Top judge on warpath after lawyers lash ‘box-ticking’ training courses

NSW’s top judge has foreshadowed a historic overhaul of legal training after lawyers across the state lashed existing courses as an expensive and irrelevant “box-ticking exercise”.

In an extraordinary intervention this year, Chief Justice Andrew Bell expressed “profound concern” about the “extremely high” cost of practical legal training (PLT), which is a prerequisite to practising law. The training starts after a budding lawyer completes their degree.

Chief Justice Andrew Bell, photographed in his chambers in Sydney in 2023.Credit: Louie Douvis

Bell wrote to thousands of NSW lawyers in February, urging them to complete a survey of PLT to “inform possible reforms”.

He said the results of the survey, released on Monday, “generated some serious concerns about the cost and quality of PLT available”.

“Over 2500 responses were received from the cohort of recently admitted practitioners, and over 2000 from supervisors,” Bell said.

“Only 43 per cent of recent graduate respondents considered assignments were practical and career relevant.”

PLT takes 15 weeks full-time and there is a separate work experience component. Most respondents (74 per cent) “agreed or strongly agreed that the work experience component ... was useful”, Bell said.

The survey was conducted by independent research agency Urbis at the request of the Legal Profession Admission Board (LPAB), which regulates the admission of graduates to practise law.

Urbis said in its report that “PLT was reported to be a box-ticking exercise, lacking relevance to legal practice”. Course fees of about $10,000 were not “always seen as providing value”.

“Respondents provided feedback that PLT ... was often seen as a required but unnecessary hurdle to being able to [practise] law,” Urbis said.

The majority (83 per cent) of graduate respondents completed their training via the not-for-profit College of Law, the country’s largest provider of PLT.

Bell took aim earlier this year at the college after examining its financial statements. He said in a speech in February that it had been “generating an average ‘surplus’ of almost $16 million per annum over the past decade”.

The college had agreed to reduce “the standard PLT tuition fee to a newly adjusted base of $9200” this year after he raised concerns, Bell said at the time.

The college said it now charged the lowest fee of any NSW provider of PLT. In a statement on Monday, College of Law chief executive Neville Carter said its role was to provide “basic, generalist training to prepare law graduates to commence work in supervised legal practice”.

A “rethink” of pre-admission legal training was overdue, Carter said, but the survey “needs to be considered as part of a more comprehensive review”.

Some universities, including the University of NSW and the University of Technology Sydney, also provide PLT.

UTS graduates, accounting for about 200 of respondents, were among those who tended to report a “more positive experience” of PLT, Urbis said.

Director of Professional Programs for UTS Law, Associate Professor Maxine Evers, said its PLT program combined “academic rigour with cutting-edge technology to equip graduates for entry to the profession”.

Only 2 per cent of survey respondents (55) attended UNSW. A spokesperson for UNSW Sydney said its PLT program “has over 1200 graduates, with consistently positive feedback from our course completion surveys”.

Bell said Court of Appeal Justice Tony Payne, the presiding member of the LPAB, had “constituted a PLT working group” to consider reform proposals.

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