Coming Soon: Occupy Big Law?

October 19, 2011
Keep Calm

A foray among the blogosphere yields this excellent post by Tim Bratton, general counsel at the Financial Times. Bratton writes a blog on matters lawyerly called The Legal Brat Blawg, and if it’s not already one of your regular reads, it should be: it is well written, insightful and authoritative with a light touch.

Good work by Bratton, whose short-form CV wryly notes that while he qualified for the purpose of ‘lawyering’ in 1998, the preceding two years of his traineeship were spent ‘photocopying’. All too many solicitors will empathise on that score, but what will they make of Bratton’s call for a challenge to the received notion of what constitutes acceptable remuneration in Big Law firms?

As Bratton puts it: “in Big Law Firms, it is reasonable for PEP to be (give or take) no less than half a million pounds … [and it] is reasonable for newly qualified solicitors to be paid salaries in the region of £60,000 according to Roll on Friday’s data.  These assumptions seem reasonable at face value, but it is these assumptions which allow (or even require) law firms to charge in one hour what the FT charges a subscriber in one year.”

And he concludes: “It’s time to drive down law firm rates.  But not just by reference to the hourly rate.  By reference to the irrational assumption that it is acceptable for clients to help their lawyers become millionaires.”

Bratton adds a rider, namely that he accepts that top-end lawyers are bright people who work long and anti-social hours. As such, sure, let them be well paid, but do they need to take home over half a million pounds a year, which in turn means that hourly billing rates among law firms are on the low side if they’re £300 or thereabouts?

It is an interesting debate, not least as it coincides with the Occupy Wall Street movement. This has now spread to London, with people camping outside St Paul’s Cathedral by way of a peaceful protest to force a rethink of capitalism. Michael Moore enthused on Newsnight that what we are seeing is the beginning of a worldwide stirring which spells the demise of capitalist economics; predictably, other voices declared that the protestors are nothing but a bunch of layabouts and hypocrites.

But as lawyers stride to their offices of a morning, what, were they first to read Bratton’s post, would they think? Perhaps a Magic Circle lawyer will decide to return the next morning with a tent and join Moore’s nascent movement for change. Then again, perhaps not. That lawyer will have a mortgage to pay, a family to feed and bills to meet. Deciding to forsake the level of PEP to which he or she has become accustomed will not, then, be an attractive option. Taking things to their logical conclusion, those who want change might conclude that Occupying Big Law is the next step.

Then again, as Norman Schwarzkopf, the American General, once said: “The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.”

 

Comments

Please submit comments to Swordplay below.

If you’re Joey Barton, attack is not the best form of defence

May 17, 2012

Interesting times, these, in the life of Joey Barton.

If the violence displayed by the QPR captain at Manchester City last Sunday was remarkable, his subsequent conduct on Twitter has been astonishing. Barton appears to have radically reinterpreted the notion that attack is the best form of defence, lashing out at all and sundry via a series of tweets whose ultimate effect is entirely self-destructive.

In the past 24 hours, Barton has accepted one charge of violent conduct at the Etihad Stadium but denied another. The FA seems set to throw the book at him, and his club has declared that it will deal with the matter after the result of the FA investigation. Conspiracy theorists might conclude that QPR’s management team and board hope that the FA ban Barton for so long a period (four months and more) that their reported desire to rip up his contract can only be bolstered.

What, then, should Barton do? Should he:

(a) Keep his head down and say nothing, or

(b) Issue a sensible statement in which he acknowledges that both his conduct at the Etihad and subsequent tweets have brought QPR into disrepute, and

(c) Add an apology to said statement, or

(d) Go to Portugal, log onto Twitter and tweet that the world is against him but that he doesn’t care because everyone is a moron and he’s worked really hard to get where he is and if anyone is nasty to him again he is going to expose their secrets.

The answer is not (d).

The moral of the story is that if you’re a loose cannon, when you turn attack into defence there is a danger that you will blow yourself up.

Gunning foglessly for clarity

May 15, 2012

A fine piece, this, on Winston Churchill’s gift for language and the obscurantism that goes with so much corporate communication.

But wait, what’s this? Could this injunction have been phrased rather more successfully:

Be concrete, not abstract. Use metaphors to get your message across.

Metaphors are, by definition, not exactly concrete. But be that as it may: there is a lot of sound advice in Clare Lynch’s piece and a revelation, too. We had never heard of the Gunning Fog Index.  But it exists, and reveals the age at which someone would have to leave full-time education to understand given text.

We’re pleased to display our own Gunning Fog rating for the above words. That of the Churchill speech cited by Ms Lynch was 9.698.

The Gunning Fog index is 9.585

Spin at the Leveson Inquiry

May 9, 2012
Leveson witch hunt

The idea that Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry’s QC, Robert Jay, are in need of PR advice is intriguing.

Surely their respective tasks ought to be immune from spin? Then again, perhaps the way in which they execute them is deserving of some communications advice. Either way, times have changed. A similar inquiry from yesteryear (and such do exist) would surely not have been accompanied, albeit informally, by communications advice.

Pictured courtesy of this Flickr user: a portrait of the Leveson Inquiry.