Conclusion

There is growing concern that the cost of legal vocational education skews the profes­sion by discouraging the less well off. On recent evidence, there will continue to be pressure on the profession to justify or amend its requirements for practice.

Despite recognition of the importance of professional ethics in official reports, including the recent report for the Legal Education and Training Review, the subject has not gained a significant foothold in the initial stage. It was introduced into the

²⁰⁶ w Twining, The Role of Academics in Legal Education and Training (www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/academics/ profiles/twining/2013-LETR-Report.pdf).

²⁰⁷ ibid, at para 10, 3.

CONCLUSION 211 vocational stage as a pervasive subject in the early-1990s. There, on some accounts, it struggled to make much impact. The Bar recently established Professional Ethics as an independent, centrally assessed subject as a result of the Woods Review. It is doubtful, however, that it will continue to be accepted that professional issues be left to the vocational stage.

The prospect for creation of an undergraduate legal ethics curriculum is not promising. At the point when legal ethics appears ready to enter the mainstream, the recommendation, as in the LETR Report, is invariably to prescribe ethical outcomes. Outcomes have previously had relatively inconsequential impact on undergraduate study. At present, it seems likely that ethics outcomes will need to compete for curriculum time against the megalith of the core subjects. Whatever is implemented, at least within the template of the LETR Report, is therefore unlikely to have much impact on future lawyers.