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The Times

Thursday, October 13 2016

See our new Brief Premium articles today, plus this morning's must-read of all things legal, including news, comment and gossip from Frances Gibb and Jonathan Ames.

Today

  • Top universities 'treating students as cash cows' -- today's Student Law supplement
  • Plus -- exclusive survey shows students glum over women's career prospects

Also ...

  • City solicitor in row over obscene social media tirade
  • Lawyers ‘more stressed than other professionals’
  • Brief Premium sector focus on tax: Cracking down on avoidance
  • Brief Premium comment: Extend fixed costs, says Lord Justice Jackson
  • General counsel comment series: Law firms must cut back on the expensive Swedish furniture
  • Blue Bag diary: Bridget Jones scandalises the Supreme Court
  • More Blue Bag: “Sad bastards” at Mills & Reeve

Tweet us @TimesLaw with your views.
 
 
 
Story of the Day

Top universities 'treating students as cash cows'

One of the country’s leading university law schools has cut its number of degree places by a third in a move to focus on providing students with the skills they need as lawyers in the workplace.

The move by Manchester University – reported in today’s Student Law supplement in The Times – comes as academics in the law school accuse their Russell Group counterparts of exploiting students with a “pile ’em high approach” to law degrees, seeing law students as cash cows.

However, many of the law graduates stand little chance of access to the profession: there are roughly 21,000 LLB and graduate diploma in law graduates annually but last year there were about 5,500 solicitor training contracts registered and fewer than 400 barrister pupillages available.

Lord Sumption, a UK Supreme Court justice, said in a speech released this week that studying law was “not a particularly good training for the handling of evidence, or for acute social observation, or for the exercise of analytical judgments about facts”.
He urged would-be lawyers to “personally enrich” and “intellectually satisfy” themselves by choosing another degree discipline before taking law at postgraduate level.

Lord Sumption, 67, who secured a first class degree in history at Magdalen College, Oxford, suggested that his own subject was an ideal training for a future on the bench. His medieval histories, including a multi-volume account of the Hundred Years War, have earned excellent reviews.
 
 
News Round Up
• City solicitor in row over obscene social media tirade

A leading City of London law firm has suspended one of its senior associates amid allegations that he fired off a vitriolic and abusive social media tirade over Europe’s refugee crisis.

The insurance law specialist at RPC is also alleged to have posted an expletive-ridden scattergun attack at the national press and City traders.

Nick Pester, a ten-year-qualfied lawyer in RPC’s property insurance department, was at the heart of the latest row about lawyers making injudicious remarks on social media sites. Using the Twitter handle @NickoAIM, Pester is alleged to have posted at least three messages that were replete with profanity and aimed at various targets.

The gist of one appears to be aimed at those debating the refugee crisis preoccupying Europe. “Turkey is where he washed up C*NT, not where he's from,” reads one message. “I really hope you wash up on my nearest beach soon. C*NT. Subsequent tweets specify the Daily Mail, with the newspaper being referred to with a list of obscenities.

The tweets were originally discovered by RollOnFriday, a legal profession gossip website. A spokesman for RPC told The Brief that the partners had been made aware of the tweets via a tweet from an unidentified Twitter user.

According to RoF, that tweeter asked: “Is this the kind of folks you employ?” The anonymous tweeter went on to say that Pester’s alleged behaviour “brings the company in disrepute”.

The firm's spokesman said: "We have been conducting an internal investigation since these tweets were brought to our attention – as a result, the employee in question has been suspended on full pay pending an expedited disciplinary hearing. Although these comments were made in a personal capacity, the tone, content and language used run completely counter to the culture and values that we espouse here at RPC – there is no excuse for them and we distance ourselves from them unreservedly."

The firm’s website lists Pester as handling “large and complex commercial and high-net worth individual property insurance claims”. A spokesman told The Brief that the firm was "taking the matter seriously".

The embarrassing allegation is not the first social media scandal to hit a City law firm. At the beginning of last year, a Clifford Chance trainee created a firestorm by posting a YouTube rant lambasting UK Muslims for their reaction to the terrorist attacks at the Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo. The firm did not dismiss the trainee.

