As magic circle titan launches harassment helpline
Linklaters has asked its lawyers to disclose personal relationships which could lead to conflicts of interest within the workplace.
The magic circle player said it now expects its partners, lawyers and support staff to discuss the existence of such a personal romance with “an office, group or practice head or HR contact” to ensure “any actual or potential conflict of interest” is properly managed. While stressing consensual relationships between colleagues were not prohibited, Links said the new guidance was about ensuring it acted as a “responsible business”, and that it is not simply “prying” on lawyers’ love lives.
Relationships where a conflict of interest is likely to arise would include, the firm said, “those between a partner or director and an employee/contractor or between people where they are in a direct reporting line or where one can unduly influence the performance assessment, career progression, promotion (including the partner election process), work allocation or remuneration of the other”.
The elite firm has also launched an external “whistleblowing hotline”, which staff can use to report unacceptable behaviour including harassment, discrimination and bullying. The service, SpeakUp, is operated by an independent company and allows staff to report their concerns anonymously. On this, the firm said:
“When making a report, individuals do not have to give their name or contact details and once an issue has been raised a written report of concerns will be passed on to a small designated group of recipients internally to enable an appropriate investigation to take place. The report will never be provided to anyone named within it.”
The SpeakUp service is currently available to Links staff working in the UK, the Americas and Asia, and will be rolled out in other offices in due course.
A plethora of City outfits have greater brand power than their elite magic circle counterparts, according to an index released this week.
Acritas’ UK Law Firm Brand Index 2018 ranks law firms by their brand power, with international player Pinsent Masons this year securing the top spot for the first time. The City outfit leapfrogged four-time leader Eversheds Sutherland by a margin of just two points. DLA Piper placed third on this year’s list, which was compiled using data gathered from interviews with 295 UK-based and 190 non-UK-based senior legal counsel. In fourth is CMS, a firm that’s climbed nine places since its merger last year.
Elsewhere, Acritas reports buoyancy within the UK legal market, despite political uncertainty both in the UK and overseas. This is at least partly down to an influx in spend from clients requiring international legal advice. Acritas’ director, Jo Aitken, said:
“As the international needs of UK buyers grow, those firms who are able to service their clients in key international jurisdictions are continuing to stand out — particularly those with a strong EU presence, who can help clients reorganise pre-Brexit.”
Then actor who played TV show’s Jay turned up and handed him glasses and a briefcase
Tony Bellew has taken an Inbetweeners-inspired swipe at the lawyer of fellow boxer David Haye, ahead of the duo’s highly-anticipated boxing rematch at London’s O2 arena this weekend.
Sports law specialist and law firm partner Adam Morallee, who is ex-heavyweight champion Haye’s promoter, launched into a bizarre rant during a packed pre-fight press conference in Liverpool earlier this week.
Morallee, founding partner of boutique London outfit Brandsmiths, told the noisy crowd: “The person who said ‘history always repeats itself’ was wrong. It doesn’t always repeat itself. Two things might repeat themselves. You lot screaming and shouting and Tony Bellew playing games. They may repeat themselves.”
"First of all, I'd just like to thank Will out of The Inbetweeners – He's just given me more motivation" – @TonyBellew responds to Adam Moralee's (Team Hayemaker) press conference comments #BellewHaye2pic.twitter.com/oz42EM1cW7
Raising his voice above the incessant jeers of boxing fans, Morallee continued:
“But you know what won’t repeat itself? You know what, this time David’s going to win. This time he will, you know it as well. You know it and you [Tony] know it. You can kid yourselves all you like, play your little games. Ooh shout at me, ooh that’s good. You’re wrong. You’re wrong guys. And Saturday night you’ll see.”
Liverpool-born Bellew can be seen laughing throughout Morallee’s rant, and then kicked off his own address to the press by comparing the lawyer to Will McKenzie, a character from Channel 4 comedy The Inbetweeners.
Bellew, who will go toe-to-toe with Haye on Saturday evening, said:
“First of all, I’d just like to thank Will out of The Inbetweeners. He’s just given me more motivation.”
Bellew’s quip prompted cheers from the crowd and was met with a wry smile from the former Mishcon de Reya lawyer.
Unfortunately for Morallee The Inbetweeners gags didn’t stop there.
Actor James Buckley (who played Jay Cartwright in the popular sitcom) interrupted a follow-up conference in London yesterday to hand Morallee a pair of glasses and a briefcase — items synonymous with geeky McKenzie.
Multi-tasking pro Helen Tse speaks to Legal Cheek about being a law firm partner, restauranteur, businesswoman and published author, all at the same time
To describe Helen Tse’s career as unconventional would be an understatement.
The Cambridge-educated lawyer’s impressive CV includes stints at magic circle titan Clifford Chance (both in London and Hong Kong) and big four accountancy giant PwC, as well as a sun-soaked spell at Cayman Islands-based outfit Walkers. But it isn’t her stellar legal credentials that caught our eye.
Manchester-born Tse also happens to be a published author and a restauranteur. Her 2007 family memoir Sweet Mandarin, charts the extraordinary life of her grandmother, Lily Kwok, from her childhood working in Hong Kong’s silk factories, to the tragic murder of her father. The book shares its name with a Chinese restaurant that Tse co-owns with her twin sister, which was given the thumbs up by Gordon Ramsey on his The F Word programme.
Helen and Lisa Tse with Gordon Ramsay
Tse was encouraged to write about her grandmother’s life after publishing a series of cookbooks based on family recipes. “A friend of mine who is a literary agent wanted to know more about the story behind my grandmother’s recipes,” she says “so, with that in mind, I started to research her extraordinary life and career.”
