Page 19 - Prime - Marking Ten Years

Our Impact: Virtual work experience
As more and more member firms moved their programmes online, in some instances their reach was widened, allowing students from cold
spot areas to access them where otherwise they might not have been able to do so. Whilst a virtual work experience programme will never replace the magic for a young person of walking into a law firm for the first time and what
it does for raising their aspirations and building their confidence, the impact is still considerable.
To build on this and to help reach more students, PRIME have created an Open Access Legal Work Experience Programme to complement those live online programmes being offered by our member firms. We worked with Forage on its development, a company who share our belief that “talent is evenly distributed but opportunity is not”.
Made up of five modules, PRIME’s Virtual Legal Work Experience Programme gives students the opportunity to build legal skills and gain an understanding of what it means to be a lawyer, helping them to decide if this is the career for them. They get to experience what real lawyers do every day, working on tasks that introduce them to different practice areas, including commercial and criminal law. The Programme was launched in the Summer of this year and we are anticipating over 750 students completing it in the first year.