A collective for the people the rulebook forgot to explain things to.
Legal Pathways Collective is a guidance platform and professional community for aspiring solicitors in England & Wales — beginning with the Equivalent Means Route (EQM).
Who's behind LPC.
Legal Pathways Collective was co-founded by two lawyers who took non-linear routes into the profession and now want to make those routes legible for the people coming next.
Obaid Bin-Nasir
Obaid is General Counsel at a UK engineering firm, leading the legal function on commercial, governance and IP strategy. He qualified through Equivalent Means in 2020 after almost five years as a paralegal at an international City firm, and has since worked across private practice and in-house roles at Simmons & Simmons, the Electrical Contractors' Association and Buro Happold.
He has mentored multiple Equivalent Means candidates through the SRA application and previously sat on the national executive committees of the Junior Lawyers Division and the Junior Lawyers Committee. His writing on alternative routes has been published in The Law Society Gazette and The Lawyer.
Napassawan (Ploy) Wood
Ploy co-founded Legal Pathway Collective to widen access to the legal profession and provide aspiring solicitors with the kind of practical guidance she wished she'd had earlier in her own journey.
She has over six years' experience as a paralegal across private practice litigation and in-house legal teams, including within management consulting, IoT/cloud/mobile technologies, video gaming, and fintech companies.
Having embarked on the equivalent means (EQM) qualification route herself, including recently submitting her initial application to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, she understands first-hand the challenges of navigating the process and hopes to support others pursuing the same path.
Most career guidance assumes a linear path: law degree, the Legal Practice Course (LPC), training contract, qualification. For thousands of legal professionals - paralegals, chartered legal executives, in-house lawyers, those qualified in other jurisdictions - that path was never the one they walked.
The Equivalent Means route (EQM) exists for them. It works. It just isn't well explained anywhere. We started Legal Pathways Collective to change that.
Clarity is a kindness
Regulatory language shouldn't gatekeep careers. We translate without dumbing down.
Experience is evidence
Years of substantive legal work deserve to be recognised, mapped and respected.
Community compounds
The people ahead of you on the route are the best resource you'll ever have.
Where we're going
Legal Pathways Collective launches focused on Equivalent Means. Next: SQE preparation, jurisdictional transfers, in-house career mapping, and a member network with webinars, mentoring and live workshops.
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