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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”.

 

 

Complete review of 2011 for the BPP Legal Awareness Society



It’s been a great first year for Legal Aware, the official blog of the BPP Legal Awareness Society (here it is on the official BPP Students website developed by Madelaine Power and Laila Heinonen).

February

On February 26 2011, I introduced my blog for the first time. I announced that blog would be centred around ten topics, and indeed I have largely stuck to this list throughout the year. Actually, I have expanded the list as my interests in the corporate legal news grew, and I started blogging on non-corporate topics, as my interest in pro bono welfare benefits developed. I have worked for five months in a law centre in London, in a post which was first advertised through the BPP Careers Newsletter.

March

Shortly, after announcing some meetings, I reviewed the plagued Rio Tinto and Riversdale transaction, one which had been plaguing Linklaters for months and which had an unfortunate conclusion. I invited people to join the brand new BPP Legal Awareness Society, which they did.  Maxinutrition was sold to GSK through Marcfarlanes in an interesting transaction, and I reported on the forthcoming implementation of the Bribery Act. Onto the legal landscape, it was becoming  increasingly recognised that professional legal services had to be run as businesses, and the nature of commercial law continued to interest me.

April

U.S. firms were fast adapting to the commercial opportunities of social media, and this was a theme to recur in the whole of 2011. For example, in May 2011, I reported on lessons in the UK industry for my social media strategy which had been very much made up on-the-hoof. In June 2011, Victoria Moffatt would later consider whether junior lawyers should participate in LinkedIn. By that stage, I was gaining a much clearer idea of what the BPP Legal Awareness Society was about, and that was to explain the relevance and critical importannce of law and regulation to shaping the competitive advantage of businesses. The regulation of the banking industry was beginning to bcome important as a theme, and I first brought up firewallsThe SRA spelt out 10 new principles in its Code of Conduct, and members of my Society discussed the use of ‘Second Life’ in law and legal education.

May

Slaughter & May LLP removed what they called a ‘clearly offensive advert’ widely reported in the blogosphere, including “Roll on Friday”. I was becoming very interested  in my MBA on how corporate social responsibility should pervade the business strategy in corporates, and I reported on a recent experience from India. Back in the real world, I was doing pro bono, and I wrote about a test in welfare benefits law which interested me – the cooking testMotor insurance was hitting the headlines, whilst international arbitration saw two bits of ‘big news': arbitration over nuclear power in Russia was becoming important and a new ‘Arbitration Ordinance’ was introduced. The effects of  the global financial crisis were becoming clearer, as law firms sought to find solace in Islamic Finance in diversification of their range of legal services. The effect of other issues, climate change, continued to be a source of legal work for the City,  RBS considered a international expansion strategy into China through the joint venture mechanismAmazon Inc continued to explore the intellectual property issues surrounding their “1-click patent”, and Google Inc meanwhile had their hands full with problems over AdWordsThe High Court also saw another interesting IP dispute over the name of Lotus in motor racing.

The impact of media law was beginning to become known as England discussed the need for a privacy law whilst free speech on the internet became under scrutiny and Charlotte Harris, a partner in Mischon de Reya LLP, tried to discuss superinjunctions and anonymised injunctions on BBC’s Question TimeLord Prescott indeed managed to achieve a win in the High Court over phone hacking. Finally, the impact of technology and the breaking of superinjunctions hit the limelight as ‘the Streisand Effect and that footballer’, and I dutifully did not break the superinjunction as I have student enrolment from the SRA.

June

“Roll on Friday” mooted the notion that I and various others at BPP were in fact suffering from “Stockholm Syndrome”, whilst I considered how my Society could help to overcome “the silo effect” in business and legal education. I moved the CSR debate onto a discussion of Bhopal in our Society’s meeting on CSR and international corporate strategy, and the general importance of marketing and CSR in corporate law’s “competitive advantage”.  The changing landscape of the world generally was further manifest in the ongoing discussion of the impact of the Digital Economy Act, now in the arena of whether it offended human rights.

Meanwhile, Ken Clarke presented his new legal aid and sentencing bill to parliament, and BAILLI realised it was having trouble securing fundingMicrosoft took a critical look at the role of entrepreneurshipCompass looked at ‘ethical banking’ in the banking regulatory reforms, and Steve Hynes wrote a brilliant letter to the Guardian on the impact of the legal aid cuts, whilst the Government produced its official response to its consultation on legal aid. Meanwhile, discrimination reared its ugly head, some would say quite literally, in a ‘battte of the cornrows‘ at the High Court. My passion for social law was intensifying at this point in this year, as I went to a brilliant meeting organised by the Islington Law Centre about what the legal aid cuts would mean. Again, I only found out about this meeting through the BPP Pro Bono Unit.

