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.”

Viva Revisionistas!

This, from Jake Tapper’s Political Punch blog, is Bill Clinton explaining Hillary’s misspeaking

“She took a terrible beating in the press for a few days,” he said, per ABC News’ Sarah Amos, “because she was exhausted at 11 o’clock at night (1) and she started talking about Bosnia and she misstated the circumstances under which she landed in Bosnia. (2)

“Did you all see all that? And oh, they acted like she was practically Mata Hari,” he said — referring to the Dutch exotic dancer accused by the French of spying for the Germans and executed by a firing squad during World War I — “like she was making up all this stuff.

“And then the president of Bosnia said, ‘Well, it was quite dangerous when she came, there were snipers in the hills all around,’ (3) And then Gen. Wes Clarke, who was there trying to make the peace among the Bosnians, said ‘Yeah, it was dangerous, let me remind you three of the Americans who were on my peace-keeping team were killed because they had to take a dangerous road ’cause they couldn’t go the regular way.’

If that wasn’t bad enough, when Nancy Pelosi was asked about this, she referred to Bill Clinton having a “late night adult moment”. I cannot imagine to what she was referring. It certainly isn’t the sort of late night adult moment I usually have.

Jake Tapper’s subsequent post in Political Punch is excellent,

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was asked about former President Bill Clinton’s error-riddled defense of his wife, regarding her Hemingway-esque accounting of her 1996 trip to Bosnia.

“I can’t for the life of me figure out why the president would have said it except he may have been having a late night adult moment,” Pelosi told CBS’s Bob Schieffer, “but let’s leave it at that.”

Kind of harsh for a House speaker to say about a former president.

And ABC News’ Sarah Amos points out that Bill Clinton’s comments were hardly “late night” — having been uttered at 3 in the afternoon and again at 5 pm.

Somebody buy these Democrats some watches.

But then again, Bill Clinton’s late night adult moments usually took place in mid afternoon.

No crisis to address?

Isn’t it enough that he denies that his country is ravaged by AIDS? Today’s comment by Thabo Mbeke, reported by Reuters, suggests that he is denial on a whole lot more,

“I wouldn’t describe that as a crisis. It’s a normal electoral process in Zimbabwe. We have to wait for ZEC (Zimbabwe Electoral Commission) to release (the results),” Mbeki told reporters after meeting Mugabe for an hour.”

To the rest of the world, including many of his fellow leaders, what is happening in Zimbabwe is nothing less than a constitutional coup d’etat. That perhaps the most powerful leader in Southern Africa seems to think all is “normal” says more about Mbeki than Mugabe. According to Gordon Brown, “We, and the leaders of the region, strongly share this commitment [to democracy]”. Perhaps, as has long been suspected, Mbeki doesn’t.