And about a year ago, Clive O’Connell was sacked from the partnership at the London office of Goldberg Segalla, a US law firm, after the Chelsea supporter called Liverpool fans “Scouse scum” on another YouTube video.
• Lawyers ‘more stressed than other professionals’

Lawyers say they suffer more far more stress at work than other professionals, research released yesterday shows.

More than 67 per cent of lawyers surveyed said that working in the legal profession was more stressful than other fields. About 22 per cent thought that working in the law was no more or less stressful than other professions.

Only 4 per cent of lawyers thought their working lives were less stressful than other fields.

The research – commissioned by Keystone Law, an alternative business structure practice that employs lawyers remotely – coincided with figures published on the recent world mental health day that showed about 20 per cent of the UK population a year experienced a mental health problem.

Workload was far and away the largest cause of stress for lawyers, with more than 80 per cent pointing the finger to piles of case files. Closely linked was the client demands category, with more than 76 per cent citing it. Billing targets were blamed by more than two thirds of survey respondents, while lack of support was cited by about a third.

The change that lawyers cite most often as one that would improve their working lives was increased flexibility in working hours, with more than 37 per cent citing it. Not far behind, with nearly 37 per cent of lawyers citing the category, was lower billing targets. An equal percentage also squarely blamed senior partners for their woes, claiming that “better management” would make their work more enjoyable.
• Students pessimistic about career prospects for women in law

An overwhelming majority of young aspiring lawyers predict that women will not reach the top of the legal profession and judiciary in equal numbers with men for ten to 20 years, a survey published today shows.

Nearly 80 per cent say it will take ten years for women to reach the upper ranks in numbers approaching equality, and 35 per cent of those believe it will be 20 or more years before that is achieved.

The stark finding comes in a survey from the University of Law (ULaw) conducted for The Times and published in the Student Law supplement today. In echoes of controversial comments a year ago from the UK Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption, who predicted that women would have to wait 50 years to see gender equality in the legal profession, students felt parity was a way off.

Some 82 per cent of ULaw students, who are either studying for a law degree or doing vocational training, also see their chosen profession as somewhat or very socially exclusive. More than three quarters said that access to the big City of London firms was still connected to background and class and overwhelmingly backed the CV-blind policy adopted by some key legal firms to improve social diversity.

About 43 per cent maintained that being from an ethnic minority was a barrier to reaching partnership and 53 per cent said the same about having a disability. More than 50 per cent said that being a woman was a barrier to reaching board level or achieving partnership status in a law firm, an increase on the 46 per cent last year.
• In Brief

In today’s Times Law …

Elsewhere …

  • Woman jailed for tricking friend into sex wins retrial -- The Times
  • Kim Kardashian West sues over claim she faked Paris robbery – Sky News
  • CMS UK will take back power from Germany with three-way merger – The Lawyer
  • Only a Commons vote will give a consensus on leaving the EU, says Keir Starmer, QC – The Times
  • Starmer is the best hope when Corbyn’s gone, argues David Aaronovitch -- The Times
  • Obituary: Sir Swinton Thomas -- The Times
 
 
 
Byline
Comment

Law firms must cut back on the expensive Swedish furniture James Hulsken

In the second of our general counsel comment series, this lawyer lashes out at private practices that are all fur coat and no knickers.

Lawyers are firmly entrenched in their ways of working and stubbornly resistant to change.

True, some firms are trying to buck history and operate in a more modern way, but most are stuck in the bricks-and-mortar approach, sticking resolutely to paper files and office desks.

For many years, on visiting their solicitors, clients would be greeted with a cup of tea served in a bone china cup in a plush reception, before having a meeting across a mahogany table with a crystal water decanter in a library-esque room filled with important-looking leather-bound books.

It had always been this way, and clients felt comforted by the professionalism that this depicted. The ancillary costs of the advice were never considered as the expertise was felt to pay for itself.

However, today customers (as that is what clients are) have never been more savvy. The proliferation of information and metrics at a company’s fingertips has caused procurement professionals to shine a light on the value of their outsourced providers.