I revisited the subject of my LLM at the College of Law – cloud computing – in attending an interesting one-day conference on it at the HQ of Microsoft in which we discussed possible regulatory avenues for cloud computingFrank Jennings argued at this meeting that cloud computing offered a myriad of opportunities, particularly for cloud computing providers to “stand out”. The highlight of the month, and possibly the year, was our #tweetup organised by @ShireenSmith of @Azrights at “The Yorkshire Tea”, just a stone’s throw from the BPP Law School in Holborn. I was highly amused at the various antics of Magic Circle Minx, and this interview description made me laugh a lot.

July

As the training contract deadline was drawing to a close, I blogged about the online application form based on a meeting done by the BPP Careers Unit at Holborn. I was in the middle of studying leadership for my #MBA, so I wrote about Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” iconic speech.

I got easily bored, and discussed how Yogi Bear should be ‘legally aware’, and I even likened the training contract interview to the driving test the following month. I gave a well received presentation on the employment support allowance for my student society, whilst the full impact of the phone hacking at the ‘News of the World’ was becoming more widely known and what effect our statute law might have. This was the birth of the #Leveson inquiry which would be a dominant feature of recent months. Phone hacking was now a very active area of debate in the Houses of Commons, which was to be the case for the months which followed.

August

I became increasingly interested in the methods that legal recruiters use to select people for interview for corporate law firms. I had in my sights the ‘situational judgement test’ where applicants have to make a decision ‘what they would do’ in that particular corporate situation; I made my own version up, and so far over 100 people have taken it providing me with clear answers, surprisingly.

September

On 1 September 2011, Alex Aldridge published a thought-provoking article, “Disabled lawyers still face discrimination” in the Guardian.

I commented as follows:

I’d very much like to thank @AlexAldridgeUK for writing such a constructive and positive article on a topic, in my personal opinion, which has become somewhat of a ‘white elephant’ for law firms and legal education.

I agree that all of the firms mentioned in the article have really ‘meant it’, when it comes to widening access to disabled students in the legal profession. I am mentioned in Alex’s article above, and I tweet at @legalaware. The article generated much-needed debate, and I hope that it begins to forge a path for the future, where all stakeholders can bring their views to the table equally validly. For example, I have always found @SundeepBhatia2 very encouraging in supporting me. Sundeep is a Law Society Council member, and is extremely committed to the values of equality and diversity, in letter as well as in spirit.

Although I have now passed my LLM in international commercial law and I am about to commence my LPC in January 2011 here in London, I now run the BPP Legal Awareness Society during my MBA, a student-run society to promote the importance of law to business, and business to commercial lawyers (our news and educational videos are located at http://www.legal-aware.org). This time last year, however, I went to the http://www.open-to-you.com/ (OPEN 2011) event which was immaculately organised.

It was a great opportunity to meet face-to-face legal recruitment experts, other law students, and, most importantly, lawyers generally at Managing Associate or Partner level. I’ ll be strongly encouraging my friends at @BPPLawSchool and@BPPBusiness, where I hope to be increasingly involved in our disability strategy at a personal level. As I am physically disabled myself, I think such an event is wonderful for introducing law students to issues such as reasonable adjustments in legal recruitment, and ongoing training. There was a brilliant session on interview techniques which I loved.

I happen to believe that a much more ambitious debate needs to be had, however. Disability is not simply about law firms meeting future employees face-to-face once-a-year, which I dare suits meets requirements of all those concerned. We need a decent acknowledgement that disabled people aren’t there simply for marketing purposes; disabled citizens are potent members of society. and can indeed secure “competitive advantage” for law firms in a directly relevant area of law such as real-life application of the Equality Act 2010 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents).

Crucially, all disabled lawyers can exhibit remarkable skills in completely different areas of the entire range of corporate law specialities, such as share acquisitions or joint ventures, as indeed you’d find out if you were to attend the ‘OPEN 2012′ event. I believe that many disabled lawyers are also happy in high-street ‘social law’ in professional legal services firms offering specialist advice.

and

I couldn’t agree more with Tim’ s comment above: especially the need to ‘walk the walk’ as well as ‘talking the talk’ when it comes to inclusivity and diversity. This extends to all forms of legal recruitment, including careers fairs.

Tim is deaf as stated in his comment, and I have mildly impaired walking ability, as indeed also stated correctly in Alex’s article.