The book has now been adapted for the stage as Mountains: The Dreams of Lily Kwok by Korean playwright In-Sook Chappell. Tse tells Legal Cheek how the play came about:
“I was keen for people to hear about my grandmother’s incredible story. So, when the producer of a local theatre company was using our restaurant as the setting for a different play, I approached her with the idea of doing something for the stage based on my book. It’s been three years in the making and it’s exciting that her story is being brought to life.”
While play audiences will be treated to a spot of onstage cookery in homage to Kwok’s culinary past, Tse also sells food, specifically a range of sauces, to wider audiences thanks to a £50,000 investment she secured during a 2013 appearance on BBC hit show Dragons’ Den. In 2014, she was awarded an MBE for services to food and drink.
It’s clear Tse is a very busy woman. Now a corporate partner at national outfit Clarke Willmott, she tells us that she survives on just five hours sleep a night and answers client emails around the clock.
For all her other ventures, Tse says her passion principally lies in law. When asked why she decided to study the subject in the first place, Tse has a response a world away from the ‘because it’s interesting’ stock answer given by many law students. She tells us:
“When I was 12, I worked in my family-run chippy in Manchester. Unfortunately, one evening we were robbed and my mother was injured in the process. Not knowing my legal rights, I felt helpless, I didn’t know what to do. This was a turning point for me and acted as the catalyst to pursue a career in law.”
Over 100 chambers now refusing to take on new legal aid cases
The Shadow Justice Secretary, Richard Burgon, has urged the government to rethink controversial changes to criminal legal aid ahead of this afternoon’s House of Commons debate. In a recently-released statement, Burgon told the government to “go back to the drawing board and come up with a scheme that attracts widespread support rather than provoking a backlash”.
The plea comes after Criminal Bar Association (CBA) members voted overwhelming in favour of refusing new publicly-funded cases from 1 April.
This walkout is in response to the government’s changes to the Advocates’ Graduated Fee Scheme (AGFS), which it’s understood will result in further cuts to legal aid lawyers’ income. There are now over 100 chambers involved in the quasi-strike action, and Legal Cheek was told last week that the Executive Committee recently met to consider recommending the action be escalated.
“Our justice system depends on those accused of serious crimes having access to proper legal representation. Without that there is greater risk of miscarriages of justice. This flawed scheme risks causing further damage to our justice system which is already in a crisis driven by 40% budget cuts — the deepest cuts of any government department.”
MPs are due to convene in the House of Commons today to discuss the impending changes to criminal legal aid. So far over 130 MPs have signed a motion calling on the government to scrap the proposals.
Pleased to have secured a parliamentary debate on the government's flawed changes to the criminal legal aid fee scheme. These take place against a wider crisis in our justice system driven by 40% cuts to the Justice budget – the deepest of any department Time for a new approach! pic.twitter.com/FzeNyyVvz6
Prior to this afternoon’s debate, MPs will be invited to pick up (and hopefully read) their free copy of The Secret Barrister’s new book: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken. The book — which shines a light on the problems affecting the criminal justice system — is available to MPs gratis following a successful crowdfunding campaign which raised over £13,000.
Ahead of Legal Cheek’s Future of Legal Education and Training Conference on 23 May, Adam Curphey, White & Case solicitor turned head of innovation technology at BPP University Law School, discusses the growing importance of lawtech as a theme in vocational training
Adam Curphey, the former White & Case solicitor who is leading BPP University Law School’s innovation team
We live in ‘interesting times’ in legal education and training: the introduction of the Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE), the first significant change in a quarter of a century, has broadened into a crucial debate on what the training of the next generation of lawyers actually means.
One key facet of that debate is the role of technology in that training. As the tentacles of tech reach into more and more of what lawyers do, should students be trained in law-related IT? If so, what type of training? When? What should it look like?
Adam Curphey, head of innovation technology at BPP University Law School, argues that the SQE could be a golden opportunity to introduce an element of this sort of instruction into solicitors’ vocational training, not least because under the new regime there will be no prescription about what is taught in preparation for graduates entering legal practice:
“At the moment, the LPC is very regulated about what can be taught, how it is taught, and how it is examined so if we do want to incorporate tech we have to fit it in around the edges,” he says. For instance, BPP itself is, subject to validation, launching a new module, Legal Technology Innovation and Design, in September of this year, but Curphey says that at the moment “out of necessity, tech is additional, on the outside”.
From 2020 — when under current estimations the SQE will be introduced — this will change.
“The SRA has said that the regulator should only give the minimum regulatory requirements for solicitors so we see the SQE as a floor on which to build things, not a ceiling,” continues Curphey. “There will be far greater scope to embed technology into new graduate programmes.”
So if there is the capacity for teaching legal tech, the question then is what aspects of it should students learn about? Curphey argues we should take a holistic approach: “At BPP, we see this not as ‘tech and the law’ but tech as part of law, how tech is deployed in the law. And the way you study and what you study should reflect the way you will practise.”
Take drafting as an example. Curphey explains: “When you learn about drafting you shouldn’t just learn the skill of drafting, you should also learn how to use the software which is used in drafting. Our concern is to make training more focused on 21st century practice.”
This ‘part-of-law’ approach means that Curphey does not believe lawyers must be taught to code, a common concern among law students. He elaborates:
“Coding is a useful skill if someone has a particular interest in it, but is not essential for lawyers. Let’s take an example of another skill which a lawyer may have, such as DIY. A lawyer who is very good at DIY might deploy some of the skills that he or she has learnt from being very good at DIY in their job: attention to detail, ability to follow step-by-step instructions, and that is absolutely great. But if they were to come to the office and build a desk, that wouldn’t really be the best use of their time!”
But, he adds, there is a skills gap out there: “At the moment, law and tech don’t talk to each other very well so it would be good to develop the skills to facilitate a better understanding of what tech is trying to do, and what is should be doing is solving problems for clients and for practitioners. Lawyers do need more of a skillset in analysing their own processes, and a clearer mindset in talking tech.”
