Trainee solicitor a crap job/Englisches Rechtsreferendariat kritisiert

Buch (in Oktober erscheinend) beschreibt Rechtsreferendariat (trainee solicitor) als sechstschlechtesten Job in England.

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The book ‘Crap Jobs’, edited by Dan Keiran, is to be published in October. ISBN: 0553816896. If it’s like his earlier ‘Crap Towns’, it is humorous but not totally divorced from reality.

According to Roll on Friday, being a trainee solicitor is the sixth-worst job in Britain:

bq. The book describes a trainee who accepted a job at a high street firm for the Law Society minimum wage. He found himself being given a succession of menial tasks by an irritable partner (surely not?), including repairing photocopiers, washing cars, cleaning shoes and spending a month “fighting spiders the size of my head” in archives. His only litigation experience seems to have been apologising to an irate judge after the partner failed to turn up in court.

I quite enjoyed my articles (as the traineeship was called in those days), especially litigation and conveyancing (I was working for a building society where the mortgagors were represented by licensed conveyancers, or maybe they were unlicensed in those days, but at all events things used to go wrong), and also wills. I did work for one partner where all I could really do was carry his briefcase around and buy sandwiches, but he was quite amusing. And for another partner whose work mainly revolved around exchange controls, which no longer exist, and which even he knew was too complex for anyone else to understand. And then for a partner whose in-tray, or perhaps his last-but-three in-tray, had a pile three feet high in it.

5 thoughts on “Trainee solicitor a crap job/Englisches Rechtsreferendariat kritisiert

  1. Well, a minimum annual trainee-solicitor wage (used to be GBP 14,000) has been introduced following pressure by the Trainee Solicitors’ Group. I knew a Welshman – not called Taffy BTW – who earned GBP 1 a week in 2 years’ articles with a North London solicitors’ firm 30 years ago. Nowadays, the Law Soc of Eng. & Wales will refuse to register a traineeship contract below the min. wage.

    In those days, trainee lawyers paradoxically were exposed to slave-labour conditions amounting to what would now be called ‘violations of human rights’ – including racial harassment, sexual discrimination & plain rudeness, even in Magic-Circle(Primrose- League)City of London law firms.

    What a relief it was for me to work for a civilised German law firm in Hamburg where English-speaking trainees were treated WITH RESPECT.

  2. Thanks, Isabella. Very amusing. I quote:

    >>The first vacuum I worked with, I called it Maud. She was a good vacuum. You know, life is like vacuuming — you’re going along and everything is fine, when suddenly it shuts off and you realize you’ve run out of cord.

  3. The problem in life is not with inanimate objects like vacuum cleaners. As Jean-Paul Sartre – or was it Albert Camus ? – memorably wrote: ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’ – hell is other people’ [or nasty lawyers].

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