I feel intuitively that partners promoting disability in ‘top law firms’ (a term used in helenfcooke’s comment above), especially if they are not disabled themselves, could ‘do no harm’ ln listening extremely carefully to the views of people who live with disabilities.

This is, I suppose, what the people like me might call ‘face validity’ (cognitive neuropsychology was the subject of my own Ph.D., hence my somewhat late interest in psychometric tests for legal recruitment).

Ideally, I don’t feel it would be a bad thing if there were more disabled lawyers at Managing Associate or Partner level in these ‘top law firms’, anyway as I feel that there are few role models for disabled law students like me.

Furthermore, the proportion of disabled people in the general population is not altogether insignificant, so there is arguably no legitimate reason why disabled citizens should be underrepresented at senior level in such ‘top law firms’, or any law firm for that matter.

A new intake of students arrived at BPP University College. I hotfooted back from the party conference season to display my stall at Freshers Fair with Majid. During my conference, there were many interesting topics which I blogged on. Having already done pro bono work as a law student for several months by that stage, I attended a major event at the Labour Party Conference on the perils of the legal aid reforms. I concluded that the proposals did not constitute ‘justice for all‘. At some point during the year, probably inspired by two academic economists Prof Paul Krugman and Prof Joe Stiglitz, who both won the Nobel Prize in economics, that the Coalition policy was wrong and profoundly anti-Keynesian; I disagreed with Vince Cable’s interpretation of it in a blogpost I wrote on the “paradox of thrift“. I felt I had to tie in the notion of ‘economic rent’ and Ricardian economics in discussing bankers bonuses, however.

Later that month, I decided to make my own platform to help law students, particularly those with dyslexia and visual impairments, become good at the online verbal reasoning test; this is an obstacle for many law students getting even an interview for a training contract now. I wrote an introductory post on this here.

October

I became increasingly interest in how psychometric tests had managed to gain such an elevated status in legal recruitment; in fact, at one point, I reviewed the history of the situational judgement test, with a view to considering what the future holds.

On 14 October 2011, Alex Aldridge published an article in the Guardian entitled “Is the law degree an ass?”.

I commented as follows:

I really enjoyed attending this debate at UCL on Tuesday for two main reasons. Firstly, as a law student (about to study the BPP LPC in Holborn in January 2012, having successfully completed my GDL, LL.B.(Hons) and LL.M. as a mature student), I was interested to hear how academics answered the question “Do lawyers need to be scholars?’. This is particularly since I have received academic scholarships from three well-known institutions including Cambridge. Secondly, UCL is in fact where I did my own post-doc, and I have fond very memories of the place. I

I would like to thank the organisers @LexisNexis and UCL who took great care over the many delegates. I was able to sit near the front, due to my poor eyesight. I hope very much that @LexisNexis hold an event in the near future, with panel representatives including ‘real’ law students. I hope particularly @kevinpoulter will be involved as he is an experienced legal commentator who communicates well. I sat with fellow ‘legal tweeps’, @colmmu from the College of Law, and@legalacademia, a legal academic originally from Cardiff. It has been interesting for me (as @legalaware) to read the general feedback following the event, which converges on the notion that the scope for discussion about the issues was too limited, and drawn from people who were perhaps too senior. Notwithstanding these issues, I am very much looking forward to the outcome of the review to be conducted by the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR).

I have written a blogpost based on my own personal experience of this panel discussion on our ‘LegalAware’ website, the official website of the BPP Legal Awareness Society. On a positive note, Mr Bickerton explained his personal belief that the purpose of the degree is fundamentally not supposed to teach people how to be good at the law – his firm are rather looking for aptitude, interest, and a need to pursue law as a vocation. However, I found a bit alarming his relative disinterest as to what should be in the legal curriculum compared to the well-reasoned thoughts of the academics in the panel, in that the trainee recruitment of the Clifford Chance was of acceptable standards anyway. Ironically, it is perfectly possible for the Graduate Recruitment Team at Clifford Chance never to discover that you are a “scholar” if you do not meet their benchmark in their situational judgement test or verbal reasoning test. However you choose to define what a “scholar” is, most reasonable people would not define it as simply producing an arbitary mark in a psychometric test.

