Author: wilks

I called myself wilks when I first started blogging. The idea was that it would afford a measure of anonymity. For much the same reason, there was no photo. Times change, hence the photo, but I decided that even when I changed the blog’s title at the start of 2009, I should remain wilks.

Employer brand?

Once a week in the FT’s Business Life column, Stefan Stern tells it like it is.  If you have no time for anything else, read him. Today’s column is as good as ever, Why you should pay attention to your employer brand. It is, or should be, common sense: and as important for law firms as for any one else: especially in the present economic climate.

You need to present a coherent and plausible sense of yourself as an organisation. That means having a robust employer brand: knowing who you are, and being able to tell a good story about yourselves.

This happy scenario will not come about by chance. It requires leadership and a sustained communications effort. You may need to bring to the surface your organisation’s values and attitudes that have remained tacit or undiscussed until now.

How did you deal with your lay-offs? And how will you deal with your next round of recruiting?

Crisis-driven change

The opening quote of Francesco Guerrera’s Analysis article in this morning’s FT caught the eye, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste” (but then I don’t work at Citigroup, so hadn’t heard it before).

What struck me, however, and what is applicable to law firms as much as any other business was this,

Experts argue that although most companies see the need to reform in a crisis, many embark on the wrong kind of change. A common mistake is to go for across-the-board job and cost cuts that weaken the company without sharpening its core businesses. “The first thing you have to do is to protect and strengthen the core,” says Bain’s Mr Rigby. “In the same way our bodies allocate blood flow away from expendable extremities in favour of vital organs during a crisis, companies must make sure their best markets and consumers are protected.”

Driving change may be easier in times like these, but, as Guerrera notes,

In the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, companies face a daunting choice. Do they exploit the tough times to lose the ballast accumulated during the boom years and make risky strategic changes in the hope of emerging as lighter but stronger organisations? Or do they adopt a defensive stance, trying to weather the storm without rocking the boat until their markets and the economy rebound?

“A truly diverse and inclusive legal profession”

I always enjoy John Naughton’s posts in Memex 1.1.

Yesterday, in Onwards and downwards, what struck me most was less his finding the report of Alan Milburn’s inquiry into social mobility in contemporary Britain “deeply depressing” than his conclusion,

But the wider problem laid bare with scarifying clarity by the Milburn report remains. And nobody — and this includes Milburn — has any real idea what to do about it.

And today I have finally got round to reading Alex Novarese’s post Law and the myth of social mobility in Editors’ Blog on Legalweek.com,

Does the legal profession have particular cause for concern? The basic fact remains that law, like medicine, is built on a foundation of structured academic learning, followed by equally structured vocational training. As such, law is not well equipped to overcome the weaknesses of the UK’s educational system. Interestingly, Milburn’s report also notes that the number of independently-schooled solicitors has fallen since the late 1980s, so on that yardstick there has been some progress. There is also the issue that law has a very structured career track, with clearly defined routes in, making it one of the more transparent of the aspirational careers.

There is an interesting comparison to journalism, which the report notes has moved from being one of the most socially inclusive careers to become considerably more privileged over the last 20 years. The report concludes that journalism is the only career in which the proportion of staff educated at independent schools has gone up (it was static or had fallen for all other professions, even for judges). There was also the hilarity of seeing one newspaper covering the report refer to journalism as a “former trade”, as if it had been transformed through the infusion of the privileged classes into an actual profession; my chosen trade has far more to be ashamed of regarding social mobility than law.

But the last word perhaps should come from Beth Wanono, in her Comment piece in the Law Society Gazette on 9 July, Managing Expectations. What she is writing about is not so much about social mobility and the legal profession as the very real and immediate challenge for those who aspire to be lawyers,

There is a difference between a crunch and a squeeze. My impression of the trainee market is that the situation is akin to 10,000 people trying to cram onto a train that can only hold 1,000. You could extend the tenuous analogy further and say the platform is already overflowing with those who couldn’t squeeze on to the last train.

This will only get worse. As Wanono remarks,

We have reached a stage where the balance between offering access to the profession and managing the expectations of those considering it has become dangerously tipped towards the former.