To BPP and Beyond - part 4 of my training contract adventure

This is part 4 of a series about how I got my training contract. See here for Parts 1, 2 and 3.

Following the fiasco that was my failed training contract application at “Thomas Harwood” I began the GDL with great misgivings.

Mainly because I was self funding what was essentially a ￡10,000 degree, plus there was a whole thing with my visa situation and Theresa May’s hostile environment schtick. With apologies to any American readers, ￡10,000 is a lot of money for law school in the UK, or indeed any country with a functional legal qualification system. Anyway, I realistically had only one more application cycle to get a training contract. It was time to go big, or go home. Literally. As in, I could have faced deportation.

Thus I began my October studying at the impressive-sounding “BPP University” (est. 2007) from its London Waterloo campus.

I say “campus”. “Campus” is Latin for “field” or “plain” and conjures up an image of, you know, an actual university campus with halls of residence, faculty buildings - i.e. buildings plural - and rolling fields and so on. The London Waterloo campus of BPP University was, and still remains, a converted 6-floor office building located conveniently round the back of a train station. The view from the windows was not so much of rolling fields but of rolling stock (in diesel-stained sidings). The “canteen” was a row of vending machines on top floor and the “library” was a sectioned off bit of the ground floor which had about 40 books and 5 desks and where the thermostat was permanently set to “arctic mode”.?

On our first day, we were all handed a stack of BPP-branded textbooks and exercise books, custom-written for the GDL, and - as we swiftly discovered - full of typos and other errors.?

So far, so good value for money. Hooray for privatised higher education!

Of course, only about half of the students there were actually paying for the course. The other half were holders of training contract offers who not only had their course fees paid for in full, but also had a monthly allowance from their firm to live off so they wouldn’t need to sully their hands with things as menial as part-time jobs. I ask later learned that, worse still, a number of law firms who regularly sent their future trainees to BPP received a bulk discount so apparently only paid half or two-thirds the price per student. Great.

So as you can imagine, there was always a palpable tension between the two groups. To this end, BPP had tried to segregate us into separate classes for the have’s and have-not’s, but administrative constraints meant this wasn’t always possible so all the lectures were held with everyone together and I ended up in one of the classes which was mixed. Nevertheless, us paying customers ended up gravitating towards each other and sitting at the back of the room, glowering, Morlock-like, at the happy and complacent Eloi, munching away at the course content, and whose fees we were effectively subsidising.?

Of all of my lecturers and professors I only remember two.?

One was a guy who was called Brendan who taught us contract law. He had previously worked in-house at an investment bank. He was about 35, single, tall, athletic, Australian and very good-looking so that many of the women (and some of the men) would swoon as he walked by or said words like "causation" and "remoteness". He was also very good and teaching and clearly knew his stuff. To us initiates, he gave the impression that all in-house lawyers were not only highly commercial but had an excellent grasp of the principles of law. Most of us did very well in our contract law exams.

The other was a woman who was not called Amelia who taught us equity and trusts. She was a barrister who was "in between jobs". Towards the end of the academic year she became a door tenant at some set of regional chambers somewhere that did property work. I remember her being singularly the worst teacher of law – perhaps of any subject – in a higher education setting. It didn't help that she appeared to come to class completely unprepared and "did not really understand what a Vandervell trust was as it was quite complicated". And no – I'm not exaggerating – those were her exact words after she explained something in an incorrect way and someone queried this. I mean, I'm still a little hazy on the concept myself – partly because of her I think – but my God that was unprofessional. Despite Amelia, we still all just about managed to scrape passes in equity and trusts, but it was a close run thing.

The highlights of that term (aside from Brendan) included:

i) becoming really good friends with two guys who later decided they hated law and went on to do other, more fun things. I will probably write about them in a separate article at some later stage about careers that are more fun than law. (Disclaimer: “more fun” does not mean “better paid”.)

ii) being sued by the University of Law. It turned out when I paid a nominal holding deposit for the GDL course there (before eventually deciding to go to BPP), page 17485 of the terms and conditions included a lock-in clause that meant you had to give notice “not” to attend the course - failing which all ￡10k or so of the full course fees would fall due. Fairly insane and, of course, completely unenforceable as the partner at my Oxford high street firm told me, although this was 2014 and therefore prior to the Supreme Court decisions in Makdessi/ParkingEye. (If you haven’t ever read it, I recommend it. If nothing else you will marvel at how an ￡80 parking ticket case made it to the UK Supreme Court. The press summary is here for those looking for a quicker read).

Anyway, I held my ground despite the threats of being taking to the County Court and getting a CCJ against me, and ended up settling for not having to pay any money but agreeing to do the LPC (part 2 of law school) there instead the year after. More on that later, likely in a separate article, and once I have had a chance to discuss with a libel and defamation lawyer.

iii) Managing to complete 2 vacation scheme applications (HSF and BLP), and 2 training contract applications (Macfarlanes and SJ Berwin). To cut a long and boring story short, I got invitations to assessment centres at BLP (in November) and Macfarlanes (in January). I did not get any response from SJ Berwin at all, which in hindsight was a bullet dodged given that it went spectacularly bust approximately 3 years later - which would have been halfway through my training contract. Sliding doors moments and all that.

Anyway - my BLP adventure started on a dreary and wintry afternoon. We were a group of about 20 in total and had our icebreaker session first in a dingy meeting room. This time we were asked by graduate recruitment to state our name, university, degree subject, prisoner identification number etc etc. After about the 6th person had gone it became painfully apparent that everyone in the room had gone to Oxbridge, which was some kind of awkward.

Oh, and we all had to give a fun fact as well. I don’t remember anyone else’s fun facts except for that of some guy called Tom who said that he was president of his College’s History Society, which was such a spectacularly underwhelming humblebrag that I remember the look of punchable smugness on his face as he said it, which subsided into a sort of weak embarrassed smirk within a few seconds as everyone visibly rolled their eyes. A girl with dark hair and piercing eyes snorted loudly, before pretending half-heartedly to pass it off as a cough. She happened to be next in line and her name was Elen. After the assessment centre, we bumped into each other on the way out and chatted as we walked to the station together. It turned out that we had a lot in common with each other. Fairly poor form, all in all, to actually make friends with someone in a job interview context, but we became, and remain, good friends.?

Of the actual assessments I remember quite little save for the negotiation exercise in which we were divided up into teams of two, then pitted against each other in tiny meeting rooms. The exercise I did was an IP rights negotiation between a musician and a music streaming business. A trainee solicitor was sat in the corner of the room, presumably to assess the applicants and also to break up any fisticuffs that broke out. She watched, presumably in amusement, as my partner and I, acting for the music streaming business, stormed the negotiation and secured favourable terms on pretty much everything. I recall offering the musician and their agent the use of a free supercar though, which may or may not have been within the remit of the actual instructions but whatever. Anyway, all went well until the last 5 minutes when we had to document what had been agreed, at which point the other team physically saw how terrible a bargain they had and promptly reneged on everything. We all came out thinking we'd fluffed our lines, only to all be invited back for the vacation scheme in December. Clearly we had proved good entertainment value for the trainee.