Curphey should know all about this as he was a practising solicitor at White & Case prior to joining BPP. Indeed, his observations of life in a law firm as a junior City lawyer are instructive in analysing how the established mindset needs to change: The Oxford University law graduate recalls: “Fear was the overriding emotion when I first joined the firm because when you come to law, there is a perception that things are done in a certain way and cannot be changed, which makes sense from a risk-perspective; but you are not necessarily encouraged to challenge that.” This is changing, of course, in firms, and Curphey agrees they are “becoming more open to ideas”.
Indeed, the shift is becoming ever more apparent as illustrated in the innovation and research & development roles that are increasingly being created at global law firms. Several will be giving their take on the training of lawyers at the Future of Legal Education and Training Conference this month. The creation of ‘innovation hubs’ by the likes of Reed Smith and Allen & Overy, and wider legal profession participation in projects like Barclays’ Notting Hill law tech lab, are also emblematic of a wider change of mindset. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, such developments remain at an embryonic stage, and it remains to be seen if they will fundamentally alter the practice of law.
In the meantime, the debate unleashed by legal and education training reform over how and to what extent lawyers’ training should involve tech will continue to rage. About time too.
In the latest instalment in our Career Conundrums series, one once-aspiring solicitor now wonders whether the law is for him.
“I’m getting towards the end of a training contract at a prestigious law firm in the City. It’s been OK, but if I’m being brutally honest this is not the way I’d have hoped to be spending my 20s, let alone my entire life.
The money is good, and will be very good when I qualify, but the work and lifestyle is dull. Even the little bits of supposedly ‘quality work’ that we receive, and are supposed to savour, are in reality hard to get excited about. First world problems, I know, but can’t help feeling I’m wasting my youth in a very safe career space.
The trouble is if I leave this what do I do? Although I’m single and don’t have any dependants or mortgage etc, I’m now in my late 20s and feel like I have left it too late to start something new. Moving in-house doesn’t appeal, as it would be more of the same but less well paid. Should I just knuckle down with private practice and start a new hobby like marathon running (like everyone else around me seems to be doing)?”
A former legal secretary at US law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton accumulated a secret fortune in excess of $9 million (£6.6 million) after observing the investments made by her wealthy lawyer bosses.
Sylvia Bloom, who joined Cleary Gottlieb’s New York office in 1947 as one of its first employees, carefully accumulated the eye-watering seven-figure sum during a secretarial career spanning 67 years, according to The New York Times. Jane Lockshin, Bloom’s niece, takes up the incredible story:
“She was a secretary in an era when they ran their boss’s lives, including their personal investments. So when the boss would buy a stock, she would make the purchase for him, and then buy the same stock for herself, but in a smaller amount because she was on a secretary’s salary.”
Unbelievably, New York-born Bloom’s fortune, which was spread among three brokerage houses and 11 banks, only came to light after her death in 2016, much to family and friends’ surprise.
The financially-savvy secretary’s will included a $6 million (£4.5 million) donation to the Henry Street Settlement, a not-for-profit social service agency in Manhattan. Bloom — who retired aged 96 and had no children of her own — set aside a further $2 million (£1.4 million) to be spilt between Hunter College, a higher education institution in the centre of Manhattan, and another scholarship fund to be announced in due course.
Sylvia Bloom – Image credit: Henry Street Settlement
Paul Hyams, who worked alongside Bloom at Cleary Gottlieb for over 35 years, said he was “completely astounded” to discover Bloom was a secret millionaire. Despite living in a modest rented apartment with her retired firefighter husband, Bloom “could have lived on Park Avenue if she wanted to”, Hymas joked.
But it would appear Bloom still had some regrets in life despite her incredible personal wealth. Hyams revealed his former colleague wished she’d gone to law school. At her memorial service in 2016, her intelligence and analytical skills were discussed, and that she would have made an excellent lawyer.
Cleary Gottlieb was established in 1946 (just a year before Bloom joined) and has 16 office across the globe including London. Legal Cheek’s Firms Most List shows Cleary Gottlieb offers 15 City training contracts annually and a qualification salary of £120,000.
The Lord Chancellor, David Gauke, has told the House of Lords’ Constitution Committee that he wants to see more high-flying City lawyers join the judiciary.
Gauke, who began his career as a trainee solicitor with Reed Smith and then joined Macfarlanes before moving into politics, told the committee that more needed to be done to encourage City lawyers to don judicial robes.
“I look at my own background as a solicitor in the City and see a lot of people who I think would be very good judges, but it probably never even occurred to them that they could or should do that,” Gauke said. Suggesting some lawyers may be interested in making the career switch but need to be “encouraged along”, he continued:
“One of the things that we are doing is funding pre-application judicial education so that we can get a more diverse range of people from different backgrounds coming forward to join the judiciary.”
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is providing £152,000 over the next three years to help fund a new judicial education programme. The initiative is headed up by the Judicial Diversity Forum, and will target solicitors as they are underrepresented on the bench.
Gauke — who has been the MP for South West Hertfordshire since 2005 — appears to have already tapped up his former City contacts for advice. He continued:
“I am already having conversations with representatives and senior partners of some of the leading City firms at an informal level to get their views as to what more we could do and what more they could do.”
The Lord Chancellor may have his work cut out persuading City lawyers to join the bench, given the difference in pay potential. Legal Cheek’s Firms Most List shows that an equity partner at a top City firm can earn high six-figure and even seven-figure sums of cash. By comparison, the best-paid judge in the country, the Lord Chief Justice, makes £252,079.
