If one more person says.....
“You are a lawyer so you must be stinking rich” I shall scream and scream.
I suppose there was a time when all solicitors were very wealthy but that era had just about ended when I first qualified 50+ years ago.
Yes of course there are some very wealthy solicitors, most of whom inhabit large commercial firms mainly in the big cities, but for the rest there has been a slow decline over the years and many solicitors and barristers (the two main branches of the legal profession in England - sometime I will post a treatise on the difference between the two) find it increasingly hard to make ends meet. I know this from having spent a dozen or more years on the Council of the Law Society (the representative body of solicitors) and heard many tales of solicitors facing financial difficulties. This applies particularly to “High Street” firms, the solicitors whose offices snuggle between the local poodle parlour or hairdressers and a betting shop or off-licence in towns up and down the country: the firms that provide general legal services to their local population, be it house moving, defending traffic violations, helping obtain compensation if someone has injured them, divorcing them or dealing with the dying. It especially applies to lawyers who are doing what might be called “social law” – helping those who cannot afford legal fees to have some semblance of access to justice.
This sorry situation was highlighted recently by the announcement from a former colleague on the Law Society that she was winding down her legal practice.
Nicola Mackintosh is quoted in the Law Gazette (the house magazine for solicitors) as saying:
‘Being a small specialist legal aid practice means that cross subsidising is not an option and unlike businesses in other sectors we cannot increase what we charge to cover our increased overheads. Legal aid work involves disproportionately high levels of unnecessary administration for work at unacceptably low rates. This additional bureaucracy wastes huge amounts of valuable time and resources which could be far better spent on advising clients.
‘Sadly, as a result of all these factors, it has become impossible to attract and retain staff who can provide the professional assistance our clients deserve, because we are unable to offer the kind of flexible and financial packages they seek. There is no immediate or short-term prospect of positive civil legal aid reform which is so urgently needed.’
In contrast, lawyers employed by the Crown Prosecution Service receive salaries significantly more than those who are operating under the legal aid scheme (CPS salaries are reported to range from £37,850 - £94,000 per annum). And even those figures pale into insignificance when compared to the six or seven figure salaries paid to City solicitors.
Governments of all shades do not like lawyers who support the interests and rights of ordinary people. We are an inconvenience to them, and sometimes get in the way of their best laid plans.
What better way get us out of the way than impoverish us and -
· make courts difficult to access. Many of the previously accessible county courts have now closed and most court business is conducted online. Try to telephone a human being at the courts and you will soon be regaled by tasteless music on hold. Stories abound of solicitors sitting on the phone for hours waiting to get through to the court service.
· decimate legal aid,
· charge breathtakingly high court fees and
· put bureaucratic obstacles in the way of fighting for justice for their clients?
Apart from being falsely accused of being rich, I wrote this because I have come across two solicitors who have had to take night jobs in supermarkets stacking shelves in order to pay their way.
That in turn recalled a brief time when some supermarket chains toyed with providing legal services among the stacks of baked beans and cereals.
Tesco wrote on its website:
“solicitors can be slow to respond and won't necessarily rate your property sale as their highest priority. Because licensed conveyancers do nothing but conveyancing they have been able to streamline the whole process, which may give you a better service.”
That was a while ago, and I am sure that supermarkets quickly found that there was a much easier way to make money than offering legal services. That section is no longer accessible from their website.
I did then offer this survival suggestion for solicitors: let’s go into the supermarket business (on the basis that despite the public perception, there is a greater skill in running a legal practice than a supermarket). There are around 65,000 of us on the roll at the moment – plenty of people power around the country. And maybe we still should.
Imagine then a different future:
The flags are out. The mayor, a rotund figure weighed down with his chains of office, is standing on a podium (in reality a stack of pallets). The President of the Law Society has turned out for the grand opening of the first ever branch of the “Color it is” supermarket.