Personally, I found the views of Prof Richard Moorhead the most compelling. Prof Moorhead is at the University of Cardiff Law School (profile here). According to Prof Moorhead, lawyers ‘needed’ scholars, otherwise it would not be clear where the knowledge was coming from; scholars researched the key issues, and there is a key interdependence of lawyers and scholars – without scholarship, the advancement of knowledge would slow. The curriculum therefore needed to be exciting and innovating.

and

Interesting. I’ve had entirely positive experiences as a postgraduate student at BPP Law School, BPP Business School and College of Law doing my LLM, LLB(Hons) and MBA – but please bear in mind I’m bound to be happy at anything surviving a 2 month coma due in meningitis in 2007. i am also mindful of ‘advertising’ legal providers in this new ‘age’ of ‘expansion’ of legal services and legal education providers.

I did spend a lot of time at Cambridge, close to ten years in fact, as both an undergraduate and postgraduate student at Cambridge. I think @BaronessDeech is possibly being a bit tongue-in-cheek in her views about Cambridge, but I have always had a huge amount of respect for the jurisprudence FHS at Oxford.

I am now myself disabled, and I have passionate views about improving access for people like me who are visually impaired. Indeed, I have a chance to air them in the Comments section in a different article by @AlexAldridgeUK recently. I once had the enormous pleasure of meeting Prof Jim Harris. If you read his obituary, you’ll understand why,

Obituary in the Times

I didn’t study the Law Tripos at Cambridge – but I think i can understand where your impression of it as ‘stifling’ came from from my limited understanding of the organisational behaviour of faculties at Cambridge, @alienat. I think Cambridge suffers from a lot of very clever academics who don’t talk to each other when designing the Tripos, meaning that the Tripos is totally overloaded. As is usual in academic interests, they tend to be protective about representation of their own research interests in the undergraduate courses (and their examinations),
This was certainly my experience in an altogether different Tripos.

I would, however, be a bit disappointed if the Law Faculty (which does have an amazing research record, for example in criminology), were not able to input constructively into design of the law curriculum. They must however be extremely careful not to overload the curriculum (different from syllabus, by defintiion) with their suggestions, however.

Interestingly, since my comment was published, Clifford Chance have decided to discontinue their use of the Situational Judgement Test (they set exactly the same test in 2010 and 2011). I assume that this is not related to my comments above.

 

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 has now begun.

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.

 

LegalAware at the Primrose Hill Christmas Fair 2011



 

 

 

 

 

Primrose Hill hosted its Christmas Fair today, 27 November 2011. It was down Regents Park Road. Marek from Primrose Hill Books was hosting his stall outside the bookshop. The bookshop is at the heart of the community. We spoke for some time. Also there was Ronald Coupland, also at the heart of the community. He is the local well-known solicitor in St George’s Mews. Here are my photos.

Bit early for Christmas, but there you go! Most of us were feeling very Christmassy today!

Follow @LegalAware on Twitter for up-to-date news about law, legal services, business, legal education, general news, inter alia. This is the official thread of the student society run at BPP by students to promote the importance of corporate strategy and the law. The views on that Twitter thread are entirely personal, and do not represent the views or opinions of BPP.

Best wishes.

These photographs are (c) LegalAware website 2011

The LegalAware legal blog awards 2011



After a popular vote based on incredibly complicated performance metrics, the top 3 results are duly announced as follows.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. @charonqc and @obiterj

http://www.obiterj.blogspot.com

http://charonqc.wordpress.com

3. @legalaware

http://legal-aware.org

Our entry in the new BPP Student Society handbook



Name of society BPP Legal Awareness Society (“the Society”)

Objectives of the Society

This BPP student society promotes the importance of the law to business, and the importance of business to law.

 

 

 

Membership of the Society shall be open to all students of BPP (across all sites).

 

 

Function

Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/legalaware  (currently has 1700 followers)

Blog http://legal-aware.org/

Details of forthcoming fortnightly meetings are given at http://legal-aware.org/2011/05/timetable-for-bpp-legal-awareness-society-2-mary-axe-semesters-2-and-3-20112/

Meetings are normally held on Wednesday evenings at BPP Business School, 2 St Mary Axe, with the details clearly stated on the LCD in the foyer or available from Reception. An e-mail signalling an event will also go out via BPP email to all members of the Society in the week of the event, and announcements are also made on Blackboard. Details of the event itself are always posted on the blog or twitter (any slide presentations are also made available as click-through videos on the blog).

5 Oct 2011                Intellectual property rights and businesses

19 Oct 2011              Share acquisitions and business strategy

2 Nov 2011               Initial public offerings and rights issues

16 Nov 2011             Debt finance: investment options for the company

30 Nov 2011             Joint ventures: practical issues

14 Dec 2011             Arbitration and other mechanisms of dispute resolution

 

Rules or Guidelines

All membership is through the ‘Community’ tab of VLE/ Blackboard. Guidelines relevant to the meetings of the Society are posted on the blog.