For judges not in the appeal courts, a salary of about £100,000 to £150,000 is more likely. In the corporate law world, this money is similar to what a newly qualified lawyer at the London office of a top US firm would earn.
Could Donoghue v Stevenson be ditched from law school syllabuses?
A top judge has said he doubts whether lawyers will be involved with tort law and personal injury cases in three decades’ time.
Sir Geoffrey Vos, the Chancellor of the High Court, said in a recent speech:
“In terms of tort and personal injury, I somewhat doubt whether lawyers will be much involved in that by 2050. Even if there is not a no-fault compensation scheme for road accidents and medical negligence by that time, the expertise required will not be legal so much as medical and scientific.”
Tort law is a compulsory module on the qualifying law degree and is famous for seminal cases including Donoghue v Stevenson and The Wagon Mound.
Recently, a spell of tort cases have reached the Supreme Court.
In February, Lady Hale and colleagues delivered judgment in Robinson v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police. They ruled the Hill v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police principle, which says police are generally immune from negligence claims in respect of their detection and investigation of crime, does not extend to positive acts done by the police. The court is still considering a case on whether employers who are defending vicarious liability actions owe a duty of care to the employees alleged to have committed the actions their employer is vicariously liable for.
So could tort law really be wiped from law school syllabuses? A spokesperson for the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) had this to say: “If there are large shifts in law over the coming decades, we will need to take that into account in making sure any assessment is as relevant and effective as possible.”
Adrian Denson, chief legal officer at personal injury outfit Fletchers, added: “It is a fundamental right enshrined in common law that a person has the right to pursue legal remedy when they suffer a civil wrong that causes injury, loss or damage. Our legal system has developed over a 1000 years in order to provide a framework to resolve disputes that inevitably arise from civil claims and lawyers, not medics or scientists, will always be needed to navigate the court system and the myriad common law principles and statutory rights and obligations that underpin it.”
Elsewhere in Vos’ lengthy speech, the top judge said he thinks legal training needs to be modernised.
“The glacial pace” at which legal training has changed in the past 40 years is “remarkable”, he thinks. The former barrister is concerned that aspiring lawyers study “the same or almost the same subjects” as he did in the early 1970s.
His vision is for training courses to depend on what sort of lawyer it is you want to be.
For example, “social lawyers will need training in dealing with people, in social science, in civil rights, in what causes crime and family break-up rather than hard-edged law”. Whereas “business lawyers” will “need to understand the ever-more-complex regulatory regime that affects commercial life online”. To do so, “they will need to know some computer coding”, he thinks.
Firm ‘will not tolerate abusive behaviour from anyone’
Mark Hastings, a London partner at Quinn Emanuel (QE), has been booted out of the firm over allegations of inappropriate behaviour. QE says it will not tolerate abusive behaviour from anyone at the firm and stressed it has not sought, and will not seek, a non-disclosure agreement from the complainants about the allegations.
Until his dismissal, Hastings worked on complex international litigation cases at the London office of QE. The US firm, whose full name is Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, has said:
“We can confirm that Mr Hastings was expelled from the firm with immediate effect and without compensation on 8 May 2018.”
This followed an investigation into allegations made in February by two members of staff about his behaviour. The firm “immediately suspended” Hastings, a former Addleshaw Goddard associate and partner, pending an investigation. It brought in Alison Levitt QC, a Mishcon de Reya partner, to investigate.
Levitt’s findings were shared with QE — which has offices across the world in locations including Australia, America, Belgium, China and Japan — on 26 April 2018. QE said:
“Quinn Emanuel takes allegations of the nature made against Mr Hastings extremely seriously. We will not tolerate abusive behaviour from anyone within the firm. Where allegations of inappropriate behaviour are brought to our attention, they will be investigated and appropriate action will be taken, without exception.”
Legal Cheek has reached out to Hastings for comment and is yet to hear back.
The firm also added in its statement that it has not sought, nor will seek, “any form of non-disclosure agreement from the complainants in relation to the allegations that they have made”.
Non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs, have been thrust into the spotlight following the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
Zelda Perkins, Weinstein’s former London assistant, revealed last year that she’d signed an NDA drafted by Allen & Overy following an allegation of sexual harassment made against Weinstein by her in 1998. Part of this NDA was published this year; conditions included: if Perkins is to visit a doctor “in connection with the conduct alleged” she must seek a confidentiality agreement from the doctor.
Mark Mansell, a partner and employment specialist at the magic circle firm, faced a real grilling over this by MPs, one telling Mansell that the use of these clauses in NDAs “flies in the face of telling the truth”.
Back to QE, and the litigation specialist has now referred itself to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) in response to the allegations made against Hastings. An SRA spokesperson said: “We have received a report and will gather all relevant evidence before deciding on any appropriate action.”
Hastings’ LinkedIn profile states he has “conducted some of the largest cases to come before the English courts”. He trained at Herbert Smith Freehills and has a degree from the University of Oxford.
A number of law firm partners have left law firms as of late. These include Latham & Watkins (ex-)managing partner Bill Voge, who resigned from the top spot after exchanging “communications of a sexual nature” with a woman he had never met and who was not connected with the firm. Voge said he’d “made a personal mistake for which I bear considerable fault and humiliation”.
Commercial Awareness Question Time comes to Scotland
Legal Cheek is partnering with Pinsent Masons for its first ever student commercial awareness event in Scotland.
The session, entitled ‘Innovation in the law’, will be held at the international law firm’s Glasgow office on the evening of Tuesday 5 June. It features a panel of leading lawyers and legal technologists spanning areas of expertise including banking & finance and corporate.
The speakers will share their insights into the changing legal market with an audience of 60 students, and advise them on how they can best position themselves to thrive as they enter the profession.
Also on the agenda will be training contract application advice ahead of Pinsent Masons’ summer deadlines.
