In 1877 Britain examined trainee solicitors halfway through, to check the job was teaching them. We stopped doing that.

Start in 1728. The Attorneys and Solicitors Act made two things compulsory for anyone wanting to practise: your name on the roll, and five years bound under articles of clerkship to a practising solicitor. Not five years working in law. Five years bound to a named person who had agreed to train you.

The detail worth keeping is who that person had to be. When Parliament revisited the arrangement in the 1840s, the rules required that the master be in actual practice for himself, and to have been so for five years. The law regulated the teacher, not just the pupil. Ministers described the point of the whole apparatus plainly: candidates should have had the means of instruction by employment. The employment was supposed to be the instruction. That was the deal, written down.

It was not egalitarian. Five years was long, articles cost money, and roughly one clerk in five in the eighteenth-century registers was articled to his own father. The system made lawyers by making them wait, and it was efficient at reproducing the sort of people who were already lawyers.

The loosening began early. By 1843 the five years came down to three for graduates of Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Durham and London. Time served was already becoming negotiable if you had the right education.

Then, in 1877, Parliament did the thing we have since abandoned. The Solicitors Act of that year set out three examinations administered by the Law Society: a Preliminary, a Final, and, between them, an Intermediate. The Act defines the Intermediate exactly: an examination of persons bound under articles, in order to ascertain the progress made by them during their articles. Not a test of what they had been taught in a classroom. A test of whether the apprenticeship was working, sat while it was still happening.

That is the instrument. Britain built a way of checking, midway through, that the job was doing its job.

Everything since has run one way. Articles became the training contract. The training contract became, in 2021, qualifying work experience: two years rather than five, splittable across four employers, paid or unpaid, requiring exposure to a minimum of two competences that the regulator declines to specify. The old Legal Practice Course route stays open to those already on it until the end of 2032, and then that too is gone.

Every step of that loosening had a decent argument behind it, and some of them were overdue. Five years bound to one man who could refuse to release you was a system built for the sons of solicitors. The modern route is cheaper, faster and more open, and the results bear that out: solicitor apprentices, who would never have got near articles, now outperform every other group in the qualifying exams.

So this is not a lament. The old system was narrow and slow and it kept people out on purpose.

But look at what was dropped along the way rather than what was added. Three hundred years of reform steadily reduced what the law demanded of the workplace: how long you spent in it, who was allowed to run it, and finally whether anyone examined what it taught you. The exams got better. The scrutiny of the apprenticeship got weaker, and then went.

Which leaves the profession in an awkward position at exactly the wrong moment. The question in front of it is whether the workplace still teaches, now that the tasks it taught through are being automated. That is a question about the quality of an apprenticeship. It is the question the Intermediate examination existed to answer, and it was abolished long before anyone needed to ask it again.