it doesn’t even “begin to repair the damage that has been caused”.

In a statement on LinkedIn, the representative body said, “an error of this magnitude is simply not acceptable,” and that it would be seeking an urgent meeting with the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) to discuss how it proposes to rectify this “latest issue.”

Last week, it emerged that a calculation error had led to 175 students being incorrectly informed that they had failed either Functioning Legal Knowledge 1 and/or Functioning Legal Knowledge 2 (the two parts of SQE1), when in reality they had passed.

The JLD, which represents SQE students, trainee solicitors, and junior lawyers across England and Wales, said that it had already reached out to several affected students and urged anyone else impacted by the mistake to contact them directly.

“We reserve the right to call for the Legal Services Board to investigate the matter,” it added.

Legal Cheek revealed last week that students who had their training contract offers rescinded were among those hit by the marking error.