social mobility

• You get what you pay for: the SRA and the minimum salary
  Posted on May 9, 2012 by Louise Restell
  This week, it appears, I am regulator bashing. It’s not much of a sport as it’s so easy to do, but hey, we all have to get our kicks somewhere. Yesterday I was rather disparaging about the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) website for consumers. Today I am taking them to task over their ‘consultation’ on whether to scrap the minimum salary for trainee solicitors.
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  Posted in: Employment law
  Tagged: diversity, law graduates, law students, legal profession, LETR, minimum salary, social mobility, SRA, training contracts
• The partnership problem
  Posted on February 28, 2012 by Louise Restell
  It has long been apparent to anyone with an ounce of business sense that, by and large, partnerships are not the best way to run a company. There are, naturally, exceptions and I am not going to take issue with the profitability of the ‘magic circle’ firms that would be eligible for inclusion in the FTSE100 were they to have publicly traded shares. They have all said, however, they would not seek to float. There are probably many reasons for this, most of which I couldn’t hope to understand. But I bet one of them is because the partners of those firms rather like being partners in those firms.
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  Posted in: Legal services
  Tagged: business, diversity, law firms, lawyers, magic circle, partnership, social mobility
• When is a job not a job? When it's 'work experience'
  Posted on February 27, 2012 by Louise Restell
  I could have been a lawyer. I don’t mean in the way that anyone could, in theory, become a lawyer if they wanted to. I mean because I went to Oxbridge and I came from a family who could afford to support me through some unpaid internships or work experience to help me get a foot in the door. In fact, I did attend one milk-round event to find out how to become a human rights lawyer. Who knows what would have happened if it hadn’t been Linklaters?
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  Posted in: Employment law
  Tagged: Alan Milburn, Fair Access to the Professions, internships, jobs, legal profession, Nick Clegg, social mobility, Tesco, training contract, work experience, workfare