Whither the legal profession?

A stellar panel at the University of Exeter’s symposium last Monday on A Hippocratic Oath for Lawyers: Stephen Sedley, Tony Pinching, Andrew Phillips, Andrew Holroyd (the President of the Law Society), Robin Tolson (leader of the Western Circuit), Kim Economides and an introductory paper by Julius Rocca, putting the proposition in context.

The question was raised in Kim Economides’ letter to the Times,

“Should there not be some kind of Hippocratic Oath for lawyers so that, in future, lawyers’ commitment to justice and the rule of law is more than purely rhetorical?”

An excellent event, academic and professional argument at its best, and a lot to think about; and yet, sadly, very few in the audience (and no truth in the rumour that the minute size of the wine glasses the University uses for entertainment puts people off!). Does the profession care enough? The answer it seems is not enough to want to take part in evenings such as this.

The eponymous Mr Balls

I am still chuckling at David Cameron’s joke, reported by Boulton & Co, and then picked up by James Forsyth in his excellent Coffee House post, Mocking Balls

“Ed Balls is the man with the most appropriate surname since Thomas Crapper invented the lavatory.”

The tyranny of time

One of the delights of being away from the office on holiday is the freedom it brings from the tyranny of the chargeable hour. Nonetheless I enjoyed Michael Skapinker’s column The jury is out on family life and the law in the FT on 22 April, in which he looked mainly at what he referred to as the 50:20 ‘scandal’, that 50% of law graduates are women but only about 20% of partners are female, but which began with the fees we lawyers charge, following Mr Justice Floyd’s remarks in the BlackBerry case.

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.

But back to 50:20. Skapinker makes good points

In accounting for the failure of women lawyers to advance to partnership, I think we can largely discount sexism as a factor. No doubt there are misogynistic lawyers, and others who secretly doubt whether women can hack it, but for firms to be engaging in widespread rampant, or even subtle, discrimination would make no sense.

First, the level of attrition among women lawyers is ruinously wasteful. The cost of turning graduates into proper lawyers is high, and the 50:20 figure suggests that well over half of the expensively trained female recruits are dropping out along the way. No profit-minded law firm (and, as the BlackBerry case demonstrates, lawyers are intensely profit-minded) would deliberately fritter away investment on this scale.

Second, if some law firms were discriminating against women, others would surely have the nous to snap up these highly capable discards.

Everyone knows what the real problem is: much of law, as practised at the highest level, is incompatible with family life. The pressure to bill for thousands of hours of work, so evident in the BlackBerry case, helps see to that.

But is this all?

Add to this Susan Pinker’s argument, set out in The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap, that the workplace gender gap is not the result of discrimination but of differences in brain structure, hormones, motivation, empathy and risk aversion, and choice. It may not play well with the sisters, and the argument is controversial, but the question needs to be asked.

Jacques Rogge and his history of China

It was hard to believe the report by Roger Blitz in the Weekend FT about Jacques Rogge

Like most sportsmen, politics barely featured in his upbringing. The 65-year-old Belgian combined a career as an orthopaedic surgeon with an aptitude for yachting that took him to three successive Olympics.

Reading the rest of the article, it seems that he probably passed on history as well,

“It took us 200 years to evolve from the French Revolution. China started in 1949. At that time it was a country of famine, epidemics, floods and civil war. It had no economy, no health care, no education system and there was 600m of them,” he says. “They had to build that and it was a bumpy road. We all know that there were abuses under Mao and the Cultural Revolution was not a nice period. But gradually, steadily, over 60 years, they evolved, and they were able to introduce a lot of changes.”

Back in 1949, Mr Rogge pointed out, the UK was a colonial power. So too were Belgium, France and Portugal, “with all the abuse attached to colonial powers. It was only 40 years ago that we gave liberty to the colonies. Let’s be a little bit more modest”. China may not be a role model in the west, Mr Rogge concedes, but “we owe China to give them time”.

It is hard whether to know whether to laugh or cry.

Ready and willing to lend? Pull the other one.

Jim Pickard’s post yesterday in Westminster Blog anticipated a speech to the CBI Entrepreneurs Conference by John Hutton,

“The business secretary will tell a CBI audience that business people should not lose their nerve despite the well-publicised difficulties facing lenders and borrowers”, [and that although] he will concede that fears over liquidity have spread from the stock market to “workplaces and homes” around the world, . . . banks remain “ready and willing to lend to small and medium businesses”.

I sometimes wonder whether politicians live in the same world as the rest of us, and what it is they are being told. Banks will undoubtedly continue to lend to good businesses (whatever that they may mean) but the support they offer is, at least at the moment, qualified. In the last quarter I know of three high street clearing banks that have pulled loans to prospective borrowers, causing transactions to fail. For a corrective view see Luke Johnson in today’s FT,

“Many of the main clearing banks appear to be downsizing their loan books and shrinking their balance sheets, although they are pretending the opposite. I have heard of dozens of cases in recent months where lenders have used flimsy excuses to refuse facilities to corporate borrowers – for acquisitions, capital expenditure or fresh undertakings. Fees have risen, spreads have widened, covenants have tightened and demands for added security have risen substantially. Inevitably, Robert Frost’s definition is once again proving correct: “A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.”