Salute David Davis

Sunday lunch is always good for verbal fisticuffs with the children. Today, Father’s Day, was no exception, but there was a difference. Neither of the two younger children (twenty and eighteen) see anything wrong with 42 days, don’t mind CCTV (although both were surprised to hear that you cannot walk down the High Street in Exeter without being tracked) and are seemingly indifferent to the Orwellian dystopia to which this government is taking us. Gran, however, had the final word, “My generation fought to ensure it didn’t happen”. My fear is that their generation will not even notice. A good post Media groupthink and Mr Davis earlier today in John Naughton’s online diary, Memex1.1, linking to Henry Porter in The Observer,

Here was a man who threw dignity and prospects to the wind in order to defend ‘the relentless erosion of fundamental freedoms’.

Selling time

Deepak Malhotra’s post From narrative to value in Legal Village early in the month caught my eye. This sums up the dilemma for law firms:

“Law firms sell time and legal skills. From the perspective of in-house counsel, we buy legal outcomes. There is a huge difference between process and end result. Until we start talking the same language, I see that this debate about fees is going to remain and its intensity will only increase. This is where the hourly rate is limited, because the hourly rate is process and it implies that it operates independent of outcome.”

Selling time is not what we should be doing, and things are changing. How quickly is another matter. The problem is that it is considerably easier to sell time than value, and when I have argued the matter with my partners (most of whom are wedded to the chargeable hour), their usual reply is that if it works, why change it. The point they are missing is that either we will have to change, or clients will change us.

S words

Succession and Strategy: two words that most lawyers do their best to avoid. Succession because it implies mortality and loss of control; and strategy because it asks us to consider a horizon somewhat more distant than the end of the partnership year. We ignore them, however, at our peril. One of my favourite blogs is Jordan Furlong’s Law 21- Despatches from a legal profession on the brink. It may be Canadian but what applies that side of the water does this side as well. See Jordan’s post Surving a succession crisis.

Chlorine is good for you

Good to know that swimming will soon be free for the over 60s. According to Andy Burnham, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport,

“Swimming has universal appeal for all ages and provides the opportunities for families to participate in healthy activity together. Our aim is to help as many areas as possible remove charges and provide some kind of free swimming proposition. All the evidence shows that it removes barriers to those who are inactive. It is for local authorities to decide just how far they want to go.”

Let’s hope that we don’t get fined if we don’t go swimming. The last thing I want to do is participate in healthy activity with anyone else!

Mailing list hell

Another issue with newsletters is the mailing list (leaving aside that an email shot is probably better and certainly more environmentally friendly). Having spent much of my train journey to London reviewing one such list, I now understand what GIGO* means: duplications, wrong names, wrong salutations, wrong organisations, wrong addresses. . . to say nothing of the retired, the “no longer” clients and the dead. And all this in 2,300 names.

*Garbage In, Garbage Out