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students of the working class get all kinds of mixed messages when investigating their chances of becoming a lawyer

The Law Society's website describes their new careers, becoming-a barrister.com as a "portal for those interested in a career at the bar" but its retro design makes it more like a portal to the 1990s.

The journey starts back with a series of video clips that look and sound as if they were produced by makers of sex education videos that I sat at the adolescence. It continues with a low-budget animation, apparently designed to create the impression that lawyers are just a bunch of potatoes happy, and ends with a FAQ page that appears to have been prepared by a person excl introduction of one hour course, the Internet.

Get on appearance, however, and the actual content of the site is surprisingly good. While the case studies that trace the course of several lawyers unfussily young workers to build a career in the bar, to achieve the stated objective of the Bar Association on the site of "the entry of demystification of the profession ".

However, the style goes a long way. And for me the main message of the becoming-a-barrister.com is that the bar does not care enough about diversity to devote adequate resources to promote development.

This is unfortunate because the message is not entirely accurate. Over the past two decades, the bar has worked to increase access of women and ethnic minorities, transforming an almost all white-male enclave, in a profession where 10% of members are black or ethnic minorities ( BME) background (well above the equivalent figure of 7.9% for the entire population) and 34% are women.

One way he did it is the monitoring data on gender and ethnicity of its practitioners, and the publication to include a full breakdown of the different BME background - something that most of the counsel for the City of companies refuse to do so. This probably explains why blacks are over-represented in the bar (representing 2.4% of the independent counsel in connection with the 2% of the population in general), but underrepresented in City law firms (which represent only 1.2% of all lawyers in the city, despite the fact that 9.2% of the lawyers of these companies fall within the general group of BME).

However, when it comes to socio-economic diversity, the mentality implied by barrister.com be, is indeed confirmed, the bar is still dominated by private schools. A survey found that two thirds of lawyers had the upper chamber of a medium, but the fact that this information is not officially registered and published in the entire profession means that is currently impossible to determine exact numbers.

To date, the bar attempted to remedy this situation by trying to change the perception of him as an old club, "logic dictates that less affluent students out of the race as practice lawyers, as they mistakenly believe that it is impossible to do-become-a barrister.com is an example of this strategy -.. but one that seems to have failed other is the annual "investment plan bar" l Bar Association this week has worked in collaboration with the Foundation for social mobility and the Law Society. Continue for about 60 students from high-performance low-performing public schools correspondence with lawyers for several days of shadow work. Students also have to listen to presentations by senior members of the profession, attend court and participate in a defense. Although these initiatives will help to some extent, to ignore a very important barrier preventing real students from less affluent to get to the bar: the prohibitive cost of legal education (the School of rods , aspiring lawyers must be made at the end of their law degree undergraduate costs about £ 16,000). Due to the nature of the bar, usually have future lawyers to cover these costs themselves.

In practice, however, the only truly outstanding working-class students get their hands on money and Lincoln Children's Inn Gray (I should add here that the two-Oyin Adeniji and Al- Dimashk approached me, as in this category), much of it will end naturally less intelligent students of private schools whose education has given them an advantage. Many of these do not really need the money so much. Cherie Booth, who comes from a working class family, articulated by the lack of a lot during my interview with her this year, when he recalled his experience in the profession. "The only way that had a chance would be much better than the rest of them," he said.
The good news is that change is in the air, with the Legal Services Board (LSB) has recently announced a proposal to force lawyers chambers and law firms to compile and publish information not only on lawyers gender and ethnicity, but they went to school, and even what kind of education their parents received.