I was sat in the wine bar the other day reminiscing with an old friend.
We had both qualified as raw recruits to the legal profession in the mid nineteen eighties; we then rose to lead big in-house company legal teams in the nineteen nineties and were then both made redundant three years ago in 2010 at the time of the “Great Financial Collapse”…
We have no pensions of course. When all the schemes went south three years ago we knew we would be working for the rest of our days. I have to admit though, I never would have thought that I would end up serving behind the bar in the evenings to make ends meet!
“Legal profession”…now there is something to reminisce about…
You know. I can remember when there were 8000 plus law firms, all privately owned, and thousands of those firms (can you believe this…) had just ONE solicitor owner. Back then they were called “sole practitioners”.
That was in the days of course before the corporate money came into the game.
You would not believe the fuss that was made when the banks first opened their advice counters! But it was not long before they were followed by the large retailers…then the big legal factories kicked in buying up all the legal practices one after the other.
The government did not much care for it but once they abolished legal aid altogether they could hardly complain.
Of course the old traditional models and methods had a great deal going for them but none were helped by the majority of lawyers not realising that change was happening all around them long before it got to be a crisis for them.
Back then, during the kind of phoney war, the traditionalists took great delight in the few high profile casualties among the newcomers with their new fangled ways. Every one of them said it was better in the old days, but that was rubbish. You wouldn’t believe how inefficient some of them were…and anyway, just because you do not always strike oil it does not mean that there is no oil to find …it might just mean you are not drilling in the right place or not drilling deep enough.
But boy when the new breed struck that oil did they ever strike oil!
I think the writing was on the wall when that first big City firm broke ranks and took on the Law Society. The Law Society could have done so well out of it really…what an opportunity it had to shape and lead the revolution that was bound to happen…we were all talking about it but so little seemed to be done.
(The Law Society by the way, in case you are not sure, used to be the regulator for all solicitors. It is now effectively a small support group for old probate lawyers, but you can still get a good meal in their rather nice headquarters just off the A30 near Honiton).
That challenge by one of the biggest law firms saw the first significant loss of income for the Law Society. But the real damage was done when everyone realised as a result that actually legal services could be offered to anyone by anyone and none of us actually needed the Law Society in any event.
Then of course there was that scandal which saw all those high-flying partners go to prison for money laundering offences and the collapse of partnership as a business model as a result.
And that, as they say, was that.
The Government by then were absolutely begging for private institutional investment to prop up the legal system. Goodness knows what would have happened had the banks not stepped in…
But do you know there were still people arguing that the old ways were best and that “independence” was more important than universal access to advice, to quality products for the public and for businesses alike and even to guaranteed income for the lawyers themselves!
Bizarre really!
It’s not perfect now of course, but then nothing is or ever will be. So what do we have now? Let me think…well there is of course:
Shame about the pensions though…