 

 

Budget

This Society has never sought funding from BPP.

 

Elections

Election for a new management committee for this Society will be held in January 2012.

 

Recruitment of members

Recruitment posters are currently in the common rooms of all sites of BPP.

A campaign poster dated 27 June 2011 is on the blog at http://legal-aware.org/2011/06/legalaware-campaign-poster/

 

Information for Students’ Association Website

This Society promotes the relevance of law or regulation to all businesses in the UK. Whilst this Society is hoped to be of benefit to MBA students, we have found that there has been much interest from law students wishing to develop their ‘commercial awareness’.

 

The scope of the business law discussed, at national and international level, is of sufficient depth and breadth to complement the studies of the LPC studying ‘Business Law and Practice’, and the LLM degree in commercial law; as no prior knowledge is required, the activities of the Society are also accessible to all other students.

 

Handover

 

Elections are currently planned for a new management committee, for January 2012. Any current BPP student (then) will be eligible to stand. The committee will consist of an organiser and external affairs co-ordinator, and any other posts that the current organiser sees fit.

 

Any other information

(This section is left deliberately blank.)

 

This Manual was produced by 14 September 2011.

 

A paradigm shift is needed by law firms in understanding disability



‘Diversity’ is such a broad-ranging term, so as to be completely unhelpful. Far from promoting individuality, it clumps together people who are gay, black, bisexual, disabled, but draws the line at being male or female. Critically defining diversity has some bearing on whether you wish diversity groups to be safely ringfenced; or whether all ‘diversity individuals’ should be represented at all levels of a corporate. Whether or not a partner, who has a diversity issue, has time to making diversity part of the corporate culture or not is a moot point, or whether she or he gets paid extra and keeps work for this to a minimum to prevent its negative impact on targets and billable earnings, etc.

Lessons can be learned from another area so beloved of corporate legal marketing and recruitment departments. A highly seminal article on the different subject of corporate social responsibility (CSR) emerged from Porter and Kramer in 2006 in the Harvard Business Review. At this time, Porter and Kramer made a limited entrance into the discussion of CSR and corporate strategy, by structuring their discussion around reputation, sustainability / ‘people, planet, profit’, license-to-operate, and a few other associated issues. It is probably the article which has appeared from Harvard in 2011 that makes the most enduring impression of how CSR should be approached. Porter and Kramer introduce the notion of ‘creating shared value’, emphasising that a previous drawback of previous approaches – including their one – is that the corporation has been pitted against society. Of course, if the purpose of the company in English law is to maximise shareholder dividend, the issue of whether shareholders and directors have an alternative belief-set to other stakeholders becomes enormously relevant.

A similar criticism in my view can be made of the way that law firms approach disability. I am deciding not to hide this under the general term ‘diversity’. Michael Porter talks about the competitive advantage of businesses adopting CSR, such that your business is better than the competition. A lazy marketing solution would be to plaster your promotional literature with pictures of lawyers in wheelchairs, and get your firm to sign up to the aspirational but unenforceable Law Society Diversity and Inclusion Charter; and to concentrate on the profitability of your law firm instead. A more imaginative solution, in keeping with Porter and Kramer (2011), would be to acknowledge disabled individuals like myself as valued members of society. Whether or not you believe in multiculturalism, it is easily possible that a law firm, including the Magic Circle, could set up innovative professional legal services solutions regarding disability and employment issues in the corporate work force; they could make money out of this, indeed, and become more profitable in the process. More radical than making up numbers of the number of disabled candidates invited for interview, even.

I allude to this discussion briefly in a podcast I did with Alex Aldridge and Kevin Poulter this evening.

Good luck to the Light Blues!



Cambridge University’s crew is favoured to beat Oxford University tomorrow in one of the U.K.’s oldest sports contests, an event that generates more wagers than Olympic rowing, according to William Hill, in its fourth consecutive win.

It's hurting but it isn't working – Ed Miliband's brilliant response



Ed Miliband’s speech was brilliant with this incredible ad lib:

“George Osborne at the weekend aspired to be a mix of Nigel Lawson and Michael Heseltine, with typical Conservative hubris. He’s more like Norman Lamont with an iPod playing ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien'”.

Remember this?

Well, this is the text of today’s response by the Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer announcing his UK budget for 2011.

Mr Deputy Speaker, the Chancellor spoke for nearly an hour.

But one fact says it all.

Growth down last year, this year and next year.

