The Legal Education and Training Review (LETR), 2011-2012

For law teachers, this is clearly one of the most important initiatives for many years. It is assumed that a major prompt for it was the Legal Services Act 2007, which itself is potentially the most radical piece of legislation for a very long time in terms of both the structure and role of the existing legal profession and for legal education. The deregulatory and consumerist thrust of the Act has major implications for the nature and delivery of legal skills and the mechanisms through which they are delivered. Undoubtedly, there were other prompts, not least about concerns over the quality of some legal services, the relevance and rigour of legal education and a number of broader issues, such the impact of IT and the ability to source offshore for legal skills and the considerable growth in the unregulated provision of legal advice and support. Indeed, it is this complex matrix of legal advice both regulated and unregulated - the latter set to grow further, that provides much of the challenge for the Review.