Maurice Turnor Gardner: Radicalism in the City

May 1, 2009

partnership-agreement.jpg

The idea will strike terror into the hearts and souls of many veteran lawyers, but a new firm, comprising mostly women, has just been set up. As Alex Spence writes in the Times, “the launch of Maurice Turnor Gardner is one of the most significant start-ups in the legal sector in several years and a first for a City law firm: it will be staffed and run mostly by women. All but one of the six partners are women, with only four male employees in total.”

But this is merely the tip of the iceberg (one which, we think we’re right in saying, can also be found in the US). Lurking beneath the creation of Maurice Turnor Gardner is nothing less than a revolutionary reappraisal of the law firm, for the new firm has drafted its partnership agreement in the female voice. A typical clause is: “Each Member will devote her whole time and attention to the [firm’s] business during normal hours.”

Spence suggests that such draftswomanship is unprecedented, and he may well be right, certainly so far as the UK is concerned. But Richard Turnor, the lone male partner, maintained that the firm was not trying to send out a feminist message and that it would recruit men and women. It simply seemed “ridiculous” to draft the partnership agreement in traditional masculine terms when most of the partners were women, she said.

Pictured courtesy of LegalAssistance: not the Maurice Turnor Gardner partnership agreement.

 

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Good work by Rusbridger

February 10, 2012
scissors

The headline says it all: ‘Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger takes pay cut‘.

Dan Sabbagh’s piece says a bit more: said editor ‘emailed staff at the newspaper to say that his salary in the upcoming 2012-13 financial year will be £395,010, compared with £438,900 in the current financial year’.

Some voices say: ‘How worthy.’

Others opine: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

But we say: good work by Mr Rusbridger. For the sake of the media’s survival, we hope that others in senior positions in the industry will follow suit.

Image of toolkit allegedly deployed by Alan Rusbridger courtesy of Flickr user LollyKnit.

From the inside of the maze, ethically outwards

February 9, 2012

Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.

Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?

Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.

But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?

We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.

What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.

Supreme Court on Twitter

February 6, 2012

Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?

We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.