The National College of Legal Training (NCLT)’s first Facebook ‘reverse auction’, which took place last month, lasted just seconds after a student snapped up the Legal Practice Course (LPC) place at the opening price of £7,200 – much to the disappointment of rival bidders, who had hoped to knock the price down further and net a bargain.
To placate the disgruntled bidders, and garner a bit more publicity, NCLT arranged another auction – which was held on Thursday.
Now, you’d have thought that the law school would have at least tried to come up with a way of prolonging the bidding slightly longer in the second auction. Well, you thought wrong. Here’s what happened (writing the words “I want that LPC” claims the place and ends the auction):
As great as it is that winning bidder Charlotte Ryves got £700 off her LPC place, she still has to pay NCLT £7,200. And what happens at the end of the course?
I’m assuming that Ryves doesn’t have a TC lined up, otherwise she’d have received LPC sponsorship from her law firm and not had to bother with NCLT’s auction.
So unless she bags a trainee position during her LPC – a feat that fewer students than ever seem to be managing these days – she’ll find herself among the ranks of jobless law school graduates upon completion of the course.
More and more students I speak to tell me that having an LPC can actually count against them in the hunt for a TC, as firms prefer those who are organised enough to start looking for positions before they start the vocational training stage at law school.
Of course, it’s possible that Ryves wants to work in legal aid, where it’s almost impossible to get firms to fund LPC costs, and that she has secured some kind of advance TC arrangement that will kick in at the end of law school. But that’s the only scenario under which I can see the benefit in going for the quick fix of a Facebook LPC place auction – especially when the discounts are so minimal.