Back to school

The age of entitlement ... Barely Legal  discovers that the Legal Services Award covers graduates who haven't been admitted ... 20 days of paid leave up for grabs in graduate year ... Is the College of Law worth it? ... Surviving in an era of bonded labour 

Only three months after graduation, I'm back at College of Law to prepare for my admission as a real lawyer. 

The CoL gets a bad rap in the legal community - it is where lawyers that once did legal work end up working public service hours.

Contrary to the word on the legal street, I'm loving the graduate diploma of legal practice programme at ANU. The lecturers are like your favourite high school teachers who make you do a lot of role play.

Plus, you get to have nice biscuits and go home at 4.30pm.

The first task we had was to design a law firm logo. Here's what I came up with - and I'm really pleased with the result. 

I anticipate the fictional firm to go into administration after six months. Already, it had to turn down half the retainers due to various conflicts of interests that arose during legal ethics.

So, here are my gripes ...

College of Law is really expensive. It can cost anywhere between $8,000 and $9,000, which is a lot of money if you're a grad.

If you've graduated and haven't been admitted, you might as well be an unborn baby on the mean street of lawyers.

If you're an unborn baby, you don't earn that much money.

A lot of us law graduates do one of two things: we FEE-HELP on top of our HECS or sign ourselves into one of those contracts where we have to repay the loan if we quit the job before two years.

If it sounds like bonded labour, it's because it is.

Not to mention the pressure and stress it puts on newbies. If you spend all day pushing trolleys up and down Martin Place, the first thing you want to do when you get home is eat some frozen dinner and watch My Kitchen Rules.

The last thing you want to be doing is Skyping your firm "partners" to work on legal assignments, which will invariably interrupt your quality MKR viewing. Especially if the firm's going under in six months anyway.

I ask my very smart friend, College of Law Dux, what he think might be the solution to this issue.

Pause here for a second ... Dux for College of Law?

Isn't dux what dorky kids get for doing extra assignments and missing out on a bunch of other things at high school?

Apparently not. It turns out high school is never over and you can win dux for being smart at College of Law.

So, here's what he had to say:

Well, the skills they teach you are really important since it is different to uni law, which is more academic.

So if you don't have CoL or something similar you would need to learn it at uni. However, not everyone who does uni wants to practice so it may be redundant for them and you lose electives.

I think it should be taught at uni because some of the practical things (e.g. learning how to do conveyancing) is probably more useful than a lot of things they teach at law school (e.g. the jurisprudence of critical legal studies ... what are critical legal studies, anyway?)

That way, grads don't have to study while doing their grad year or get themselves into further debt-bondage.

In the meantime, graduates, HR advisers and partners please take note - law graduates are covered by a modern award. 

Most people think that because lawyers are award free us baby lawyers are award-free as well.

But, in the Legal Services Award 2010 there is actually a classification for law graduates who haven't been admitted to practice.

If my interpretation of the modern award is correct (disclaimer: no liability accepted), law graduates are entitled to:

1. Four days paid leave for each subject for "study and attendance at examinations" if they are necessary for admission, and
2. Paid leave to attend lectures and classes which are required for admission.

This could easily amount to 20 days of paid leave in your graduate year, although I don't know anybody who has claimed it in full.

Most people float in and out of the office to sit exams or, in the worst case scenario, spend annual leave days sitting trust account exams.

I hope more people use it so grads can save their annual leave for social life or, in the absence of such a life, watching MKR in peace.

In the meantime, I better get back to trust accounting.

Now that I know you can win College of Law Dux, my competitive instincts are firing-up. I'm off to such a good start with my awesome stationery.