After the Q&A, which runs from 6-7:15pm, there will be drinks and networking until 8:30pm with the speakers, a selection of Pinsents’ trainees and the firm’s graduate recruitment team.
Apply to attend here. You’ll be asked to submit a CV and two questions for the panel.
Hardwicke’s Brie Stevens-Hoare QC, Herbert Smith Freehills’ Sid Shukla and Axiom’s Atik Ahmed share their experiences
Three successful lawyers told an audience of nearly 50 solicitors and barristers about how they had developed their soft skills at Legal Cheek’s inaugural junior lawyer workshop and social — hosted at Hardwicke on Thursday evening.
Between the short TED talk-style presentations, by Hardwicke’s Brie Stevens-Hoare QC, Herbert Smith Freehills’ Sid Shukla and Axiom’s Atik Ahmed, were several speed networking sessions where attendees chatted about the most thought-provoking elements of what they had just heard.
Drinks and canapés were liberally supplied.
Hardwicke’s Brie Stevens-Hoare QC: Find a way to be your authentic self, and everything will flow from there
Hardwicke’s Brie Stevens-Hoare QC shares her advice with an audience of nearly 50 junior lawyers at Legal Cheek’s soft skills workshop and social
“If you are going to survive in this crazy world that is the legal profession — and I love it and wouldn’t do anything else — you need to do it in a way that energises and enthuses you,” said Brie Stevens-Hoare QC.
Stevens-Hoare recalled how she struggled in the early days of her career thinking that she had to fit into a barrister stereotype until she realised that she didn’t need to do so and found the confidence to be herself. As she did, she started to do her best work and began forging strong professional relationships that would help put her on the road to taking silk.
Herbert Smith Freehills’ Sid Shukla: The importance of building your profile
Sid Shukla, of Herbert Smith Freehills, delivers his talk at Hardwicke
Sid Shukla, a senior associate specialising in M&A at Herbert Smith Freehills, talked about how, gradually, he had got to know people across many different levels of his firm through his involvement in everything from the cricket club to its multi-cultural network to late-night deals in the office.
He also discussed how he had raised his profile externally by working hard to make ties with clients at his level of seniority — even as a trainee and junior lawyer. “This is your network, and these are the decision-makers of the future,” he said.
Axiom’s Atik Ahmed: Honestly evaluate your soft skills
Junior lawyers take a break from speed networking to listen to Axiom’s Atik Ahmed
Atik Ahmed, a lawyer at Axiom who is currently on assignment at a trade finance fintech platform company, noted the lack of formal attention paid to soft skills, and urged the audience to be proactive in developing them.
The starting point was honest evaluation, he said, and warned anyone who found themselves scoring ten out of ten on all the categories of their personal ‘soft skills audit’ to think extra hard about their self-awareness!
Ahmed also talked about how his experiences working as an in-house lawyer and holding various school governor roles had helped boost his wider understanding of commerce and strategy.
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The SQE presents an opportunity ‘to do something dynamic and innovative’, says ULaw chief Peter Crisp, if a clear framework can be agreed
Peter Crisp, The University of Law Pro Vice Chancellor External
Cheaper, less risky for students and better for diversity: the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) had plenty good to say about its new solicitor super-exam when it was formally announced last year. Now, one year on and with just two years to go before the Solicitors Qualification Exam (SQE) is set to be rolled out nationwide, how much more do we know about the new legal training regime now than we did then?
Though the Legal Services Board (LSB) has provisionally approved the exam, we’re missing reams of operational detail and that’s concerning The University of Law Pro Vice Chancellor External Peter Crisp. For starters, “the exam is completely uncosted”, he tells me over breakfast in the City one rainy morning, “we’ve seen no evidence it’ll be cheaper than the current LPC”.
Postgrad solicitor courses currently cost up to £15,000, Legal Cheek‘s LPC Most List shows, and are prohibitive to many aspiring solicitors who don’t have sponsorship from a firm. However Crisp, a legal education veteran who recently crossed over to lead ULaw after two decades at the helm of arch-rival BPP, says it’s difficult to see how the SQE would be much cheaper than this.
The SRA will be splitting the SQE into two parts. SQE1 will test black-letter law and may take the form of a computer-based, multiple-choice assessment, which Crisp says should be cheap to deliver, possibly in the hundreds of pounds. The SQE2 will cost more: it has ten assessments in five skills and requires face-to-face assessment by a qualified solicitor as well as the help of an actor for its client interviews and advocacy parts. It could cost £5,000 or so to sit both exams, but this doesn’t include the prep course costs needed to sit the exam, which could total thousands too.
While SQE costs may come in at similar levels to the LPC, Crisp concedes this sum will be spread out across the two SQE parts. Under the current system, students may fork out for the LPC and never secure a training contract nor qualify at the end of it — the ‘LPC bottleneck’. By contrast, the SRA advocates part one of the SQE to be completed pre and part two to be completed post training contract.
This should be less financially risky, as students need only pay for the cheaper exam before they get into a firm and start earning. If they never find a training contract, they’ve forked out less money than would’ve been spent on the LPC.
With practical skills not tested on SQE1, Crisp suggests that asking students to complete only this section of the exam pre-training contract will produce worse day-one trainees, who show up to firms without a postgrad qualification. He says:
“Working as closely as we do with law firms we know that they will want to maintain the same high level of training that our LPC delivers. They will not want to recruit people who on day one of the training contract know less than they do now and have fewer skills. The SQE is a retrograde step for the depth of understanding law firms want from their trainees. SQE1 is not a qualification, you don’t get a certificate — it’s just part of the SQE, so you’re not even part-qualified by having done it.”
