The education side of Sequentus started as a practical necessity. The legal work was pro bono, and legal education work with university partners was what paid the bills.
It has since become something closer to the engine of the whole organisation — the way we train people, the way we recruit, and increasingly the way we fund support for registrants who can’t afford it. That wasn’t the plan. It’s simply what happened when a stopgap turned out to be more valuable than the thing it was standing in for.
What we started with
The original idea was straightforward: give students exposure to real cases, and ask them to think about how they would actually help a client progress one.
A lot of students have never seen a genuine case file. For some it’s an eye-opener. Getting a realistic sense of what the work of a lawyer involves day in, day out is enormously useful, and it arrives far too late in most legal education. There’s also a sense of trust, responsibility and accountability toward a real client that develops regardless of how large or small the individual contribution is.
And there is a practical dimension, which I’d rather be honest about than pretend doesn’t exist: on very large cases, many hands make light work. Additional resource to review a mountain of material lightens the load.
I also use the time to push students to think about how they want to practise. Not just the usual assumption of a firm of solicitors or a set of chambers, but whether a model like Sequentus might play to strengths they have from outside the legal profession. Most students are drawn to a particular area of law for personal reasons, and I firmly believe that passion is a real driver. Not everyone was built for a traditional setting.
What the teaching actually teaches
Some of the cases I use as teaching material look fairly black and white on first reading. They’re emotive. The obvious response is that the client must be guilty.
The most rewarding thing to watch is a student moving away from the innocence-or-guilt question altogether and starting to use their emerging legal skills to construct the best possible case for that client — and realising, in the process, that the position is rarely as bleak as it first appeared.
That shift, from juror to advocate, is most of the job.
How it became recruitment
Meeting students once or twice a week over a sustained period, you learn a great deal about them — personality, strengths, weaknesses — even though everything we do is remote. It becomes easy to spot the ones who want to go further, who put in the extra effort, and who are genuinely talented but might not fit the traditional mould.
We run programmes for trainee barristers as well as trainee solicitors, so we have our pick from both persuasions. Aspiring barristers tend to be drawn to the advocacy; aspiring solicitors to the analysis and the client relationship. It makes a real difference that our clients’ cases are almost always compelling ones.
By the time we’re recruiting, the pool already knows more about professional discipline than most students ever will, and — just as importantly — they know what to expect from us as an organisation and from me as a mentor. I can be demanding, and I’ll play the big bad wolf when it’s called for, but it’s because I want people to push themselves, get the experience they need here, and then take their career in the direction they’ve chosen.
When that means someone moves on, it’s for all the right reasons, and I’m glad to have played a part in their legal education.
Where it’s heading
We’re currently developing a broader offer: qualifications at levels 3, 4 and 5, through to our own recognised diploma in professional discipline, with practical experience built in throughout.
It’s a considerable amount of additional work. But alongside helping people access meaningful training and real experience, it opens up ways of funding other things — helping registrants with fees where they fall outside what they can afford, making sure they have the support they need, and offering scholarships so that the cost of training isn’t itself a barrier to becoming a legal professional.
None of that is settled yet, and I’d rather describe it as a direction than a promise. It also sounds fairly ordinary for an educational institution. But we are a small and lean organisation, and if we can make that loop work — training people properly, recruiting from among them, and using what the education generates to fund access for the people who need it most — then we’re doing something right.
Sequentus Education works with universities and training providers on a not-for-profit basis. Sequentus Legal Services represents healthcare registrants before the GMC, GPhC, NMC and other regulators, on fixed fees.
