Laws And Lawyers

The scream

So, then, a new year and a new job? According to Career Energy, a consultancy, more lawyers approach it seeking a career change than any other professional group. Given the vast number of eager students in the colleges of law, this seems a sad anomaly. Harry Freedman, at Career Energy, says that the young bloods soon get ground down by the combination of long hours and the macho billing culture that leaves them feeling overworked and depressed. A lot actually admit that they should never have been lawyers in the first place (pushy parents beware).

So is there light at the end of this tunnel of bleak despair? “Many lawyers eventually decide that they will be better off doing something they enjoy on a lower salary than sinking into despair on a higher one,” Freedman says. “The lock-in is only psychological and it doesn’t usually last for ever.”

Alternatively, they could join Conyers Dill & Pearman.

Here comes the sun

True to form, just as the bleak midwinter was at its bleakest, sunny news arrived from the subtropics that Conyers Dill & Pearman had gone on a hiring spree, appointing half a dozen further staff to its offices in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and elsewhere hot.

Given that most London firms are still laying off people rather than taking them on, this simply rubs the (fast-disappearing) salt into the wound. So I wonder, for example, how Tara Rivers (late of Allen & Overy in London) or Claire McConway (ex-the London office of King & Spalding) has been getting by over these past few days? Feeling nostalgic for that slip and trip to work in the City? Somehow I doubt it. Despite my chilblained hands — and through lightly gritted teeth — I wish them well.

Creative accounting

The legal scene has been as warm as a snowmen’s convention over the past week. The usual new year flood of announcements just froze up.

So, instead, I was left to mull over the revelation that accountants are more positive about economic recovery than their clients with 25 per cent expecting that Britain will come out of recession this year. By contrast, only 8 per cent of lawyers feel the same.

No wonder all those lawyers want to get out of the profession.

Paid but undervalued

Maybe the truth is that the City law firm culture of a obsession with pay is where it has all gone wrong. According to a survey sponsored by Salans, the international law firm, paying people more is no way to motivate them to get out of the recession. Instead, a much higher value — by almost two thirds of interviewees — was placed on the development of skills and capability, on better internal communications and engagement with the business. Maybe if firms put more emphasis on these they wouldn’t have so many fed-up staff spending their lunchtimes with career consultants.