It is the same old Tories.

It’s hurting but it isn’t working.

What did he say last year about growth?

Judge me on the figures.

Well judge him we will.

Every time he comes to this House, growth is downgraded.

Last June, 2011 growth down from 2.6% to 2.3%.

In November, down again.

In January what did the Prime Minister say?

His three priorities for this year were growth, growth, growth.

And what happened?

Growth is down, down, down.

And taking account of all the measures.

What is the Chancellor’s singular achievement?

To deliver a budget for growth that downgrades the growth forecasts.

Down this year to 1.7%.

Downgraded next year too.

It didn’t happen by chance.

It happened by choice.

His choice.

And it’s the wrong choice.

To go too far and too fast.

There was another way.

In his own words from the June Budget – he chose to go £40bn further and faster in tax rises and spending cuts than our plan to halve the deficit over four years.

It’s the pace of cuts that has seen consumer confidence fall in almost every month since the General Election.

In his first Budget the Chancellor promised:

“steady and sustained economic recovery”.

And when last September’s growth figures came out, the Chancellor took the credit.

He called the figures “a vote of confidence” in the Government’s economic policy.

But when the economy contracted in the fourth quarter, what did he do?

He blamed the snow.

Mr Deputy Speaker, even he must appreciate the irony.

Because while the Prime Minister was grounded from his Christmas trip to Thailand, the Chancellor was on the piste in Klosters.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I guess it was the right type of snow for a skiing holiday.

Just the wrong kind of snow for our economy.

But what is it about the British snow?

They had worse snow in Germany…

…a big freeze in France…

… in the US – the worst blizzards for decades.

But despite all of that their economies grew in the fourth quarter.

And while our growth forecasts have worsened, theirs have improved.

The German economy is forecast to grow more strongly than it was last year.

So is the US.

Growth in the world economy has been revised up.

But which is the ma jor country downgrading its growth forecasts?

The United Kingdom.

It’s not the wrong type of snow that’s to blame, Mr Deputy Speaker.

It’s the wrong type of Chancellor,

…the wrong type of chancellor, in the wrong type of government

With the wrong priorities for Britain.

He also promised in June that his Budget would deliver “low inflation”

And what has happened?

Inflation has risen month after month after month.

It didn’t simply happen by accident.

It is happening because he took the wrong decision on VAT.

Same old taxes.

Same old Tories.

And he promised us falling unemployment too.

And what has happened since he gave his first Budget?

Over 60,000 more people looking for work.

And today we are told in the Red Book unemployment is forecast to rise further.

To this Tory Government, just like the ones of the past, unemployment is still a price worth paying.

And many people will wonder what world the Chancellor was describing today.

In the constituencies of over 130 Members of this House, 10 people are chasing every job.

One in five young people looking for work.

Communities seeing libraries and children centres closing.

Families seeing their living standards squeezed.

Not just this year, but year after year after year.

And what does the Government say to communities losing jobs?

Let me tell you what they recently told the people of Newport, justifying the closure of their passport office.

It said the redundancy payments of the staff being sacked would provide a “boost in trade for the local economy”.

What kind of planet are these people living on?

On growth, on inflation, on unemployment – on the promises he made, the Chancellor couldn’t bring himself to admit the truth.

That his second Budget tells the story of the failure of his first.

At this stage of the recovery growth should be powering ahead.

Unemployment should be falling fast.

And every month when unemployment is higher than it should be it stores up long-term damage.

Every month when growth is lower than it should be, it hits the future potential of our economy.

The problem is, instead of admitting it, he refuses to change course.

What did the Energy Secretary say?

If the figures change the Government “should not be lashed to the mast” of their reckless gamble.

It should be willing to change and think again.

Mr Deputy Speaker, it’s not as if they haven’t had practice at the u-turn business.

They’re becoming the past masters.

On forests, school sport, housing benefit for those looking for work, even on the vanity photographer, they have been forced to climb-down.

But on this, the issue that matters most, they are least willing to change.

At the weekend we learned something new about the Chancellor:

Apparently, his political aspiration is to be a blend of Nigel Lawson and Michael Heseltine.

Mr Deputy Speaker, another comparison springs to mind.

Because we see the same refusal to change course we saw from the Tories in the early 1980s.

The same hubris and arrogance of the early 1990s.

He’s more like the political love child of Geoffrey Howe and Norman Lamont.

Next thing we know, he’ll be ordering in the champagne and singing in the bath, je ne regrette rien.

Mr Deputy Speaker, this is not a growth Budget.

It is not a jobs Budget.

