Neil Rose interviews Tracy Savage, the new chair of ACL Training, as it marks its 25th anniversary
Tracy Savage has taken over as chair of ACL Training at an auspicious time for the organisation, as it marks its 25th anniversary.
Writing about the launch of the then Association of Law Costs Draftsmen’s new correspondence course in the March 2001 issue of ALCD News, Bob Tanner, chair of the education and training sub-committee, observed: “Please remember that, in law, there is usually more than one answer to any one problem. If there were not, there would be far fewer lawyers and, certainly, far fewer costs draftsmen.”
The course has evolved significantly since then and Ms Savage has assumed the role at a time of surging interest in it – in part perhaps a reaction to the Mazur ruling but also a recognition of the value of the qualification and the route into a legal career that it offers.
Life-changing letter
Ms Savage’s career in the law began in the 1980s. After a law degree at Birmingham University, she qualified as a solicitor at DWF, before moving to Midlands law firm Kent Jones & Done, specialising in property work for housing associations.
Then in 1993 she received a letter from the College (now University) of Law asking if she was interested in a job – one of the ways it recruited then, she explains, was to write to those who had done well in what were then called the Law Society finals. These were about to be replaced by the legal practice course (LPC) and the introduction of a more interactive approach, as well as staff-to-student ratios, meant the college was on a recruitment drive.
Ms Savage recalls: “I was working really long hours, I’d had two days of my holiday canceled and there was this letter asking if I’d like to work for the college, with 13 weeks holiday and so on. I went for an interview and they offered me the job. I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just be there for a bit’.”
It was 26 years before she left the College of Law, having been appointed an associate professor in 2013. “I really enjoyed being in legal education. I liked explaining to students, taking them from a state of complete bafflement to an understanding of what they had to do.”
In 2019, with the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE) looming, Ms Savage moved to Barbri as the head of academic programmes, where her task was to design the course to help students pass it.
There was a lot of resistance inside the University of Law to the change “and I thought it would be nice to be somewhere where you could focus just on the SQE”. It was a chance to create the course starting from “a complete blank piece of paper”.
The SQE remains somewhat controversial but Ms Savage agrees with the underlying principle of a centralised exam to ensure that would-be solicitors have the knowledge and skills required to a set standard – previously, each education provider signed off students.
“Whether or not it was true, there was definitely a perception that it was easier to get an LPC from some institutions than from others,” she recalls, saying this perpetuated similar discrimination from undergraduate degrees.
The intention of opening up the profession to those who could not afford university or law school was also positive. “I was the first person in my family to ever go to university. I was the first lawyer in my family. We didn’t know any lawyers. And I did that because everything was paid for [through a local authority grant]. I had a grant to go to the college to do my Law Society Finals.” For students carrying tens of thousands of pounds of debt, this must seem a world away.
But Ms Savage is not totally happy with the SQE’s execution and particularly the lack of mock questions available to students.
Huge amount of experience
It was a “very fulfilling and very interesting” job at Barbri (in 2021, she became director of learning), “but also very, very busy”. Ms Savage – who turned 60 at the end of last year – decided she wanted “more time to do things that weren’t just work”.
So she now works part-time – including for Barbri – and was alerted to the ACLT role by her predecessor, Sarah Hutchinson, who started working at the College of Law on the same day in 1993. An interview process followed and her experience of designing and running legal training courses, including for distance learners, clearly made her a good fit.
“People are giving up two years of their lives for the CLPQ [Costs Lawyer Professional Qualification]. The last thing most people want to have to do when they’ve come back from a busy job is to spend two hours learning, so you have to make it more engaging and interesting. Not easy – because a course like this has to have a difficult exam – but making the process of learning as easy as possible. I have a huge amount of experience in that.”
Ms Savage is also enthusiastic about the task of raising awareness of the CLPQ, especially given the relatively low pass rates of the SQE and the financial risk students are taking on. “Costs could be much more attractive than that big risk of taking the SQE and perhaps never passing it or getting a job. It’s an opportunity for people to come into the law.”
The CLPQ is a robust qualification that produces Costs Lawyers with the knowledge they need, she says. At the same time, “everything can always be improved”. In particular, she believes the course could be made “more cohesive and more joined-up between the different subject areas”.
It remains an oddity of the costs world that unregulated people can do much of what regulated lawyers do, and Ms Savage says she is keen to make qualifying more attractive to the former group. You cannot call yourself a professional without regulation, she argues. “If you’re saying you’re an expert in a field, then you should be happy to be regulated to show that.”
She acknowledges that it can be difficult to create exemptions based on experience. “You can’t simply say, ‘Because I’ve been doing it for 30 years, I’m an expert’. You have to prove that.” These generally require the submission of portfolios, which can be time-consuming and expensive both to collate and then, for the regulator, assess.
“And if you are doing everything properly, you should get through the course without too many problems anyway.”
ACL Training may be 25 years old, but there is still much to do.