PrologueOver the last 30 years professions have been subject to searching critiques; nothing about them is taken for granted anymore. The legal profession, as one of the trinity of original professions, has been mired in controversy as critics have deconstructed its values and objectives. Although for some the criticism has sounded like a jeremiad and they have attempted to resurrect professions as benign markers of sociality, the agnostics are in the ascendant.1 Underpinning the social cohesion of professions with society is the educational process through which new professionals are initiated. The critique of professions has enveloped all aspects of professionalisation including education and training, which poses massive challenges to the approach to knowledge creation taken by professions. 2 In this article we consider the institutional dimensions of professionalism and the ways that the legal profession, as a modern institution, grapples with the challenges of postmodernity.Postmodern theorists observed that radical changes in socio-economic organization presented by post-industrial capitalism in the second half of the 20 th century threatened our prevailing conceptions of knowledge. As societies became bureaucratised and imbued with notions of controlled consumption, they fractured the dominant cultural and aesthetic values and revolutionised the way learning was acquired, classified, made available and exploited. 3 For Lyotard, for example, the correlation between the acquisition of knowledge and the training of minds was obsolete. 4 Furthermore, as Lyotard and Foucault hypothesised, the linkages between power and knowledge were fundamental to understanding the processes of modernization. This is perceived in Foucault's focus on the role of types of knowledge in supporting the rise of impersonal networks of disciplinary power, 5 and in Lyotard's view that knowledge is a key component in the competition for power. The article examines three aspects of the concerns thrown up by the TFR. In the first part we analyse the structure and drivers of the TFR, where they have come from and how they will be articulated. Secondly, we consider the TFR in the light of the context of the political economy of higher education and its role in the new capitalism. Finally, we examine the potential effects of the TFR for the legal profession from the perspective of deprofessionalisation and also for the Law Society itself, whether it can retain a key role in the life course of the legal profession. The Context of the Training Framework ReviewSeen in a historical perspective, the TFR proposals are evolutionary rather than Features Of The Proposed FrameworkThe TFRG's proposed outcomes are organised in four groups. Group A outcomes comprise the intellectual, analytical and problem solving skills delivered in honours degrees, together with a core of legal knowledge that reworks the current seven Although it considered that some of the Group D outcomes could only be delivered during the period of work-based learning, most were ...

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Differences in the working lives of solicitors have become increasingly marked in recent years. Growing numbers of lawyers are employed in the public and corporate sectors and, with the increasing size and wealth of City of London commercial firms, there are significant differences between these firms and thosè high-street' firms that serve local communities. These differences impact on lawyers throughout training and beyond, both in terms of rites of passage into the profession and in conditions of employment. This research, the final stage in a longitudinal survey spanning the 1990s, combines quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the reactions of newly qualified solicitors to their work. Building on the project's previous surveys, which charted the nature of disadvantage suffered by many prospective entrants to the legal profession, the research finds a large measure of satisfaction regarding careers. It also identifies causes for concern, including increasing specialisation in legal education and the potential separation of the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards of professional practice.