It is a Budget for more of the same.

From a complacent, arrogant Chancellor.

In a complacent, arrogant Government.

It’s hurting but it isn’t working.

Mr Deputy Speaker, let us not forget, these are not just the Chancellor’s decisions.

They are not just the Prime Minister’s decisions.

They’re the Deputy Prime Minister’s decisions too.

He is an accomplice to this Tory plan.

When it comes to the economy, the man who coined the phrase alarm clock Britain has the snooze button well and truly on.

Nobody voted for this deficit plan.

Least of all his Liberal Democrat voters who were told in promise after promise that he would never countenance it.

Mr Deputy Speaker, if I can put it this way, is it any wonder no-one wants to share a platform with him.

On the measures he proposes to support growth, we will look at them.

But there is little reason to believe they will make the difference to growth we need.

The Office for Budget Responsibility has already factored in every single measure he’s just announced.

And they still produced today’s downgraded growth forecast and higher unemployment figures.

And it’s no wonder.

An enterprise zone proposal dusted off from the 1980s cannot undo the damage of a deficit plan that goes too far and too fast.

It didn’t work then, it won’t work now.

And you can’t blame people for being sceptical when the Chancellor says he’s got a new flagship policy for growth.

Because what happened to his last flagship policy for growth, at the centre of his June Budget?

Does anyone remember the national insurance holiday

He was strangely silent about it today.

In June he boasted it would help to protect the areas worst hit by his cuts.

He stood at that despatch box taking credit for the 400,000 small firms he said would benefit.

How many have actually benefitted?

Mr Deputy Speaker, he’s been strangely shy in revealing the figures but someone let slip to the Financial Times.

By mid-January it wasn’t 400,000.

It wasn’t 40,000.

It wasn’t even 4,000.

It was less than a half of one percent of the number he prom ised, just 1,500 businesses.

And his green flagship policy, the Green Investment Bank.

I think his energy Secretary had it spot on.

“Ducks quack, and banks borrow as well as lend.”

Well his green bank can’t borrow for the next 5 years.

And this policy is a lame duck.

On his incentives for small firms, we will look at the detail

But I have to say, his decision to cancel flexible working for families with children between 16 and 18 is extraordinary.

Only this Prime Minister could take the credit for championing a policy with Mumsnet, and then a few months later take the credit with small business for dumping it.

You’ve got to ask Mr Deputy Speaker – has he no shame?

The idea that families needing flexibility imperil our economic future is frankly absurd.

And tells you all you need to know about this Government’s values and how they think our economy succeeds.

Greater insecurity as t he route to greater prosperity.

Well we take a different view.

Flexible working is yet another broken promise from the broken promise Prime Minister.And while we’re on the subject what about one of the biggest broken promises of all.

Remember what he said before the election?

He, the Prime Minister, was banker basher in chief.

He was the man to deliver, and I quote, a day of reckoning for the bankers.

It’s not a day of reckoning, it’s business as usual.

Last year Labour’s bonus tax raised £3.5bn.

And this year their bank levy raises just £1.9bn.

A Tory Government cutting taxes for the banks.

Instead of doing that he should have used the money to reintroduce the Future Jobs Fund, build 25,000 homes, and boost enterprise.

They are not taking the long term steps to build the high skill, high wage economy of the future.

Mr Deputy Speaker, they are failing on growth, and they are failing on living standards too.

What did the Prime Minister say before the election to families receiving tax credits?

He said that below £50,000 a year, their tax credits were safe

When Labour said otherwise, the Home Secretary said this:

“That is a lie, and it is irresponsible for Labour to be … worrying families needlessly”.

But what is the truth?

Next year, over one million families with incomes as low as £26,000 will lose all their tax credits.

They should be ashamed of their broken promises.

All part of the cost of living crisis they are imposing.

The Chancellor trumpeted the rise in the personal allowance.

But let’s look at the facts.

He came along in the June Budget and put up VAT, costing families £450 a year.

Now he’s got the nerve to expect them to be grateful when he gives them a fraction of their own money back.

Let me tell you what the Institute for Fiscal Studies told us this morning: “there is an awful lot of giving with one hand… and taking away with lots and lots of other hands.”

It’s the classic Tory con.

And what about their decision on petrol?

He’s done the same thing again.

He’s cut duty by 1 pence.

But he’s whacked up VAT on fuel by 3p.

Families won’t be fooled.

It’s Del Boy economics.

For a two earner family both on average wages, after VAT and tax credits, it’s the same as 5p up in the basic rate of income tax this year and just 1p down next.

