What makes a good lawyer? Many months of debate and controversy on what lawyers need to know and how they should be trained will soon come home to roost.

Changes are being made both to the training contract (the two years spent with a law firm or in-house so as to qualify); and the Legal Practice Course (LPC), the one-year vocational course after university, aimed at improving content and also opening up the pathway to being a lawyer to a broader range of people. At present it is costly: if some of it can be done on the job, then a wider spectrum of students may plump for the law.

From September a new model for the training contract is being piloted by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the body now charged with the education and standards of solicitors. The idea is to help the 2,000 or so students who emerge with the LPC each year but do not land a training contract. Clare Gilligan, head of education and training policy, says that just because someone does not win a formal training contract does not mean they should not be able to qualify.

“Some 9,500 students come through the LPC each year and only 7,000 training places are available. There are a number of students with potential to become solicitors and who have demonstrated that on the LPC. So we want to test if the training can actually be provided in a different way.”

The LPC graduates would be taken on as paralegals in a law firm, but train in a way similar to legal executives, while they earn. The law firm or employer would have to provide supervision but the assessment would be done externally by a single body yet to be chosen. Several firms and in-house legal departments are taking part in the pilot in which the “trainees” will be assessed on skills, experience and knowledge acquired in a variety of fields. The pilot will be evaluated and if successful, launched across England and Wales in 2011.

Meanwhile, law schools that run the LPC are devising the new courses in line with the reforms agreed by the profession for a more pick’n’mix approach. Some will be in place from September and all by 2010. The aim here is again more flexibility: so that students can choose to do the current one-year training in stages, over time and staggering the cost and course providers can tailor courses more neatly to specialist demand for specific fields — whether corporate, legal aid, family or personal injury.

The new LPC will have essential core elements that all would-be solicitors must study. As well as professional conduct and regulation, wills and administration of estates and taxation, the first part of the course will include the core practice areas of business law, property law and litigation. Students should know about professional rules of conduct, client relations, avoiding discrimination, conflicts of interest, professional undertakings and so on. Financial services and the money-laundering regime are included — and, of course, basic skills of communicating with clients, drafting letters or documents, case analysis and research.

Then, to qualify for the LPC, students must complete three vocational electives of their choosing, of 100 hours each. But, crucially, these need not now be done after stage one — they can be taken later, at a law firm, or with a different law school. In all, the course expects 1,400 “notional learning hours” compared with 1,200 for an undergraduate year.

The question is: will law firms be happy to take students who have just done stage one, with a potential greater training burden for themselves? Professor Scott Slorach, of the College of Law, said: “The initial feeling seems to be that firms will want people who’ve done both stages and learnt as much as possible.”

Julia Clark, global learning and development partner at Clifford Chance, said its approach was to work with providers to tailor the LPC to its own needs and it would “expect all our trainees to follow that route”. But she felt that large firms “might find it difficult to accommodate a situation where some trainees had completed the whole course and others only stage one”.

Things could change though, Slorach suggests, if a firm sees a recruitment advantage in luring students after stage one, in March rather than September, offering them the chance to combine their electives with their training. “For the moment, though, everyone is watching — to see if anyone jumps.”

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