Small wonder, then, that some City law firms are pushing for future trainees to complete SQE1 and SQE2 pre-training contract, as Legal Cheek revealed last year. The SRA claims there will be a higher failure rate unless students sit the exam post-training contract, when they have more experience.
Crisp, again, is unconvinced by this, and gives the following example of a trainee finishing their two-year work experience without going anywhere near advocacy, then being tested on this in SQE2. This particular scenario seems to undermine the regulator’s claim that aspiring solicitors will garner the skills needed to pass SQE2 during their training contract. Trainees may, Crisp thinks, need to complete weekend and evening classes in prep for SQE2 alongside their training contracts — the thought of which probably won’t delight already at-capacity City trainees.
“Despite our reservations, the SQE does present an opportunity to do something dynamic and innovative,” Crisps says. ULaw’s approach is to amend its undergraduate law degree so that it’s SQE-compliant and to offer postgraduate courses that encompass SQE content.
On the former, the amount of SQE content to cram in means it’s “likely” non-essential, elective modules will be stripped from students’ law degrees, the super-exam’s effect being like a “straightjacket”. At postgraduate level ULaw will produce three types of masters degree courses, one offering more law modules, one offering business modules, and one offering lawtech modules. All will have SQE1 and 2 test prep included, meaning students would, theoretically, be ready to sit SQE2 pre-training contract (seems a lot like the LPC, doesn’t it?)
Though only one organisation will be given the tender to run the super-exam, ULaw will not be the only law school offering postgrad preparation for it.
The SRA is not proscribing routes to qualification nor regulating the SQE prep courses, meaning candidates are free to choose which courses they do and at what provider. Different courses will suit law degree holders and non-law degree holders, which differ in content and, crucially, price.
This is where fears about diversity and social mobility come in.
Students from lower socio-economic backgrounds or students who are less informed may, understandably, punt for cheaper courses which cover the “regulatory minimum” of SQE content. Richer students or those with swish training contracts lined up may complete a more expensive prep course, leading to a, seriously concerning, “two-tier profession”.
For those students who have done budget courses, trying to secure a training contract in, say, family law, will prove tough if they have just studied basic SQE content (family law doesn’t feature). Even if you do complete your training, which no longer needs to take place in one firm, you may still struggle to qualify into a firm having never studied its area of practice. Is the SRA merely moving the LPC bottleneck until after qualification?
Against this backdrop of concern and with time ticking away, Crisp urges some SQE realism. He says:
“The University of Law will be ready if the SQE is introduced in 2020 though we think the timescales for launch are probably unrealistic. We don’t yet know who the assessment provider is but we should know in the next few weeks. Then there’ll be about 18 months to design and prepare, as the SQE will have to be tested thoroughly in early 2020 ready for launch later in the year. We think it’s very, very tight.”
Whether the SQE is launched in 2020 or later, Crisp remains uneasy about how things might pan out.
SQE1’s content “leaves a lot to be desired”, the lack of proscribed routes will lead to a “market free-for-all” and Crisp has “serious concerns” about the new exam’s potential impact on social mobility and diversity. Law students seem to share these worries: more than half of respondents to our legal education survey think the super-exam is a bad idea, and less than a fifth said it was a good thing.
Interestingly, the same students rated the quality of practical skills training over course cost, and also want more legal tech training — suggesting that ULaw’s new LPC replacement masters courses are well pitched.
Crisp’s feel for what both students and the profession want clearly remains strong. Now for the considerable challenge of putting all the theory into practice.
Herbert Smith Freehills. Image credit: Instagram (@totakimateusz)
Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) has become the second City outfit to ask its partners, lawyers and support staff to disclose office romances.
The new global policy will, according to HSF, “provide a framework to deal sensitively, consistently and fairly with personal relationships which may affect the business”. The fresh guidance, Personal Relationships in the Workplace, isn’t intended to prohibit lawyers from having a personal relationship “with a work colleague, client or supplier”, HSF stressed, but is about staff using “common sense” when deciding whether or not to disclose romantic liaisons.
The advice — which forms part of an update to HSF’s Global Dignity at Work policy — follows a similar relationship-related move by Linklaters. Earlier this month, the magic circle player urged its lawyers to disclose work romances to “an office, group or practice head or HR contact” to ensure “any actual or potential conflict of interest” is properly managed.
Back to HSF and the firm has also launched an external whistleblowing hotline called Faircall. The new service, which is run and monitored by accountancy titan KPMG, allows staff to report concerns about behaviour such as “professional wrongdoing, harassment or other misconduct”. Linklaters launched a similar service, SpeakUp, earlier this month, too.
Commenting on the new guidance and hotline, HSF’s CEO, Mark Rigotti, said:
“We are committed to providing a safe and supportive workplace culture, where people behave in a way that is appropriate and considerate to others, and to recognise the duty of care we owe each other. We want to make sure people are empowered to speak up if they are concerned about behaviours such as professional wrongdoing, harassment or other misconduct.”
Not the first outfit to rock up in Ireland since the referendum
Dublin
DLA Piper is launching an office in Dublin to take advantage of what the global titan predicts will be an influx of financial services businesses to Ireland post-Brexit.
The firm, which already has a whopping 90 offices across 40 countries, said its latest outpost will initially focus on the financial services, technology and life sciences sectors. Revealing that DLA had been considering a move to Dublin “for some time”, global co-CEO Simon Levine said:
“Dublin is an important legal market and a key global hub for the financial services and technology sectors, in addition to being well located to support our global tax practice, and will continue to be so, particularly in the context of Brexit, as we expect more institutions to have or develop a presence in the country.”
DLA isn’t the first big legal player to launch in Dublin since June 2016’s referendum. Other outfits include Pinsent Masons, Simmons & Simmons and Covington & Burling.