Superficially this supermarket is the same as all others, with trolleys, special offers and tempting produce, but look a little closer:
Instead of checkouts there are little booths. Customers (rebranded as ‘clients’) wheel their trolleys into the booths, and then, in complete privacy, unload their purchases onto the checkout line. Old habits die hard: before they do so they are given a client care care letter advising them who is handling their purchase, and telling them whom to complain to if there is anything wrong, and of their right to go to the Supreme Court Costs Office if they feel they have been overcharged for their smoked salmon.
The loudspeaker announcements are also slightly different. In addition to telling the public about this week’s divorce deal or 2 wills for the price of one, there are messages like –
• “Solicitor required in aisle 47 for urgent consultation” or
• “Would till trained solicitors please go to the checkouts to relieve other operators”.
Purchases are handled by a qualified solicitor or legal executive. As the items are scanned in, clients are gently advised on their legal problems, especially as many of them will have picked up vouchers in their journey round the store:
They earn not air miles but legal minutes:
· 6 cans of baked beans = 1 legal minute
· Leg of Lamb = 7 legal minutes
· Dvd player = 25 legal minutes + half a will.
Members of the public will no longer have to steel themselves before going into a solicitors’ office, as they already find themselves in a friendly and inviting atmosphere, where they can seamlessly move from curry to conveyancing, from toffee to torts and from marshmallows to mortgages.
Solicitors benefit too. Most people visit a supermarket at least once a week, but only consult their solicitor every three years. Suddenly they will see their solicitor every week. There will be huge savings in telephone and postage costs, as the check-out booths will also have pigeon holes for letters and messages for the clients.
As the Color it is supermarket chains spread around the country (by the way, many hours of creative thinking went into the name – an anagram of “solicitor”) the need to use document couriers will disappear. Our own lorries will deliver documents along with the doughnuts and dairy products.
Let us return to the mayor, who has been competing with the Color it is brass band, but nonetheless extolling the virtues of the new enterprise (it cost a free will, a large conveyance and vouchers for two future divorces to persuade him to support the venture).
“It gives me great pleasure to pronounce this branch of Color it is open.” And with that he cuts the tape (red of course), permitting the crowds to surge in. At the back of the crowd, a miserable looking man scowls, muttering: “It’s not fair. They shouldn’t let it happen. We’ll all be out of business in no time”. Slowly he skulks away to his limousine and tells his chauffeur to take him back to Ivory Towers - the headquarters of his national supermarket chain.
Back in the real world
My main experience is with the civil law – disputes between people or between individuals and powerful companies or governments. When I first started out in the law, funding was much easier. For a start, solicitors did not have to struggle so much as they do now to make a living, and could afford to help others for little or no reward (I touch on this in one of the pieces in my book the Savage Poodle). On top of that there were help schemes – like the Green Form scheme which provided a paid-for hour of solicitor time to help point clients in the right direction – or to lead to more substantial legal aid cover. And there was legal aid to bring injury claims. It was means tested, but with claims on behalf of children there was no means test. The legal aid office had to be convinced that a client had a deserving case before a certificate was issued. Once legal aid was in force, all costs and fees were covered. If the claim succeeded all costs and were paid by the defendants and the sums advanced by legal aid were refunded. The scheme was largely cost neutral. So why end it? The cynic in me suggests that it was too successful. It gave too much power to those without resources or on lower incomes.
Nowadays it is infinitely harder and more risky to obtain justice for those injured through the fault of others.
No one will lament the impoverishment or disempowerment of the legal profession. The press love to label us as fat cats and ambulance chasers. The current government has added a further soubriquet - lefty lawyers, as if that were some kind of smell or disease. Already, the rights of ordinary people are being further diminished. The law is supposed to provide access to all, with a level playing field. For an increasingly large number of people caught up in the civil and criminal justice systems, it provides neither. And that is a very worrying state of affairs.
This is a persuasive point for us non-solicitors to realise, and to be very vocal on social media to see if we can begin to stop this trend.
As this government descends further into fascism, they increasingly decimate any and all rights of everyone not deemed to be "one of us". All lawyers are absolutely essential to a properly oriented society. They also are entitled to the peace of mind that is ensured by correct remuneration.