Claire Welsh

Traditionally delivered by university law students, in the 12 years it has been running the results are impressive with dozens of schools taking part, thousands of pupils engaged, and hundreds of Street lawyers trained.

I was a Street Law student volunteer before joining Pinsent Masons and as someone who had no prior connections to the legal sector, I could see the value of this innovative programme and I wanted to continue my support. But once I started working full-time, the reality was that delivering weekly sessions just wasn’t sustainable alongside the demands of my new role as a trainee solicitor.

So, with the support of Pinsent Masons colleagues, particularly Claudia Dean, we looked for a way to make it viable within our firm’s environment and to develop a model which remained true to the objectives of Street Law.

Instead of weekly sessions, we deliver one session a month over a three month block, and we round that off by bringing pupils into our Edinburgh office to speed network with colleagues. It’s one thing to talk about law in a classroom but it’s another to meet real-life lawyers and realise that a legal career is not as distant as it might seem.

We’ve also adapted some of the Street Law materials to reflect the kind of work we do - with a focus on topics like intellectual property and commercial negotiation - while still keeping the sessions accessible, engaging and relevant.

Our partner school is Tynecastle High School, just a short distance from our office, and it is brimming with talent, representing a wide range of backgrounds and experiences from a variety of catchments.

Like other schools, not every student will have been exposed to professional careers, particularly in law, and that’s the gap we’re trying to close. The real measure of success is not just that students enjoy the sessions, but that we can break down barriers so that they start to see a pathway forward.

For some students, those sessions are enough to spark an interest and a number of Street Law participants have gone on to take part in our Legal Insights programme, which offers further learning, mentorship by Pinsent Masons lawyers and support with university course applications.

Our sponsorship of Street Law reflects how Pinsent Masons thinks about its wider role in society - we are part of a global business but we’re also part of a local community and can give back to a vibrant city like Edinburgh by making our careers and our industry more accessible.

We recognise that it’s not necessarily guaranteed for every person that they will be offered the same opportunities to “get into the room” and so we have to ask - how can we make the door behind us wider?

If access to the profession depends on who you know or what opportunities you happen to stumble across, then by adapting the Street Law model we can do more to level that out.

We are still at an early stage, but as the model evolves we will continue to lay the foundations which encourage increasing numbers of young people from a variety of backgrounds to cross the threshold into the legal profession.

Claire Welsh is a trainee solicitor at Pinsent Masons