3 minute read
Bernadette Turner - BMD LAW
Lifestyle caught up with award winning solicitor Bernadette McDonald, of
BMD:Law to discuss her exciting new projects for the new year.
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Tell us about your new
legal school? We’ve opened the Liverpool School of Legal Education because the whole way we train solicitors has changed.The law degree and LPC has gone, so paralegals can now qualify and there’s a Solicitor’s Qualification exam so it’s more hands on with two years of experience as opposed to seven years of qualifications. This has given us a bit more of an opportunity to be innovative. We’re opened the school, we’ve trial runner it with the courts to see what works and what doesn’t, so we’ll be taking people from school leaving age and turning them into paralegals with 12 week courses, we’re supporting people who are already working as paralegals in law firms going for a SQA contract because they won’t be given any training, it’s just for them to acquire experience. Acquiring experience is easy but recognising what you’re learning from a formal point of view and document it, that is different, so we’ll be offering courses to support that. We have a mixture of online and in person courses based at our premises here and of course using the law firm here as a way of getting practical experience so it blends the both. And to ensure I have enough work to give them I am very excited too do something that I’ve waited to do for years which is pro bono business clinics for small businesses who don’t want to waste their money on law firms in the beginning because they need all their resources. So we’ll be using the students to give them advice, supervised of course, for all new businesses. This means a lot as I want to give back to the business community. I am taking the bets of law and best of business to combine it to improve the future of legal professions. We’re starting properly in Easter, start marketing after Christmas and launch some of online courses in january, SQA school will be in September but the paralegal courses will be across the summer. This is available national but they
will have to attend here in Liverpool I’ve invested quite heavily in the tech, so it’s not just lectures, there’s a lot of videos and handouts and interactive learning, quizzes, to mix it up to keep people engaged. I wrote all the courses, spending the last few months taking the design of business philosophy how we design law firms itself and integrate them into a very legal way of thinking. So I have taken a lot of different concepts and places and put them all together for a very bespoke course.
So what is a legal way of thinking?
Traditionally it’s quite intricate and informative and formal. We do things stepped so that works well with the courses and user interface. The problem with traditional law is that it's the same, always been the same where clients come into the office and sit in a meeting room but that doesn’t work in the modern world. But there’s a spectrum of what people need, so if you go too tech older people can’t access it so it’s taking what the client needs and embedding it to training in what they need. It’s hard to explain but it is like switching someone’s head and opening their eyes. It’s a very different, forward way of thinking.
And alongside this you’re doing a PHD?
Yes, it is in User Reflective Practice in a legal profession and how we design that as a course for law students. I’m also tying it into a book on Reflective Practice for Lawyers which will be published soon as well.
