Ben Keith on Paid Pupillage Advice and Access to the Bar

Ben Keith, barrister and co-founder of IHR Advisors, was quoted in City AM on 20 August 2026 about the paid advice market that has grown up around applications to the legal profession. Rosie Harris-Davison’s article reported that trainees and unqualified candidates are charging aspiring lawyers for guidance on training contracts and pupillage. Some buyers paid thousands of pounds for material they had been told came from senior lawyers. Ben Keith’s point was that a number of the people selling the advice are not qualified themselves.

What Ben Keith Told City AM

Ben Keith described the trend at the Bar as ‘a social media hubris’, created by ‘people who don’t have pupillage themselves but are claiming they can help with pupillage applications’. He was blunter about the confidence that sustains it. ‘It’s a false sense of achievement. You think you suddenly know everything just because you’ve done a bar course.’

Finishing the Bar course qualifies a candidate to apply for pupillage, and that is all it does. Pupillage decisions turn on things a recent graduate has usually not seen from the other side of the table: how a panel reads an advocacy exercise, or what a particular set actually needs in a given recruitment year. Anyone selling a formula for that without having been through it is guessing and charging for the guess.

Why the Market Has Buyers

The figures in the City AM piece explain the demand well enough. UCAS recorded 27,150 students accepted onto UK law courses last year. Fewer than 3,000 training contracts were offered across 67 City firms. The January sitting of the Solicitors Qualifying Examination produced a pass rate of 53 per cent. At the Bar there are roughly 500 pupillages available a year.

Paul Leamy, a solicitor at Temple Bright, called the practice exploitative. It was, he said, ‘creating another barrier to access into a profession which historically has had enough barriers which many of us within the profession have spent years trying to break down’. He described ‘a cottage industry chasing people who are desperate for that break and preying on them, saying, “I can share my magic formula with you” for a fee’. Finn Sprakes, a solicitor apprentice, told the paper the trend ‘feels manipulative’, and that ‘people are almost panic-buying and wondering what they’re doing wrong’.

Access to the Bar

Scarcity of this kind makes advice very hard to assess. A candidate with no family connection to the profession has nobody to ask whether a particular seller is credible, and no way of telling whether the document they have paid for was written by a practitioner at all. The people who can least afford to lose a few hundred pounds are often the ones spending it.

Leamy referred to ‘an unwritten duty’ to pass knowledge to the next generation and said that monetising it ‘doesn’t sit well with me’. The Bar has always run on that duty, informally and without much record of it. Mini-pupillages, mock interviews and a marked-up draft application have traditionally been given free by people who had them given to them. The Bar Standards Board regulates who may hold themselves out as a barrister. It does not regulate who may sell a PDF about becoming one. Candidates should take advice on pupillage from practising barristers and from chambers pupillage committees and should expect to pay nothing for it.

Our thanks to City AM and to Rosie Harris-Davison for the piece, which can be read here.