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It's all in the communication
A few weeks ago, I decided to complete an informal survey of blogs which my timeline regularly reads. This was never intended to be a competition, and the findings below are supposed to celebrate your responses. They are not in any particular order, reflecting the ‘popularity’ of bloggers. Forty people responded, and it was interesting to see how you responded. Our blogroll of the BPP Legal Awareness Society on the Legal Aware blog is meant to be a celebration of all blogs, as we appreciate all the effort that’s put in by all legal bloggers here in the UK, many of whom never get any recognition.
Communication recently has become very important in the legal world because of campaigning. For example, in the discussions over #LASPO, @nearlylegal has encouraged involvement over housing amendments in the Bill before parliament. Blogging is a brilliant way for all members of our legal community to get their point across, from law students, to Professors/Readers, and even to QCs. For example, the UK Human Rights Blog is written by members of 1 Crown Office Row barristers’ chambers. David Hart QC recently considered why we need an international environmental court in a blogpost which centred around the ‘Erika Disaster’. The article considers the thorny issue plaguing much of the legal blogging community – what jurisdiction takes charge of dealing with the matter? Hart opines that, “The problem, as often with international environmental issues, particularly criminal ones, is the jurisdiction for the offence charged – can, in this instance, the French prosecute this crime, even though someone can also do do so somewhere else?”
Communication can be used by different parties to get their point across, often in heated contexts. In the well-respected blog, recently celebrated in the longlist for the Orwell Award 2012 [blog category], “Beneath the Wig” considered in a thought-provoking blogpost latterly ‘the standard police defence'; @_millymoo observes that, “The police service has to start to recognise that while we are grateful for the protection they offer, that protection does not mean we are not allowed to question when they act beyond the bounds of what they are charged to do.” Public attitudes were considered in a different context on the “Coppola Comment” blog, where the theme was how the author (@Frances_Coppola) had increasingly discovered ‘two groups of people': “I’ve been aware for some time that there seem to be two distinct groups of people in the world of politics and economics, who see the world in fundamentally different ways and don’t really understand each other. It’s as if one group are landlings, only secure when they have hard land under their feet and terrified of drowning in deep water, and the other group are sea creatures, happy floating in an unstructured, boundary-less medium but parched and shrivelled on dry land.”
There’s no doubt that the mechanisms of communication, certainly in the legal world, could be improved? For example, well-known @legalbizzle recently contributed an intriguing explanation of “the language of contract negotiations”: “Sometimes everybody knows what you mean. The phrase “With respect…” is universally understood to mean its precise opposite, and “I’m not being funny, but…” invariably means “I am about to say something racist”. But law has its own secret language, opaque even to its practitioners on occasion. It’s not just the Latin and the tortured circumlocutions; even the most innocent phrases have hidden meanings.”
A frustration of people simply not communicating with one another is often a theme of UK blogs. Indeed, sometimes blogposts converge on the notion that valuable lessons can be learnt from comparative analysis of jurisdictions. For example, @carlgardner recently examined the application of the ‘written constitution’ to the UK socio-political-legal culture: Carl provides that, “So this case should serve as a warning to us from across the Atlantic. In particular, it’s a warning to those of us in Britain who count ourselves as on the social democratic side of politics and who believe the state can actively do good. Some people argue for a written constitution here, or for elements of a written constitution, such as a British version of the First Amendment. But any such move would inevitably give conservative forces greater power to block, by litigation, socially progressive legislation. Anyone who counts themselves liberal should pause to think how relatively easy it has been for Parliament to bring in civil partnerships, and will be for it to bring in gay marriage, as compared with the agonies the issue causes in America.”
An irreverent ‘@LegalCheek‘ blogpost has had its own look at the importance of communication in an excellent series of posts recently focussed on marketing. They recently brought news of a tie-up between Ashurst and Australian law firm Blake Dawson. Branding and marketing has become an expensive pre-occupation of some in the legal world wishing to communicate more effectively: “Colleagues of Maxwell then reveal how much they’re looking forward to a wonderful future that will in no way see them go from being a major Australian firm to a distant neo-colonial outpost of a London firm. Needless to say, the footage doesn’t recall in any way the hostage video genre, instead producing an overall effect that is both extremely natural and genuine – as you can see for yourself below.”
Intra-organisational communications within corporate cultures have recently grown in recognition. For example, @kilroyt considered the possible value in HR specialists and lawyers talking to each other: “Maybe this idea of lawyers going into HR makes sense for employment law specialists. But for others? I led HR for 2 months last year and I can tell you good intentions and common sense aren’t enough. If I ask you whether Learning & Development should be grouped with Organisation & Staffing, what’s the answer? Everything is specialised nowadays. Don’t make the mistake of thinking “I’m a smart lawyer. How hard can it be?” I devoted a lot of those 2 months to hiring an excellent, professional HR leader to replace me.”
