Attorney General's Office

Solicitor General: welcome speech for new Government Legal Service trainee lawyers

Solicitor General, Vera Baird QC MP

I am very pleased to welcome you to your new role as legal trainees in the Government Legal Service. The Law Officers are enthusiastic supporters of the GLS. You offer the pool of talent from which the top Government lawyers of the future will be drawn.

Firstly, I would like to congratulate you for having won your place within the legal trainees scheme. You should feel very proud of yourselves. It was a fierce competition and you beat off some excellent candidates in winning your places. The figures speak for themselves. There were 535 applications for 27 places in the year in which most of you applied. The standard of applicants was consistently very high. So out of a group of top quality candidates, all of you have demonstrated the very best skills and potential for a career as a GLS lawyer. That in itself is a matter for congratulation.

I would also, however, like to congratulate you on choosing to join the GLS legal trainee scheme. It is a very wise choice to make. The scheme is focused on excellence, both in terms of the quality of lawyers within Government and also the opportunities offered to those lawyers. The GLS takes the trainees scheme very seriously. You are valuable assets and the GLS will invest in you as lawyers - you will see this in the coming months, through the formal training and support you will receive.

Another way in which the GLS will invest in you is in the work you will be offered. This will be of the highest quality. If you compare yourselves to other trainee lawyers such as those in private practice, we believe that you will be offered high level, high quality work at an earlier stage in your careers. You will be asked to work on areas of law that are novel, stimulating, and legally challenging. You will become involved in the sort of law that appears in the daily newspapers or which is reported on television. You may well be given substantial responsibility for your own litigation or prosecution work. You might even be asked to brief Ministers face to face, or to work on legislation such as Parliamentary Bills or regulations.

Just to illustrate this, we often have GLS trainees working in my Office, and our present trainee has been working, under supervision, on important, complicated matters that need the Law Officers' attention. He has already been given responsibility for specific matters and has sent us submissions in his own name, despite having been working in my Office for less than two months.

The Attorney General and I are very proud of the Government Legal Service. We know that it leads the private legal profession by its example. As Law Officers, we deal first hand with GLS lawyers, both those seconded to our Office, and lawyers across all the Whitehall departments. The Law Officers might be asked to advise on any area of Government policy, wherever it involves complicated legal issues. What we see is that for every area of Government policy, there are dedicated, specialist GLS lawyers, with the responsibility for these areas, who know the detail of the law. This specifically acquired expertise is invaluable in supporting us in our work as the most senior Legal Advisers to Government.

And what we learn from this day to day contact with GLS lawyers is that they are all focused and dedicated individuals, who believe in public service and who guard their independence fiercely. They offer first-class legal advice and representation to Ministers and Government departments in almost every area including the most complicated, controversial and sensitive areas of law. Where we do advise, the advice is confidential. There is also a rule, contained in the Ministerial Code, which prevents not only the content of our advice as Law Officers being published to the public but even the fact that we have advised at all.

Consequently, while I will not go into the details of matters on which we have advised recently, I will say that "hot topics" for the Law Officers include human rights questions of all description, in proposed legislation as well the implementation of existing legislation. I have been taking the Equality Bill through the House of Commons. Law Officers do assist with Bill advocacy. The Equality Bill has involved a wide range of issues, from the best way lawfully to scrap pay secrecy clauses to how narrow an exception can be to the obligation to adapt public service vehicles for disabled access, whilst fulfilling its purpose of ensuring that there are taxis available even in rural areas where the profits cannot support adaptation and the need is small.

We have also considered recently questions of Constitutional renewal (an issue that very much interests us as Law Officers as it affects our role for the future).

The Attorney General and I are guardians of the public interest as well as legal advisers to Parliament and to the Government. This work includes looking at whether sentences are unduly lenient, and if so, should be referred to the Court of Appeal for consideration. We also appoint special advocates in national security cases and advocates to the court where the court is wrestling with complicated areas of law and seeks some neutral advice or assistance in the public interest.

