Enough said: George Wilkinson's blog
"Sometimes I sits and thinks, and then again I just sits"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
Enough said: George Wilkinson's blog 