Of course, the problem may not be as bad as all that, and law firms don’t need to spend millions to trying to ‘communicate better’. @MagicCircleMinx came up with her own hit-list recently of how the ‘trainee experience’ could be improved at an instant virtually: “At the request of some bods in human resources, I’ve been asked to come up with some thoughts on how and in what way I would improve the trainee solicitor experience. This is what I’ve got so far…
1. George Clooney as a supervisor.
2. Freedom to choose the clients I work for and my hours.
3. Free designer shoes, nutritious meals delivered to my flat and a cleaner.
4. A duvet day once a month. No questions asked.
5. And a secretary who is happy to do “trainee work.”
*deletes the above* *goes back to the drawing board* *stares at a blank page*”
First LegalAware Blog Cabin of 2012
2012 seemed to start suddenly, with the media deciding which stories they wished to pursue.
One of the stories ‘selected’ by mainstream media was the removal of breast implants in England. The story is essentially this. There have been an increasing number of reports over the safety of breast implants manufactured and supplied by the French company Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP). These implants have been alleged to have a potential rupture failure rate of 7%, and to have been manufactured (for cost cutting reasons) using industrial as opposed to medical grade silicone, amongst other materials. Mike Farrell, in his ‘Law Blog One‘, an interesting blog which has now reached its first anniversary, considered the situation both in terms of breach of contract and in terms of common negligence. Outside the scope of his discussion was when a defendant might run a concurrent claim under contract and tort in litigation, but the discussion was indeed an interesting one. The discussion could be expanded, pardon the pun, with a due consideration of remedies, including damages.
The media decided not to cover the #SpartacusReport, a Report looking at the views of disabled stakeholders looking at the proposed reforms of welfare system in the Welfare Reform Bill. Various excuses were offered by anchors in the news as to why this was not newsworthy, despite trending for most of the day on Twitter, compared to Anthony Worrell Thompson’s shoplifting offence, including there had been no celebrity endorsement. Sue Marsh showed limitless energy in rebutting every negativity during the day, including finding the support of comedians, and did a remarkably impressive day of campaigning, with Kaliya Franklin of ‘Broken of Britain’. Due entirely to independently-funded research, the authors of the Report have alleged serious failings in the development of proportionate policy for disabled citizens, partly on the way information has been provided to the legislature. Yesterday was extremely liberating in terms of the sharing of information on Twitter, despite a media blackout of the Report on the mainstream TV news, as Susan Archiband elegantly described in her blogpost yesterday on ‘Twitterland’.
In a sense, it sometimes feels as if the law is protecting sometimes the wrong sort of defendant. Access to justie was a recent theme of the Guardian’s blog on #Leveson, for example.
Their live blog reported yesterday (9 January 2012) the following:
4.19pm: Leveson says he is attracted to the idea of speedy and cheap resolution of disputes between members of the public and newspapers.
Mohan replies: “I think swifter access to justice is an interesting point and a mediating arm of the PCC [could help with that].”
He says he would be in favour of a “kite-marking system” on newspapers that might have a knock-on effect on advertising rates.
There has been much criticism from #Leveson that people who have most access-to-justice are the ones that have “deep pockets”. In a different end of law, according to a detailed blogpost, a leading American lawyer, Vince Megna, has protested against fee-limiting arrangements introduced in the US law. Megna apparently is a familiar figure in the US profession, widely known as the “lemon law” king. Lemon law, as he helpfully explains on his website, is “the body of law that offers protection to owners of motor vehicles with recurring mechanical or other problems that are not resolved within a reasonable time by the dealer or manufacturer”.
LegalAware Review of the Year 2011 – Part 3 (Oct – Dec), disability and inclusivity
In the final three months of this year, I wrote more about psychometric testing (for example in the proposed BCAT and psychometric tests for training contract applications), human rights (for example the future of the Human Rights Act as discussed in a meeting of ALBA at the Inner Temple), and book reviews (for example on affect and legal education and happiness).
However, in these three months, I did become very interested in disability issues, accessibility and inclusivity.
October
The BPP Legal Awareness Society published its timetable for meetings to be held at the BPP Business School, St Mary Axe. We held all these meetings successfully in October – December 2011, including flotations, debt finance, international arbitration and joint ventures.
In October, I started blogging, in addition, for ‘Legal Cheek‘, an alternative blog look at the legal education and legal life in general. I wrote an article outlining my feeling that disability is the legal profession’s white elephant.