As Law Officers, the Attorney General and I also work closely with the main prosecuting authorities, such as the Crown Prosecution Service, the Serious Fraud Office and Revenue and Customs Prosecution Office. Superintending the prosecutorial departments means that we have a very close association with them; we pay close attention to their work and we meet with them frequently.

In the time available, I offer you only a flavour of what we do. Bearing in mind that we ourselves see only some of the areas of law covered by the Government, imagine how much more variety is out there and may be offered to you for your work?

Work you will see during your GLS career will be varied and it will be interesting. You will have the opportunity to move to different Departments during your career and you will develop expertise in many different types of law. We encourage this and we commend it. The GLS takes very seriously its commitment to its lawyers, and how your careers will be shaped and fostered.

You will also benefit from joining a network of lawyers, larger and more diverse than any offered in private practice. The numbers speak for themselves; there are just over 2,000 Government lawyers. You will meet many of them over your career. You will be asked advise some of them; others will provide you with advice. The networks you create and the friendships you forge will be really important. Now you have joined the GLS, you are very much part of its family. We are a joined up Government and we aspire to being even more joined up in the future. That means that when a tricky or novel legal question arises, it is likely to have a wide impact and may affect more than just one department. You will work with your "siblings", sharing knowledge and coordinating a joined-up response from Government.

You will have an opportunity to start networking today, when you meet your fellow trainees at the reception. I encourage you to do so.

I also encourage you to use the web resource of LiON. It provides you with information about shared knowledge on issue such as human rights and European law. It helps you with guidance on drafting and Parliamentary Bill work. It tells you about the different GLS networks. Importantly, it also gives you a directory of all the GLS lawyers and their area of work, so that if you have a question and you don't know the answer, you can find someone who does.

Over and above our pride in the excellence of the GLS and the legal advice it provides, the Attorney General and I are also pleased that the GLS is leading the private legal profession in terms of retention of lawyers and how it achieves an appropriate work-life balance. The GLS is committed to lawyers having the proper work-life balance of their choice, wherever this is practical. This may include flexible working, job-sharing, working from outside the office and many other ways in which lawyers' working patterns are accommodated.

We believe that the quality of work given to lawyers should not be reduced if they are working part-time or from home. A number of lawyers at the senior civil service level work on a job-share basis and they make it work incredibly well. This arrangement is unheard of in many large law firms and it is a real success story for the GLS.

We are also very pleased with our healthy statistics on diversity. The GLS has set itself targets for the numbers of senior civil servant lawyers it expects to come from black and ethnic minority backgrounds and to be female. These targets can be found on LiON. The GLS has already exceeded its 2011 targets, both for the numbers of female lawyers in the senior civil service and the numbers of lawyers from an ethnic minority background.

61% of the GLS is female. While this figure is broadly similar to the percentage (60%) of solicitors admitted to the Law Society who are female, many female solicitors in private practice leave at some stage, often when they acquire caring responsibilities and find their work demands in conflict with their parenting role. Through flexibility, we do far better and this flexibility is available for you.

We believe that "smarter working" is a large part of why the GLS retains lawyers. "Smarter working" means lawyers and their employers work together to identify what work is required, where, and how it is best delivered. A specific example might be a decision to offer a flexible working pattern if that allows a lawyer to focus their time most effectively. Alternatively, it might involve deciding that rather than ask a single lawyer to take on sole responsibility for a large project, it is better to have a number of lawyers take on shared responsibility for it. Where this happens, all the lawyers are still able to take on high quality work, which helps to develop their skills and their careers, but the workload is made more manageable. Our commitment to smarter working may be at least part of the reason why 41% of the lawyers in the Senior Civil Service are female. Of these, 40% of the lawyers at the most senior levels of the Civil Service are women. The Law Society report that only 23% of partners in law firms are female. So we are significantly ahead of the private profession.

So in closing, I would like to congratulate you again on becoming GLS trainees. I believe you have made an excellent decision. I look forward to having dealings with you over the forthcoming months and years and I wish each one of you every success in the future. Welcome.