Such a lot of bollocks and generalisations being spouted on this thread.
You'll never get anywhere if you go to Brookes? I did my law conversion there and I somehow managed to finish up as a partner of a law firm. Clearly I slipped through the net somehow. Or did the Oxford Uni postgrad degree cancel out the taint of the Brookes CPE?
Brookes has a good academic reputation and ranks pretty highly in certain subjects. It is also an outstanding sporting university which makes it attractive to lots of students from top-end private schools who did well in certain sports at school and want to continue at uni. I was in one of the sports clubs there and most of the club's top athletes have gone on to do well at international level, or into high level coaching jobs. Two others are now lawyers, one has his own company, a couple work for large multi-national corporations, at least three have gone into the forces and done very well there, a couple are working overseas. I haven't heard of anyone failing miserably in life despite the apparent stigma of coming from an ex-poly.
Of course that might be because many employers these days recognise that academic achievement alone isn't necessarily a good indicator of someone's potential in the world of work. A decent degree from a decent all-round university, together with some achievements in something like sport or music or another extra-curicular activity goes a long way.
At my last firm there was a year when there was an unusually high level of Oxbridge applicants for training contracts. HR got a bit carried away and abandoned their usual policy of recruiting slightly older trainees, ideally who had done something else first, and went for an entire intake of Oxbridge firsts. It was an unmitigated disaster. Academic excellence does not necessarily translate into good quality advocacy skills, or people skills, or even common sense. I spent half my bloody time dragging one or other of them around court with me trying to impress upon them that our cases weren't some academic problem that they could solve by trial and error, or dig their heels in and insist that they were right and the rest of the legal world were wrong.
I had a great time at Brookes and I came away with an entirely serviceable qualification and a lot of useful CV points. I would recommend it to anyone. It wasn't an inferior experience to my time at Oxford - it was a different one.