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A-G: Priestley 11 still work
With the place of the traditional Priestley 11 coming under scrutiny in an age of tech advancement, the nation’s First Law Officer has weighed in on the direction of legal education in Australia.
Jerome Doraisamy
Source: smh.com.au
In conversation with Lawyers Weekly, Attorney-General Christian Porter MP observed — with some deference to his time as a law school professor — that law degrees are now more utilised as general-purpose qualifications than was ever previously the case, with “so many people coming through law schools who ultimately don’t practise but who’ve used legal skills in other contexts and settings”.
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But in spite of changes to generalised vocational direction, a radical re-think of core competences to practice as a solicitor in Australia is not necessarily needed at this point in time, he surmised.
“I think the Priestley 11 work, generally speaking, fairly well, and they’re supplemented by an ever-evolving and changing and dynamic set of elective units that can cover, I think, changes in technology, that can cover areas of growth in legal service delivery. I don’t have any major concerns without being an expert in the field, but [I am willing to] receive views from people who might think that there are major changes [needed].”
When asked if given new technologies abound that are available for online platforms, that practitioners can use to better service their clients, and the fact that the new generation of lawyers coming through the ranks is operating in a day-to-day environment that’s very different to previous generations, should the profession have an ongoing conversation about changing up the core competencies, or if those core competencies [are] well-established principles, Mr Porter leaned towards the latter.
“The core competencies are about methodologies of thinking, about fundamental underpinning principles of the common law, and the fact that we approach legal research and writing, and problem-solving in a significantly different environment with different tools,” he posited.
“I don’t think [new technology] diminishes the need to thoroughly understand hundreds of years’ worth of legal principles, based on hundreds of years of case law that have allowed us to bring taxonomy and order to problem-solving in civil society.”
New lawyers and law students coming through the ranks still need to know about the rules of evidence, “even if it’s the case that we’re practising in a very different environment to what we were in 1970 [and] how tortuous principles work, what causation means in a legal sense”, Mr Porter continued.
“I think those things are inescapably important. The difficulty is that, if you’re deciding something that should go into the core competencies, I think by necessity you’re really looking at something that you pull out.
“Approaching it from the question of, what is it in the Priestley 11, and the core competencies, that we say is no longer as important as it once was, I think that’s really hard to identify.”
