The future according to Alex

It used to be so simple. You went off to university to study a wishy-washy arts degree paid for by the state. Then, in your final year, you stumbled on a careers fair, bumped into a graduate recruitment officer from a big City law firm and, before you knew it, you had a training contract lined up. After a couple of years of hard-ish graft during your fully sponsored graduate diploma in law (GDL) and legal practice course (LPC), you suddenly found yourself as a trainee solicitor on upwards of £30,000 - a figure that would soon spiral towards £100k if you stuck around a few years. But now, as students brace themselves for the removal of the undergraduate fee cap, and the world hovers on the brink of a double dip recession, life has suddenly become much more complicated.

First, the corporate branch of the legal sector - which has been responsible for much of the growth of the UK legal profession over the last 15 years - is shrinking. Before the catastrophic collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008, the biggest City law firms took on around 120 trainees a year. That figure is currently being scaled back by around 25% at many firms, so that by 2014 some will hire just 90 trainees annually. At the mid-tier corporate firms the shrinkage could be potentially much greater if, as many expect, a second wave of recession precipitates a further round of mergers. Jane Galvin, head of professional services at Barclays Corporate, expects over a third of law firms in the Top 25-75 bracket to have merged by 2014. "Within three years I expect 35% of the firms in this category to have merged - for defensive reasons," she told me last year. 

Second, UK corporate firms are moving more of their operations abroad; principally to Asia, to service still fast-growing commercial and financial markets, but also to Africa, South America and Australia, which are all enjoying natural resources booms. While jobs-disappearing-abroad fears are often overstated, there's little doubt that we're seeing a fundamental shift taking place. Most top UK law firms currently bring in between 7% and 13% of their revenues from Asia-Pacific derived work; within four years many firms expect that to grow to 20%. What does this mean for wannabe lawyers? More competition for jobs, mainly, as the big City outfits increasingly target graduates in Asia and Australia. Still, the vast majority of these firms' entry level intake will continue to be UK law graduates for some time yet. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that British students can boost their chances of training contract success by tailoring their CVs to fit firms' newfound interest in Asia. Those at an earlier stage may even want to consider one of the growing number of joint honours law and Chinese studies undergraduate degrees being offered by universities.

The heightened competition for training contracts, combined with a squeeze in trainee numbers, is certain to see more law graduates doing spells as paralegals before they land training contracts. And when they eventually do begin training, they may find the rookie experience rather different to what it used to be. Last week, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) backed a new training model aimed at City firms, which will see a third party, Acculaw, recruit its own trainees from postgraduate law schools, then second them to firms on an ad hoc basis. According to The Lawyer, Acculaw trainees will earn "in excess of £20,000 a year" - a figure that will equate to substantially less than the amounts currently paid by top City firms.

Expect even more upheaval in the legal aid branch of the profession, where huge impending cuts to the legal aid budget will surely force a raft of high-street solicitors' firms out of business. Wannabe lawyers in this area will, more than ever, need the drive - and resources - to work for free for a period in order to land full-time positions, with unpaid internships now the norm. It's at the publicly funded Bar, though, where there could potentially be the most change, as cash-strapped chambers find themselves with no choice but to review their business models. Legal aid barristers are currently talking a great deal about diversification – for example, criminal barrister Nichola Higgins, the chair of the Young Barristers' Committee, recently branched out into advising companies on the effect of the Bribery Act 2010. Another way chambers with a publicly funded bent will seek to balance the books is through the adoption of new business models, and, in line with the liberalising provisions of the Legal Services Act 2007, by employing paralegals to do low-cost volume work. These paralegals would work in separate corporate vehicles known as 'SupplyCos' - the template for which Nicholas Green QC developed during his tenure as chair of the Bar Council in 2010. "If entity regulation and direct access are introduced by the Bar Standards Board, as is likely, then chambers can use corporate vehicles to employ providers of reserved and indeed non-reserved legal services," Green told me last year, adding: "Graduates could come to see SupplyCos as a route into the Bar."

The challenge law students face in adapting to this new post-financial-crisis marketplace is heightened by the changes taking place in legal education. The trebling of the cost of a law degree at top universities to £9,000 a year has spurred private law schools and less traditional universities to launch a host of alternative options. The buzzword here is 'choice'. From 2012 students will be able to live at home and study a compressed law degree at private law school BPP that takes just two years and costs a total of only £12,000. Or they might try a new option like the combined law degree at Northumbria University, which effectively rolls a conventional LLB, an LPC and a training contract into a single five-year programme - and sees graduates leave university as qualified lawyers.

The early signs are that law firms are minded to consider graduates from such routes, as a new mood of open-mindedness sweeps a profession that has become increasingly conscious of its long-held bias in favour of those from well-off backgrounds. "Provided students meet our minimum A-level requirement of three As, we'd consider anyone from any degree route," Lawson Caisley, graduate recruitment partner at City firm Hogan Lovells, told me last week for a piece I did on new legal education options for the Guardian. This anti-snobbery sentiment is further manifested in the trend for law firms to open up apprentice routes into the profession for non-graduates. Over the last few months, Pinsent Masons, DWF and Gordons have all launched apprenticeship programmes that see school leavers trained up as lawyers via the Institute of Legal Executives (ILEX) qualification. More firms are likely to follow.

So, forget master's degrees and expensive, event-packed gap years. Abandon hopes of earning fortunes before you turn 30. Accept that law is becoming less glamorous. The age of austerity is all about making the best of what you've got, steering clear of anything that could be construed as pretentious and, ultimately, taking what comes your way.

Alex Aldridge is a guardian law columnist and Above the Law UK correspondent. For more from Alex - who tweets at AlexAldridgeUK - listen to his weekly 'Round my kitchen table' podcast every Friday.