They will understand that the square footage cost associated with the plush offices needs to be paid for; the expensive meeting room furniture needs to be paid for; the housekeeping staff who deliver the extensive range of teas and coffees from around the world needs to be paid for; the artwork and expensive Scandinavian furniture in reception needs to be paid for.

Many companies, rightly in my opinion, now ask why they should foot the bill for these excesses. After all, as much as we as clients enjoy the show the advice that we need can just as easily be dispensed over a drink in a local coffee shop, and the overheads associated with that advice come down to the cost of a skinny latte.

The world has never been more technologically advanced or connected. Teams within companies work together from the other side of the world; mergers and takeovers can be negotiated on either side of an ocean in real-time; the world is always open for business.

As customers we inherently look for value in what we buy. Yes, prestige comes into the buying decision for some, and there will always be clients who place value in the postcode of their solicitors’ office. The big firms will always be able to tempt people who are prepared to pay for the letterhead.

However, if you aren’t a “magic circle” firm can you honestly say that you provide real value for your clients? Do you really need all those empty offices and desks? Do you really need an office where the lights are on 24 hours a day? Does the quality of the service you provide increase because you dispense advice over a custom-made boardroom table?

We all know the answer to those questions, and it has never been easier for clients to answer with their feet. To update an old legal phrase: “Value not only needs to be given, but must be seen to be given.”

James Hulsken is the head of legal at de Poel, a personnel agency in Cheshire
 
 
 
 
Tweet of the Day

It's hard to like an ambitious politician but I think Starmer will be useful on Brexit.

David Osborne @OBSlawyer
View Tweet
 
 
Blue Bag

Bridget Jones scandalises the Supreme Court

Only within the past few days has The Brief been able to get to the cinema to see Bridget Jones’s Baby, the third film of the franchise. We’ll leave critical analysis to others, but lawyers will be interested in the scenes shot in the highest court in the land.

Supreme Court officials were keen to ensure as much authenticity as possible and The Brief understands that they fought pitched battles to prevent the filmmakers from incorporating a US-style gavel or kitting out the justices in wigs and gowns.

The Colin Firth character, a leading human rights barrister, does appear in full court dress, but a court spokesman has confirmed that it is not a hard and fast rule in the real court that advocates must stick to lounge suits. Indeed, about 10 per cent of advocates still arrive wigged and gowned to appear before Supreme Court justices, with the English criminal bar being particularly fond of retaining tradition.

In the film, Firth’s character appears for a Russian girl band modelled on the famous Pussy Riot. Their dilemma appears to be that they are threatened with extradition to Vladimir Putin’s clutches. As the court rises to consider its ruling, the girls enthusiastically start chanting the lyric of one of their hits, the sum total of which is the repetition of the slang word “punani”. (Some readers may need to refer to their teenaged children for a definition.)

Had the most senior judges in the UK signed off on that part of the script? No, confirmed a court spokesman. It is also unclear whether any of them has seen the film.

'Sad bastards' at Mills & Reeve

Allen & Over, the City of London “magic circle” law firm, is not the only firm understood to be embracing “hot-desking”, the growing fad for forcing employees to scramble around each morning for somewhere to conduct their business.

Word reaches The Brief that Mills & Reeve’s recent move to its new London office at Monument Place was what the firm describes as a “catalyst for a complete reimagining of its working environment, specifically designed to promote agile working”.

That should have been a big red flag to anyone wedded to the old fashioned idea of having an established desk each morning. Sources tell The Brief that lawyers at Mills & Reeve are now not allowed to use the same desk for more than a working week and that any items left after that period will be removed to a “cupboard of shame”. And personal belongings must be stored in what have become known as “sad bastards' lockers".

Anyone for fond recollections of old-school Dickensian offices?
 
 
Quote of the Day

“We can all be offended by what is written on social media. And as the US election campaign is illustrating over and again, what one of us may find grossly offensive another may find tolerable, even vote-worthy.”
Amber Melville-Brown, the head of media and reputation management at Withers, an international law firm based in London, writing on the firm’s blog.
 
 
 
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