Bishops say silly things (No surprise there)

You can always rely on a Bishop to say something stupid: it must be part of the training. So yesterday evening, up pops Michael Scott-Joynt, Bishop of Winchester, on the Six O’Clock News, to comment on Evan Harris’ Private Members Bill to amend the Act of Settlement. And in case you missed it, listen on BBC iPlayer: it’s roughly 14 minutes into the News.

Described in the introduction as a “senior Anglican leader”, my lord bishop launched straight into it,

It’s wretched to say so today, but Roman Catholics were regarded [in the Eighteenth Century] as like Al Qaeda or the Taleban are today.

There you have it: an obligatory hand-wringing preface, a reference to the bogey men of the Modern Age to point up how frightfully misguided our forefathers must have been, and wrong history. And all for a sound bite.

Instead the Act was another demonstration of Parliamentary power.

. . . a further Provision to be made for the Succession of the Crown in the Protestant Line for the Happiness of the Nation and the Security of our Religion. And it being absolutely necessary for the Safety Peace and Quiet of this Realm to obviate all Doubts and Contentions in the same by reason of any pretended Titles to the Crown and to maintain a Certainty in the Succession thereof to which your Subjects may safely have recourse for their Protection

The need was for certainty in the succession: Queen Anne’s only surviving child, the Duke of Gloucester had died in 1700 and Parliament, dominated by the Tory/Country Party interest, went for the Protestant Hanoverian line, and excluded the 57 or so Roman Catholic heirs.

A bleak future

Following on from Jordan Furlong’s recent post in Law 21 (which I commented on some days ago), a snippet from Legal Risk LLP’s March Newsletter*, after a law firm risk management conference in Chicago,

The future shape of law firms

The traditional leveraged model of law firms with large numbers of associates was under attack from clients’ general counsel, one commenting that partner: associate ratios of 1:1 delivered better results than 2 or 3:1 – “the shape of the successful law firm is not a pyramid”. We know UK firms with corporate practices are increasingly under pressure to service in-house legal teams with specialist advice rather than do whole transactions – as one risk management partner put it succinctly, firms are being asked to take 10 per cent of the fees and 90 per cent of the risk.

This has been my recent experience in the UK, so what is happening that side of the Atlantic is already reflected over here.

* Legal Risk LLP’s website is http://www.legalrisk.co.uk/ . There is no hypertext link to the March Newsletter, but it is well worth reading. I rate Frank Maher really highly and he always talks sense.

Not another meeting

I have never much enjoyed internal meetings, whether management, business development, risk management, department, start the week, or whatever. When I was more closely involved in the day-to-day management of my practice they were the bane of my life. It was very refreshing reading Luke Johnson’s take on them in his FT column yesterday,

I am constantly astonished by managers in large organisations who obsessively attend internal meetings. Often these grey affairs have a dozen or more participants, each feeling they must make a contribution to justify their existence. It is my idea of corporate hell. It astonishes me to meet middle-ranking figures who have such bookings stretching not just for months ahead, but perhaps even into next year. What is it that goes on in all these crucial gatherings?

Committees almost by definition are a black hole into which time is sucked. Usually, they are planned months in advance, looming on the horizon on a Monday morning, primed to bore you to death. They are dominated by minutes, agendas, protocol and other matters of ultimate tedium. I rather admire those outfits that hold sessions where everyone has to stand up. It gives the event a real sense of urgency, I suspect. In these straitened times, such a stripped-down attitude feels rather appropriate – along with a genuinely flexible attitude to how you spend your day.

Holding on to optimism

A very good public lecture at the University of Exeter yesterday evening on Building the Energy Future, given by James Smith, Chairman of Shell UK.

Very upbeat (“we need to hold on to our optimism, but realise that optimism alone is not enough”) and honest. And this morning Stefan Stern in the FT on why Managing the mood is crucial,

Leaders have to be resilient. At the moment the bad news is coming not single spies, but in battalions. Tough trading conditions like these test character as much as business acumen. Your physical and emotional response to these challenges is just as important as the decisions you actually take.

If James Smith’s performance last night is typical of the man (and I am sure it is) then Shell UK must be a great place to work.

P.S. Note to Steve Smith (University of Exeter VC) ~ these lectures are too good to miss: there should be a podcast.

More on the future of law

Another thought provoking post by Jordan Furlong in Law 21 on How to solve the legal employment problem. It makes for uneasy reading,

We’ve been bingeing on reports of law firm layoffs for a few months now, and there’s every reason to think those reports will continue through 2009. But we haven’t spent as much time looking at the big picture: there is a growing population of lawyers whose jobs are gone for good, and a larger group of lawyers whose underlying business models are fast becoming obsolete. . .

During the recession, we’re all going to learn to do more with less. Cost-saving efficiency and “good-enough” quality will be the twin standards by which purchases of all kinds will be made, including legal services. Lawyers have never needed to be efficient and they’ve always preferred an exhaustive answer to an adequate one; they’re not going to adjust easily, and some won’t adjust at all. Clients also will need their lawyers to focus more on high-value services that demand advisory skills and judgment, and less on than repetitive tasks that require boxes to be ticked off and i’s to be dotted. That’s going to be more than a business model challenge; that’s a new way for many legal professionals to view themselves and their functions, and again, some simply won’t have the wherewithal to meet the new expectations.

In particular read the take on the problem for legal education: “churning out lawyers suited for 20th century practice”.