Back to DLA and details regarding its new Irish offering remain thin on the ground. It’s still not clear how many lawyers the outfit is looking to take on, for example. We can, however, tell you that the office will be headed up by David Carthy, who will join DLA from the Irish outfit William Fry, where he’s currently a corporate partner. Carthy is a qualified attorney in the US as well as a solicitor in both England and Ireland.
We have reached out to the firm regarding the position on the possibility of Irish training contracts, but is yet to hear back. Legal Cheek’s Firms Most List shows DLA Piper offers around 70 training contracts annually. London-based rookies currently earn a salary of £44,000 in year one, rising to £49,000 in year two. It’s newly qualified lawyers, again in London, earn £75,000.
Reed Smith is rolling out a new scheme that rewards its lawyers for being innovative.
The global outfit’s Innovation Hours programme means lawyers can now allocate up to 50 ‘Innovation Hours’, time spent on potential projects, of their annual billable target. Legal Cheek’s Firms Most List shows Reed Smith’s London-based lawyers currently have a target of 1,600 billable hours, roughly in line with other big City players. That means around 3% of lawyers’ time could be spent on dreaming up possible projects or products.
The roll-out follows a successful pilot last year with 17 lawyers clocking up 364 hours on six projects. As part of the test run, lawyers from across Reed Smith were invited by chief knowledge officer Lucy Dillon and innovation hub manager Alex Smith to submit their ideas. From 30 submissions, six were eventually selected based on their “creativity”, “client focus”, “efficiency”, “alignment with the firm’s strategy” and “cultural change”. Smith will be speaking at our Future of Legal Education and Training Conference alongside other top speakers on 23 May in London.
Among the projects given the nod was a new Breach RespondeRS app. A free download — developed entirely in-house by Reed Smith’s lawyers — designed to simplify “the patchwork of US state laws” for businesses. Looking ahead, Reed Smith confirmed five new projects with direct client involvement or impact will be selected for a fast-track, 12-week programme.
Sandy Thomas, Reed Smith’s global managing partner, said: “Our internal teams are provided with unfettered time to think and generate new ideas, and they have the firm’s commitment, facilities, technology and manpower at their disposal to develop these ideas into projects. Innovation isn’t just a buzzword at Reed Smith — it is a part of our core values and culture.”
Innovation aside, some law firms have adopted some slightly unusual tactics to ensure billing remains as high as possible.
Blame game begins over why City outfits didn’t include partners
MPs didn’t hold back yesterday when they quizzed Slaughter and May‘s head of human resources, Louise Meikle, about the firm’s lack of partners in its gender pay statistics.
The chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, Rachel Reeves MP, told Meikle her firm had published “bogus numbers” which “masked the true gender pay gap”. She added:
“If I was a young woman listening to this evidence, I’d think about not going [to Slaughter and May] and think about opting for one of the firms that does have the initiative to be open and transparent.”
Slaughters has borne the brunt of a lot of MP anger here. Though some firms did publish gender pay stats inclusive of partners, many others, including three out of the five magic circle, didn’t — and that’s because they didn’t have to.
Big companies must release their employee gender pay gap data every year because of the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017. Law firm partners are not employed, so don’t fall under the regulations’ ambit. For all the committee’s rage, Slaughters and the plethora of other firms which didn’t include partner data were abiding by government regulations.
Some may argue the regulations are a floor not a ceiling, and that law firms should have gone beyond the regulatory minimum in the interests of transparency and openness. The problem is that, sans a centralised method of releasing partner-inclusive data, firms calculated their pay gaps in myriad ways and the outcome has been a bit of a mess.
Irwin Mitchell and Reed Smith, for example, released two gender pay gaps: one for employees, one for partners. Others, like Travers Smith, Clifford Chance and Pinsent Masons, lumped partners and employees together — but did so in differing ways (this to do with whether bonuses are looked at separately from average hourly rate). Albert Owen MP pummelled Meikle in committee yesterday over the impact employee-only gender pay gap information has on public scrutiny. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who could easily scrutinise the cluttered pay gap data we’ve been dealt.
Louise Meikle being question by the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee yesterday
You’ll notice that, for all the praise lavished on firms for releasing partner-inclusive figures, only employee data appears on the portal. If you want to find firms’ higher, partner-inclusive figures, they’re in firm-specific pay gap reports probably no one outside the profession reads. How open and transparent is that?
Compulsory gender pay gap reporting is in its first year, and it perhaps would’ve been wiser for firms to stick to the government regulations then lobby for fresh guidance next year. Oxford law graduate Meikle conveyed this to the committee when she said “we’d like to see clear guidance from government on how to [include partner figures] in a way that means we can all report consistently”. Translation: sort the regulations out and stop blaming law firms.
Crispin Rapinet, Training Principal at Hogan Lovells
Last year the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) put an end to the Legal Practice Course (LPC) and Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) when it confirmed plans to scrap both in favour of a centralised assessment. Reworking a system that has been in place for the past 30 years is the resultant task that law firms now face, under the new Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE) framework.
Crispin Rapinet, who oversees Hogan Lovells’ training strategy, is approaching this challenge from the perspective of a global law firm which recruits a wide range of students to work across the spectrum of corporate law. He identifies “two key issues” in this “very big change” that he and his colleagues are prioritising, explaining:
“The first is making sure that the non-law graduates that join us are adequately equipped with the fundamentals of law in place. The second is to ensure that both the law and non-law graduates that join us receive training that is relevant to the type of work they wish to do with us.”
It is a concern for everyone in Rapinet’s position that come 2020 “we won’t know how well-equipped our trainees will be”. Indeed, in the absence of a formal law conversion course, Hogan Lovells and firms like it may have to provide extra instruction during the training contract to get non-law graduates up to speed. After all: “How can we expect these trainees to make it as international commercial lawyers without first understanding the basics of contract law?”