What do the British people know from history?

Every Tory tax cut ends up costing them more.

Same old Tories.

Same old deceit.

We needed a Budget that changed the direction of economic policy.

We needed a Budget that protected the Promise of Britain that the next generation does better than the last.

We needed a Budget that changed course on cutting too far and too fast.

The Chancellor said at the weekend with his customary modesty that he had completed his rescue mission of the British economy.

After this Budget, it’s not the Chancellor who is rescuing the country.

It is the country that needs rescuing from the Chancellor.

Mr Deputy Speaker, when families look at this Budget,

Look at the squeeze on their living standards,

Look at the job losses in their communities,

They will conclude:

It’s hurting but it isn’t working.

Tory Story 3 – Some New Year's resolutions for Labour



Osborne Cameron

By Shibley Rahman@shibleylondon

Opinion polls consistently return the verdict that Labour is economically incompetent compared to the Conservatives. Many would indeed agree that Labour didn’t get its economic messages across competently in the 2010 campaign. Labour tried to explain its economic strategy through a series of university-style tutorials, and sloppily allowed various ‘facts’ to go unchallenged. Ed Miliband and his team will have to learn from these mistakes.

This article looks at just three assumptions of the Tory Story on the economy. The true success of the Tory Story is its simple but misleading messages. The story has various components: for example, NI is “the jobs tax” but VAT isn’t, Britain is going bankrupt, and government debt is like a credit card debt. Perhaps Labour new year’s resolution should be to stop these corrosive myths from going unchallenged. Rebuilding the trust and confidence of the electorate in Labour’s economic strategy is a marathon not a sprint, so the sooner we get started the better.

Will the VAT have no effect on jobs?

To shift the limelight onto NI as the “jobs tax” is also to present an attractive story to the voter that a VAT hike presents no threat to jobs. The British Retail Consortium (BRC) in May 2010 forecast that as many as 163,000 jobs could be lost in the next four years if VAT is increased. They said that, in its first year, a VAT rate of 20% would reduce the deficit by £11.3 billion, but by the end of that first year there would be 30,000 fewer jobs in the UK, across all employment sectors, than if there had been no increase. The BRC has, instead, urged the government to prioritise public spending cuts over tax rises to tackle the budget deficit, as well as to aim to half the deficit over four years rather than the proposed three. Voters will be looking carefully at the unemployment count, while the expert economists forensically examine the GDP statistics, over the course of 2011.

Is government debt like a credit card debt?

David Cameron and Nick Clegg have consistently likened government debt to credit card debt (like paying for your weekly groceries). This is a plausible common-sense approach based on the electorate’s instinct for belt-tightening, and the hardships they will be experiencing in difficult times. The analogy is clearly weak, but analysis of that is way beyond the scope of this article. Given that the public appear to like this comparison, it might be useful to explain also what might go wrong in such terms. The biggest threat for the UK in 2011 is that unemployment goes up and therefore benefit payments go up, while tax receipts go down. This would be like credit card bills beginning to “flood in”, while you are unable to deposit any money into your bank account.

Is Britain going bankrupt?

In January 2009, David Cameron suggested that there was a “risk” that Britain would go bankrupt. George Osborne also has repeatedly warned that the country was facing financial meltdown. When asked on the BBC’s ‘Andrew Marr Show’ whether it is possible that Britain would go bankrupt, Ken Clarke said in contrast:

“I don’t think it’s a realistic possibility. Though, I mean I’m as gloomy as most people…I think it’s very important to realise the constraints of a responsible opposition.”

The media and the public seem disinterested in discussing this, but the spin of a bankrupt Britain relentlessly goes on unchallenged. Foreign investors currently fund about 35% of the government’s total debts, and there is currently little sign yet of them losing their appetite for government bonds, or gilts – the German government has had more problems selling its debts at recent auctions than the UK.

The solution

Thankfully, official data from the Office for National Statistics about GDP and unemployment will be hard for the coalition to put a positive spin on. When commentators say “it’s the economy stupid”, they fail to appreciate one further addition to that for 2015, that is, “and its social and economic consequences”.

In the meantime, Ed Miliband and team will have to work hard at identifying the reasons why the public trusts the Conservatives with the economy more. It is undeniably hard to explain in a punchy manner why the deficit grew so big under Labour, but a good start would be to point out that the Conservatives did indeed match our spending plans until the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

I wonder what resolutions Labour will make in getting its message across more successfully in 2011…

This article was originally published in LabourList on 2nd January 2011. It has had 69 comments so far.

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