5 minute read
Solicitor Apprentice Route
Ruqayyah Raja talks to Legal Women UK about the nontraditional route to qualification from a solicitor’s apprentice viewpoint.
“There are currently more than 1,300 solicitor apprentices in England, whilst some 18,000 university students graduated with degrees in law in 2022 (The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, June 2023)”.1
It’s a crazy statement to make, that a solicitor apprenticeship may be harder to secure than one of the 8,000 available spots at Oxford and Cambridge. Yet, a tiny sliver of obscurity around this route, still remains in the world of law despite its exclusivity.
Timesheet filled, out-of-office message on, laptop shut, tea mugs cleared, I’m writing this article on a late Thursday evening. My Thursdays, as a second-year solicitor apprentice at Deloitte Legal, are always the busiest with my four-day working week in the corporate immigration team (Friday being my study day). Being an indispensable player in a person’s decision to start their life or settle in the UK, brings immense personal fulfilment no matter how many times I do it over with new faces, new circumstances, and new personalities. It was my remarkable team that meticulously trained me as if they reassembled my Lego pieces to unlock a gleaming caseworker character – a solid upgrade from my sixth-form build.
Before this shiny new upgrade, on a Thursday, I completed my A-Levels virtually and clapped for the NHS at my doorstep at 5pm. I proudly received an A*AB in Politics, History, and Mathematics, yet was financially unable to apply for university… yet. Having completed high school abroad in the UAE, and Bahrain, I was constrained by - ironically - the law, in The Education (Student Loans) Regulations 1998, s 1(7)(a) which meant I had to wait out one more year to comply with the 3-year residency rule. This is where things took a sharp turn. As a victim of a shelf robbery at my first job where I worked as a shop assistant at Holland & Barrett, I suddenly grew financially literate and finally my dad’s ramblings about somehow avoiding a debt of a minimum of £32,314 clicked, leading to aggressive Google searches on legal apprenticeships. It immediately became my life’s mission to secure one; I knew I was tired of waiting for a pay-out, I was primed and ready to dive straight into the professional world, and I really wanted to learn both on-the job and off, as I do best. I was never a partygoer anyway.
Every pathway in life comes with its advantages and disadvantages, it would be naïve to think otherwise. Every interview I went to, without fail, I was asked if I had the mental strength to see the six-year apprenticeship through to qualification. I always left feeling like they were purposely putting me off, but whilst I’m just in my second-year, it is glaringly obvious that this is difficult and requires a certain personality. Watching the 2016 Olympics on TV, I caught the dead switch in Mo Farah’s eyes as he was running his 10,000-metre marathon, when it turned from a physical race to a purely mental one. Whilst the completion of a solicitor apprenticeship is no comparison to an Olympic gold, it’s a long-winded marathon which tests
your mental endurance of excelling at each of your six-month seat rotations as a trainee whilst both completing your LLB and Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE)with your one allocated study day a week (it’s never enough). However, if you have the tenacity to see it through, you will leave with six years of client experience instead of two, a solid network and support system, and find belonging with diverse communities across and beyond law firms. It is no luck that “apprentice pass rates were average 26% higher than the overall pass rate” undertaking the SQE from September 2021 – August 2022 (Solicitors Regulation Authority, February 2023).2
Of course, I am a huge advocate for the solicitor apprenticeship route to qualification, like many, many others. It diversifies access to the law and contributes to an inclusive legal landscape with the lowering of grade requirements and access to all. Alongside my fellow solicitor apprentices at Simmons & Simmons LLP, Dentons LLP, and Bolt Burdon Kemp LLP we created an initiative called mylaunchpad to empower prospective legal apprentices by providing free mentoring for students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds, and comprehensive application support. Truly, the resilience required to become a solicitor was introduced by my very first interaction with the legal world as I suffered more than 10 rejections each with a 5-stage gruelling process - I’d take a university personal statement any day. If you would like to support our journey to break down barriers, launch careers in law, and empower the next generation of apprentices, please reach out at general@mylaunchpad.uk to find out more.
Solicitor apprentices do deserve a similar air of acceptance and regality as those pursuing a degree from Oxford and Cambridge, typically starting at the age of 18 at looming law firms working and studying simultaneously for 6 years into transformed newly qualified solicitors. ■
Ruqayyah Raja
Solicitor apprentice at Deloitte Legal Co-founder and Mentor at mylaunchpad
1https://www.instituteforapprenticeships.org/about/newshub/newsevents/solicitor-apprentices-outperforming-academic-counterparts-inexams/
2https://www.sra.org.uk/sra/news/press/2023-press-releases/ apprenticeships-week-2023/#:~:text=Apprentice%20pass%20 rates%20were%20on,8%25%20higher%20than%20other%20 candidates.
