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Qualification

Our aim is to try to ensure that all those we recruit as legal trainees are offered a post on successful completion of their training. This can never be guaranteed, although our retention rates over the past few years have been excellent. For example, in 2008 we retained over 95% of our trainee solicitors and pupil barristers.

Once you’ve cleared this significant hurdle in your legal career, what happens next? Obviously you’ll take a sense of pride in the fact that you’re a fully qualified solicitor or barrister but what will happen from a work point of view?

Essentially, you can expect to spend at least two or three years within the department where you completed your training (in some departments this might rise to 4 years). As your training period comes to an end, your training principal or supervisor will discuss with you what the next steps will be. This will differ from department to department and from trainee to trainee. You may continue in a team in which you have previously worked or be placed in a completely unfamiliar team. Whatever happens, we will work to ensure that your development as a lawyer continues.

You’ll be pleased to learn that you won’t be left to fend for yourself. The level of responsibility you’re given during your training will hopefully ensure that you aren’t too daunted by the transition from trainee to qualified lawyer. But just to make sure, you will work under a degree of supervision for a while after you qualify.

The amount of time you work under supervision will depend upon whether you are a barrister or solicitor. Having taken just a year to qualify, barristers in most GLS departments will work under supervision for two years. Following their two year training contact, solicitors will be supervised for a further year. This means that both barristers and solicitors work under a degree of supervision for a total of three years.