Blade is intrigued by the storm surrounding Field Fisher Waterhouse partner Mark Abell following his ordeal in Mumbai.
Abell had to barricade himself in his room in Mumbai’s Trident Oberoi Hotel after being caught up in the terrorist attacks of two weeks ago. As carnage raged around him he endured nigh on 40 hours with barely any water, no food, and the constant possibility of serious injury or death.
Upon his release, Abell gave an interview to the BBC Today programme. If you listen to the interview here, you will see that he conducted himself with grace and dignity. He was clearly upset by the death of a waitress who had served him and his colleague in a restaurant, so too by the fact that a Japanese businessman with whom he’d exchanged some banter had also died in the tragedy. He says that he’s had enough of overseas business trips for now and that he can’t wait to get home and see his children.
But Abell also says that he’s looking forward to getting back to work – and namechecks his firm. “I’m looking forward to getting back to work with Field Fisher Waterhouse,” he says, and this statement, allied with references to the firm in subsequent interviews, has created apoplexy among certain of Abell’s brethren. A cursory glance at The Lawyer’s online coverage of the matter reveals a host of condemnatory comment, with many people lambasting Abell for allegedly shameless and insensitive promotion of FFW. Here is a fine example of the hostility Abell has encountered:
What an embarrassment to the legal profession this guy is. I am a former City solicitor working in house; i don’t read the Lawyer these days and i don’t normally go on comment boards. But the namedropping of his firm through the Today interview takes the biscuit and has driven me to this site to comment; no wonder people think lawyers are tw*ts. What an inappropriate time to try and promote one’s third division law firm.
Blade is no stranger to cynicism, but he has to disagree. Indeed, Blade wonders just how good at their various jobs those castigating Abell are, for their capacity to analyse the evidence with lawyerly rigour seems sorely lacking.
Abell had just emerged from a terrifying ordeal, but was prepared to give an interview. He did so admirably, but audibly cried when casting his mind back to the death of the waitress. He was clearly very shaken. But being a lawyer – and, one would suspect, a good one, given that he is FFW’s international head – he did his utmost to recover his poise and answer his interviewer’s questions helpfully, and, moreover, accurately.
This – the oft-tiresome notion of accuracy – is crucial. As a lawyer it would have been tantamount to an omission of a crucial part of the story for Abell not to reveal for whom he worked. This is because lawyers, perhaps more than any other profession, are defined by their professional identity. Casting his mind back to his days in media law, Blade can recall that one was either a Carter-Ruck man, or a Schillings type, or perhaps more of an Olswang lawyer. In the City, one was with Freshfields, or Clifford Chance, or Slaughters. And so on. Each firm has its own particular culture, and for those who sign up to the whole kaboodle for the long term, corporate culture soon fuses with personal definition. It becomes impossible to be merely ‘a lawyer’, for one is always ‘a lawyer with X’. In contrast, a GP interviewed will never think to add, say or even insist on his practice being named.
Sartre wrote about the more esoteric, existential aspects of this debate in Being And Nothingness. Blade would not presume to hypothesise as to whether Mark Abell is a devotee of Sartre, but he would suggest that for the Field Fisher Waterhouse man, having evaded nothingness never did his identity seem so fused with his firm than when he was asked to articulate about being.
No wonder he looked forward to getting back to work – and good luck to him.
Image courtesy of www.IACmusic.com.