In this article, I argued that embracing disability was a good way of improving the quality of law schools.
All law schools deserve to be scrutinised very carefully in their response to the government white paper entitled, ‘Students at the heart of the system’, over the issue of whether disabled students are seriously disenfranchised. The formidable white paper, which was published in June, sets out proposals for a higher education sector which is sustainably funded, delivers a “better student experience”, and contributes fully to the efforts to increase social mobility. The ability of a disabled student to get a job is a massively significant factor in that individual’s social mobility; virtually all individuals do not aspire to sustain themselves through the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) itself. An adverse effect of the legal aid cuts may be to put off disabled applicants from applying for the DLA. Good law schools will wish to embrace theNational Student Survey, and participate in it to the full.
November
In November, I argued in an article for ‘Legal Cheek’ that the term ‘diversity’ is an unhelpful one, not least because it means different things to different people. My conclusion was follows:
I believe that an useful first-step in advancing the diversity debate would be to phase out the word ‘diversity’ from the terminology, because, far from encouraging individual differences, clumping people together – inappropriately – inadvertently abolishes key individual differences.
Continuing the theme of disability, I developed the argument that law schools could take practical steps to make the wellbeing of disabled students much better:
The agenda for disabled law students under the government’s new framework is very much set by the law students. One way of getting involved is through the National Union of Students’ recently-launched petition calling for the establishment of a national advocacy service for disabled students (disabilities usually include long-term illnesses, mental-health conditions and specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia). In fact, if you’d like to set up your own disabled students’ group, you can email them for advice:disabled@nus.org.uk.
Still, I also feel it is up to the individual learning provider to be pro-active in responding to what disabled law students aspire to. At the bare minimum, they can simply comply with the white paper. But learning providers which wish to add social value may wish to do more to understand what disabled students aspire to and are legally entitled to. Certainly, it would reflect well on them to do so.
Meanwhie, back on the LegalAware blog, I was becoming acutely aware that the overlap between law and politics was becoming much closer. The legal aid cuts agenda remained at the front of my mind:
‘Sound off for justice’ and ‘Justice for all’ maintain that their campaigns are not political. However, senior people I talk to in law centres in London come to a conclusion that it is not possible to divorce politics from legal aid funding. Poverty unfortunately is political, as the Shadow Attorney-General, Emily Thornberry MP, suggested yesterday on BBC’s ‘Any Questions’. It happens that access-to-justice could disproportionately affect people on the basis of their income, in that cases of access-to-justice could become much harder to obtain for poorer people for certain problems. With many law centres set to shut down altogether, the legal services for immigration, housing and asylum, and welfare benefits, look set to be affected. The question is whether the poor will suffer disproportionately. Rich people will possibly be able to afford superinjunctions as before, as the evidence that the top 1% of the population have been affected substantially by the recession is lacking. This top 1% includes some (at least) well-paid lawyers in London.
However, colleagues of mine found it hard to discuss the political issues in an open way, but the funding of legal aid had unfortunately become a political isssue.
Whatever – I personally think all legal practitioners should be given support, acknowledging that funds are limited. but funding bodies will have to prioritise unfortunately. In fact, a focus on funding may have the beneficial effect of providing better precision to all stakeholders in their strategy and core competences of their legal services, whatever sector they are in. However, fundamentally, I most agree with the observation that, at this late stage, arguing over a sense of entitlement is totally unhelpful. It is desperately important that we fight until the end for our common purpose in protecting legal aid. I would find it very hard to support law centres if they wished to campaign at the expense of CABx or other stakeholders, but they should think about how they differ from other stakeholders when applying for London Borough grants for community investment or structural upkeep, I feel.
December
By December, I had come to the conclusion that a more radical solution had to be developed to improve access to the legal profession
It’s my fundamental belief that people are written off far too early in England and Wales at present. We have an education system that seems to punish certain bright people who fail to get perfect grades at GCSE and A-level. It doesn’t help that students are forced to make very specialised educational choices for their 16-18 studies at an age where they may not be totally convinced about their career choices.
I feel that the education and assessment environment needs an overhaul to prevent recruiters from using arbitrary academic achievement to ‘sift’ candidates out of sheer laziness. Talented people are being deprived access to jobs in the legal profession. Instead, we should be encouraging people to learn how to learn for themselves, and know where to find relevant information.
To this end, I feel law firms should be able to hire people straight out of school, if they wish, but also to take advantage to a greater extent of the enormous breadth of experience from other spheres of life mature candidates might offer. Unfortunately, we’re not in a place where that sort of flexibility can happen.
What will the future hold? 2012 begins soon.