Over time it’s likely that an established preparatory course will emerge that covers much of the same ground as the GDL. But groundwork needs to be put in — and quickly — to ensure that future non-law trainees arrive in the profession on a level playing field. “It’s important to us that these students are able to get the grounding they require in order to not be disadvantaged — otherwise they’ll be drowning not swimming!” says Rapinet.
On the issue of training being tailored to firms’ specialisms, there is still quite a lot up in the air. With the onus now shifting onto law firms to work with the SRA to design a course fit for their needs, rather than rely on bespoke LPC arrangements with law schools, Rapinet hopes to see sufficient flexibility to allow the creation of a vocational course relevant to organisational needs. “We can’t fret about issues that don’t touch upon our areas of practice”, he says, alluding to concerns that under the SQE future corporate lawyers may have to spend large amounts of time studying modules that they will never use in practice.
With a centralised exam where assessed content is likely to be the same across the board, it’s possible that the extent to which law firms are able to tailor course modules and content could be quite restricted. “I thought we had crossed that Rubicon back when the LPC was reworked and the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach ceased to be an option,” reflects Rapinet wistfully. “I’m hoping that students will be able to pick and choose their modules, but all that is still up for grabs.”
When probed further, Rapinet anticipates a compromise solution that may not actually be so dissimilar to the current firm-customised LPC. If this does prove to be the case, some will no doubt question the point of all the upheaval involved; others would respond that the creation of a centrally assessed system that could drive down legal education costs for students without training contracts makes it all worthwhile.
Substantive details on the SQE remain thin on the ground, but the SRA has said it will be split into two parts, with the first part examining functioning legal knowledge. Stage two of the super-exam will test a series of practical skills, including advocacy and drafting, and there is a suggestion that it is set to take place towards the end of the training contract. Many law firms have expressed their discontent at this and believe that stage two should be taken earlier on. Rapinet acknowledges, however, that there is an argument for placing it, say, two thirds of the way into the two-year training contract if it really is going to test practical skills learnt in the course of the training contract. He elaborates:
“This is where you’d reasonably expect it to sit. You can’t leave it until the end as that doesn’t accommodate those that don’t pass the first time round and you’ve also got to factor in the time trainees will need to take out of their training in order to prepare.”
The positioning may also impact training seat rotations and international secondments, notes Rapinet, who has worked internationally in Asia and the Middle East, and has a good understanding of what is needed not only in London but across the firm’s global network.
Alongside changes to established procedure, the SQE consultation has brought about a wider debate about legal education, and creates the opportunity to review a regime that hasn’t been significantly shaken up for a quarter of a century. With the technology sector particularly hot right now, there have been calls in particular to incorporate legal tech training to a greater extent into courses. Rapinet offers qualified support:
“There is no doubt that legal practice is changing due to technology. We’ve all read the robot articles but take some of the sentiment with a pinch of salt,” he says, adding: “Certainly, artificial intelligence tools assist lawyers in a number of ways and lawyers are indeed having to become more adept; thinking ahead about the technologies that could be added to enhance client service delivery. But this doesn’t detract from the fact that the true value of a lawyer stems from their legal training — being able to understand basic legal principles and apply these to practical situations — I don’t think we can do away with that just yet.”
Most of all Rapinet and his team are working pragmatically to put in place a new training regime that ensures that young lawyers continue to successfully progress through the Hogan Lovells ranks.
“A future trainee of the firm and I currently face the same dilemma — albeit from different ends of the telescope. What I am trying to achieve now will ultimately be of great assistance to the trainee who joins us three years from now,” he says, adding: “Do not despair — we will continue to produce fantastic trainees of the highest calibre and we will make it work.”
A professor at the London School of Economics has argued that corporate law is a bullshit job.
“Huge swathes of people”, including lawyers, “spend their days performing jobs they secretly believe do not really need to be performed”, argues David Graeber, a professor of anthropology at LSE.
His new book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, is an expanded version of an article Graeber wrote in 2013 in Strike magazine. He cites economist John Maynard Keynes’ famous prediction that we would all be working a 15-hour week, and notes that, clearly, this has not come to pass. The reason for this, the LSE professor argues, is not rampant consumerism (we choose to work to buy all those lovely things out there) but the creation of meaningless “administrative” jobs.
He says we have seen “the ballooning” of “the administrative sector up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources and public relations”.
Graeber is keen to point out that “bullshit jobs” are not the same thing as “shit jobs”: bullshit jobs are often well-paid and well-respected. Indeed, the world has turned jobs on their heads so that jobs that we really need to be done such as nursing, teaching and rubbish collection have increasingly attracted low pay and low status.
In the original article, Graeber gives the example of an old school friend of his (Graeber is American) who had once been a poet and in a band but, after racking up debts and having a daughter to care for, had become a corporate lawyer.
Graeber says of this lawyer-friend: “He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and in his own estimation, should not really exist.” He adds:
“I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit.”
This last point is crucial: Graeber is keen to point out that his arguments are based on people’s own perceptions of themselves rather than on a scientific evaluation of the jobs. In other words, he is not saying that corporate law jobs are pointless, it is corporate lawyers who are saying this.
In his book, Graeber analyses 250 responses which he received on Twitter to put his thesis together. In a similar exercise in self-definition, in 2015, a YouGov poll was published which asked: “Is your job making a meaningful contribution to the world?” 37% of (an undisclosed number of) respondents said no.
Graeber’s thesis would be supported by another guru of human nature, Malcolm Gladwell, who argued in his bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success, that it was much easier to be successful at something which had meaning. But he was more forgiving because that job only had to have meaning to the person carrying it out. He wrote:
“Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.”
"First of all, I'd just like to thank Will out of The Inbetweeners – He's just given me more motivation" – 
