I started thinking about what it would take to become a UK solicitor, and if it’s the type of career that someone would start at my age, I’m not going to tell you what my age actually is, but lets just say it’s a lot closer to 40 than it is to being of school age!
It seems that most people who go into the legal profession, initially do well at school and college (or 6th form) and then go into a good university to get a degree in law, from there they go to work with a firm of solicitors and whilst there continue to study and take other professional qualifications. Now to be realistic there is no way I could do all that now, I’d have to stop working completely to do an access course for a year, I would need this before I could get into university to do the law degree which I’m guessing would take another 3 years, all that time I wouldn’t be earning any money, well certainly not as much as I do in full time employment.
Then I would need to find a solicitors office who would take on a (by that point) well over 40 year old trainee, so I would be competing with all the young people leaving Uni’ who are also applying for those jobs, and I expect even at this point the money isn’t great as they are just employing people who have recently left full time education, so get away with not paying a proper salary.
So all in all, my plans of becoming a lawyer have pretty much gone down the pan, the lengthy education process of achieving it, it’s a shame really as a legal professional can earn a small fortune, no, scratch that, a huge fortune!
I wouldn’t really know what specific field of law I would want to go into though, possibly commercial law, or no win no fee, I think the no win no fee solicitors may only be around for a while though as the government is making so many cutbacks, that it’s only a matter of time until they clamp down on the British legal aid system altogether.
There are plenty of other options though, I could train to be a paralegal, these are the people who do a lot of the work for a qualified solicitor, but aren’t actually qualified, sometimes not at all.