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.

Corporate control

One of my dislikes is our telling clients that we are always available 24/7.

Leaving aside that I am not (and so the claim is not strictly truthful), do my clients really want me to be available 24/7? When the job requires it, yes: but not all the time.

And how are we? The BlackBerry. I don’t have one (I gave it back) and I live in an area where there is no mobile coverage. But most of my colleagues do, and having one is very much seen as having ‘arrived’ (quite where is not clear) and even more when they are allowed to upgrade to the new model.  They clearly haven’t read The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr,

The Blackberry has become the most visible symbol of the expansion of corporate control over people’s lives. Connected wirelessly to corporate servers, the ubiquitous gadget forms an invisible tether tying employees to their jobs. . . Many people feel a genuine sense of empowerment when they use their BlackBerry or otherwise connect from afar to their corporate network. They welcome the technology because it “frees” them to work whenever and wherever they want, making them more productive and successful in their jobs. The price they pay, of course, is a loss of autonomy, as their employers gain greater control over their time, their activities and even their thoughts. “Even though I’m home,” another BlackBerry user told the Journal, “I’m not necessarily there.”

For more from Nicholas Carr, see his blog Rough Type. It doesn’t always make comfortable reading (his latest post is on Twitter ~ a corrective to the recent law blog posts such as Law tweeting proposition 2 in Binary Law).

. . . and yes, I occasionally tweet (but not that often).

Wishful thinking?

Somewhat late in posting, but see this post (it links back to my Selling time post earlier in the month).

Fees to rise despite client pressure, say lawyers

Wishful thinking? Speaking with clients this morning at one of our regular Breakfast Clubs, it is clear that we cannot take anything for granted. What this period of economic uncertainty now offers us is an opportunity to revisit the relationship between lawyers and clients as regards fees and value: and to move the agenda to value.

Should we salute the long hours culture?

An excellent article in yesterday’s FT by Stefan Stern on today’s workplace, Success at work is a drug that becomes an addiction. His final comment is one that will resonate with many corporate lawyers, as we work ever longer hours,

The best and most subversive question to be asked about the “long hours culture” is this: why don’t you want to go home?

When I was an articled clerk, and just writing that dates me, my principal, one of the best corporate lawyers I have met, made it clear that office hours (9.00 to 5.15 in those days) meant for me just that. He didn’t expect to see me in the office much after 5.30, and he himself was gone not much later. How things change, and not always for the better.

On this day, 1815: “Vive l’Empereur!”

Shortly before 7.30 p.m. Napoleon played his final card, despatching the Guard up towards the crest of the ridge that ran from La Haye Sainte to Hougoumont, in what Andrew Roberts describes in Waterloo, Napoleon’s Last Gamble, as “the last great military manoeuvre of a hard fought battle”. In little more than 30 minutes it was over, ‘La Garde recule!‘ and the French army broken.

More on 42 days

Marshall Grossman’s post Electing Obama, the Supreme Court and American Exceptionalism in HuffingtonPost.com is well worth reading for his take on the importance of Obama’s candidacy. I was very struck by his comments on law, and his reference to James Harrington,

“To be sure the signers of the Declaration of Independence represented the enfranchised classes of Englishmen, but they also knew the difference between a republic and a kingdom and they understood the significance of a government based on a written constitution. Writing under a pseudonym in the Boston Gazette in 1774, John Adams both asserted the English origins of the new republic and its aspiration to something different when he famously quoted the English republican theorist James Harrington’s call for an “empire of laws and not of men,” strategically substituting the word “government” for Harrington’s “empire.” We have in the last seven years seen a sustained and often successful effort to replace that government of laws with something closer to the royal prerogative against which Harrington wrote in 1656.”

In Gordon Brown’s Britain, we are inexorably moving back towards that royal prerogative. 42 days is just one more step along that journey.