THE legal profession was criticised yesterday for having “barely changed since the 1980s” as privately educated candidates are still chosen for most top lawyer and judge jobs.

Three-quarters of judges and 71 per cent of top Queen’s Counsel (QC) barristers are privately educated, compared to just 7 per cent of the rest of the public.

Half of law firm partners in the “Magic Circle” of five leading City-based firms went to expensive independent schools.

Out of 147 judges in the study, 74 per cent were Oxford or Cambridge graduates. The proportion of the Oxbridge-educated jumps to 78 per cent among the 100 QCs.

State-educated aspiring lawyers fare better in becoming solicitors, as less than a third of solicitor law firm partners went to fee-paying schools.

Social mobility charity the Sutton Trust and Prime, which campaigns for fair allocation of work placements for less-advantaged candidates in the legal profession, one of the most competitive industries in the world, compiled the report.

Sutton Trust chairman Sir Peter Lampl said: “The worrying fact that the high proportion of privately educated judges has barely changed since the 1980s warns us that there is still a big social mobility problem in the legal sector.”

Seventy-one per cent of senior lawyers polled by YouGov say that recruiting people of different backgrounds would benefit society as well as their own firms. The law firm partners also admit that their own companies have a responsibility to recruit from outside the usual Oxbridge graduate pool.

But they say there are weaknesses that state-educated applicants need to remedy.

Nearly a quarter of the senior lawyers said applicants seemed to lack “soft skills” such as interview presentation and small talk to win over recruiters at posh networking events.

Around 18 per cent said applicants suffered from a lack of “pre-university educational attainments” and 16 per cent said many did not fully understand the profession due to having fewer mentors.

Mr Lampl said efforts by Prime and the Sutton Trust to help state-educated, non-Oxbridge candidates become solicitors must be “redoubled.”