Always an easy target?

Luke Johnson’s weekly The entrepreneur column in the FT’s Business Life section is always a good read: trenchant views and punches rarely pulled. His attack on the legal profession three weeks ago was no exception, and it made for somewhat uneasy reading. For a flavour of the tone of the piece, read on,

But somehow lawyers have risen to such exalted status that many of them appear to believe they are a breed apart, not subject to the same standards of decency and fair dealing to which the rest of us in commerce attempt to adhere.

It also attracted more attention than many of his pieces do, and not just in the way of on-line comments on Ft.com, but a post in Legal Week’s Editor’s Blog (“great knock-about stuff”), tweets on Twitter, and no doubt much more elsewhere. By and large the comments fell into two categories: those violently disagreeing (mainly lawyers) and those violently agreeing (everyone else). No surprises there then, although reading some of the comments I can only supposes that they were drafted in green ink.

I read the piece on my way to an all parties meeting in London, on a corporate transaction that was, and remains, slightly sticky. In one of those lulls that seem to characterise any corporate deal, usually an opportunity to discuss cricket, rugby, football, racing – in fact anything but the deal itself, the conversation turned to the column. It turned out that the lead corporate finance adviser on the seller’s side (a director of a Top 4 accountancy practice so glasshouses and stones came to mind) had read out choice extracts to his clients and their lawyers before we had arrived. Nothing like putting the lawyers in their place.

But although there is some truth in what Luke Johnson wrote, and no one likes a mirror held up to them, he misses a very important point. The profession is only too well aware of the issues, and by and large lawyers are taking steps to get things right. Luke Johnson had an unhappy experience, and these are still all too common, but law firms know that experiences like that lose clients, and if nothing else one consequence of the overlawyering he describes is competition.

And while the attitudes he so pungently describes were commonplace 20 years ago, and the experiences of clients reflected this, clients today expect something very different, as does our regulator. Within law firms there is a recognition that change is not something we can or should avoid. Similarly, although there are lawyers who still fit the stereotype he portrays (and not all of them are my generation), for every one of them, there will be many more who understand that the game has changed.

“A truly diverse and inclusive legal profession”

I always enjoy John Naughton’s posts in Memex 1.1.

Yesterday, in Onwards and downwards, what struck me most was less his finding the report of Alan Milburn’s inquiry into social mobility in contemporary Britain “deeply depressing” than his conclusion,

But the wider problem laid bare with scarifying clarity by the Milburn report remains. And nobody — and this includes Milburn — has any real idea what to do about it.

And today I have finally got round to reading Alex Novarese’s post Law and the myth of social mobility in Editors’ Blog on Legalweek.com,

Does the legal profession have particular cause for concern? The basic fact remains that law, like medicine, is built on a foundation of structured academic learning, followed by equally structured vocational training. As such, law is not well equipped to overcome the weaknesses of the UK’s educational system. Interestingly, Milburn’s report also notes that the number of independently-schooled solicitors has fallen since the late 1980s, so on that yardstick there has been some progress. There is also the issue that law has a very structured career track, with clearly defined routes in, making it one of the more transparent of the aspirational careers.

There is an interesting comparison to journalism, which the report notes has moved from being one of the most socially inclusive careers to become considerably more privileged over the last 20 years. The report concludes that journalism is the only career in which the proportion of staff educated at independent schools has gone up (it was static or had fallen for all other professions, even for judges). There was also the hilarity of seeing one newspaper covering the report refer to journalism as a “former trade”, as if it had been transformed through the infusion of the privileged classes into an actual profession; my chosen trade has far more to be ashamed of regarding social mobility than law.

But the last word perhaps should come from Beth Wanono, in her Comment piece in the Law Society Gazette on 9 July, Managing Expectations. What she is writing about is not so much about social mobility and the legal profession as the very real and immediate challenge for those who aspire to be lawyers,

There is a difference between a crunch and a squeeze. My impression of the trainee market is that the situation is akin to 10,000 people trying to cram onto a train that can only hold 1,000. You could extend the tenuous analogy further and say the platform is already overflowing with those who couldn’t squeeze on to the last train.

This will only get worse. As Wanono remarks,

We have reached a stage where the balance between offering access to the profession and managing the expectations of those considering it has become dangerously tipped towards the former.

Leadership is all

In a week when everything is overshadowed by the fate of Speaker Martin (at the time of posting we are still waiting to hear when it is he intends to go) and after what seems an eternity of disclosures about MPs’ expenses (accompanied by an orgy of hand-wringing insincerity), yet another excellent article by Stefan Stern in today’s FT – and for leaders in law firms another pointer,

Does “real leadership” simply mean telling people what to do? Or does leadership mean building consensus, so that when you attempt to make changes your organisation advances more or less as one.

Leadership is situational. In other words, context is everything. Few business leaders find themselves facing a weekly inquisition like PMQs. But in a time of economic difficulty, businesses and organisations do look to their leaders for clarity of thought and decisive action. So which organisations will come through this period in better shape: those where there is less talk and more action, or those where agreement is sought before action is taken?

Stern writes about the recent launch of the Centre for Professional Service Firms at the Cass Business School in London, and reports the comments of Laura Empson, director of the centre : “Professionals, by and large, do not want to be led, and professionals, by and large, do not want to be leaders.”

And this is the real problem.

A bleak future

Following on from Jordan Furlong’s recent post in Law 21 (which I commented on some days ago), a snippet from Legal Risk LLP’s March Newsletter*, after a law firm risk management conference in Chicago,

The future shape of law firms

The traditional leveraged model of law firms with large numbers of associates was under attack from clients’ general counsel, one commenting that partner: associate ratios of 1:1 delivered better results than 2 or 3:1 – “the shape of the successful law firm is not a pyramid”. We know UK firms with corporate practices are increasingly under pressure to service in-house legal teams with specialist advice rather than do whole transactions – as one risk management partner put it succinctly, firms are being asked to take 10 per cent of the fees and 90 per cent of the risk.

This has been my recent experience in the UK, so what is happening that side of the Atlantic is already reflected over here.

* Legal Risk LLP’s website is http://www.legalrisk.co.uk/ . There is no hypertext link to the March Newsletter, but it is well worth reading. I rate Frank Maher really highly and he always talks sense.

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.