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.

What does revamp mean?

Lucy Kellaway’s Monday column in the FT always brightens up the start of the week. This week she ended with Words to the wise, ‘the sinister things that people say to each other in offices – the little phrases that look perfectly innocent but are actually toxic’.

I liked in particular

“We haven’t made any final decision about this.” This means we have made a final decision and you aren’t going to like it. An alternative, even more sinister variation is “We want to consult you about some possible changes . . . “

Given the reports about the travails of Bevan Brittan in both Thelawyer.com and Legalweek.com, one wonders which of the two phrases was used when the men in grey suits walked in to Stuart Whitfield’s office last week?

BlackBerry as fig leaf?

A quote from a Links partner, reported in Linklaters says: take a BlackBerry break in Thelawyer.com,

I have to admit, though, I do feel a little naked without my BlackBerry. It’s like when you leave the house without your watch on.

Not sure how worried I should be. I don’t have a BlackBerry (as those of you who read this blog will know), but I am now going to have to own up to the fact that I don’t wear a watch either. I only feel naked when I leave the house without my trousers on.

Delivering value

If Nick Jarrett-Kerr is right that the current downturn in work has removed the last excuse for partners avoiding to engage in valuable non-chargeable work (see his article in Kerma Partners Quarterly 2/08 and my earlier post Spending time wisely), then high on our list of things to look at is how to resolve the problem of a business model based primarily on selling time.

Although his post The new brand landscape for law firms in Law 21 is primarily aimed at law firm rebranding rights and wrongs, and is very well worth reading for that, Jordan Furlong also touches on billing and branding,

Today, brand opportunities are opening up everywhere — not primarily in new industries or practice areas, although there are a few of those, but in how a firm delivers value to its clients. Service delivery, billing parameters, value definition, client communications, risk sharing — these and many other key elements of customer relationships, which have lain dormant and ignored for years, are coming to sudden life.

Take the oldest complaint in the book — the billable hour system — as an example. Clients have moaned for decades about how the billable hour removes the burdens of accountability and risk from the lawyer (though clients share some of the blame for not pushing harder), and conventional wisdom called the billable hour unkillable.

But now there are firms that have successfully staked out this ground and branded themselves as having abandoned the billable hour altogether.

Sticks and stones?

An interesting five minutes driving home late yesterday, listening to Louise Bamfield of the Fabian Society debating about chavs on the World Tonight. She was there to put Tom Hampson’s argument, from his article in the latest Fabian Review, that we have to stop using the word ‘chav’. Then this morning an article in the FT by Emma Jacobs, Move over chavs, here is a pikey (the latter apparently now the insult-du-jour, according to a King’s College language consultant referred to by Jacobs)

I don’t agree with Hampson that using ‘chav’ ‘betrays a deep and revealing level of class hatred’. I do agree that it is a deeply unpleasant expression. Trying to find the discussion on the BBC website, I first found a 2005 article, Charvers, which shows that things have not moved on much in the past three years.

And equally thought provoking post, Britain’s social recession, by Matthew Taylor in his RSA blog yesterday,

This extreme level of social pessimism [found in the countries of old Europe] is accompanied by a rejection of structural explanations of disadvantage. Whilst there is growing resentment at the very rich, people are more and more inclined to say that the poor have only themselves to blame. This is not fertile territory for developing a new agenda for social solidarity and action.

The figures on expectations of growing inequality are particularly stark. One of the other points made by Roger Liddle is that education – which many progressives hoped would be a driver of social mobility and inclusion – has actually become a major driver of social polarisation. The reason for this is simply that the wages available to those lacking higher education are falling, and will fall even faster now hard times and higher unemployment rates are here again.

Making education a force for inclusion and opportunity will require more than a further cranking up of an increasingly problematic standards agenda. We need to ask what education is for and we need a system which is not about finding our whether children are able but how they are able and how their abilities can be developed.