Getting the message right - the V word...

I am always surprised at the poor press that barristers get. The public's perception of a barrister in my fantastically unscientific survey (i.e. I asked those friends who weren't lawyers) is that lawyers are posh, articulate, and usually very highly paid.

I'm not sure where that last perception has come from. Yes it is true that some barristers - usually commercial lawyers - are very well rewarded for the work they do. Most, however, work to generate a comfortable (and no more) existence. My surprise, however, is that the barristers' union (for want or another work), the Bar Council, seems to have been unable or unwilling to change the perception.

I was struck again by this since I am again acting as Interim Chambers Director - this time for East Anglian Chambers, based in Ipswich (but throughout the region). I am working there three days a week and had briefly forgotten that barristers seem to do the business of chambers after 8pm or before 7 am.

Let's do a quick calculation. Assume that our barrister earns £100,000 a year. That sounds a lot doesn't it? But our barrister is self-employed (as they mostly are - certainly almost all the good ones) and so that is a turnover figure. We need to take off VAT - leaving £80,000. Next come overheads - chambers will take a percentage. Let's say that's 17.5% (that's about average). Suddenly our barrister has only £66,000 left from which to pay other costs (including travel) and tax. It doesn't seem like quite such a huge number any more, does it?

Assuming that travel is about £1,000 per month I will take a figure for other costs of £20,000 - which is probably very light. So - now there is £46,000 left. Let's say that they put in ten hours a day - which is about right  - and then another ten hours over the weekend (probably a vast under estimate). That's a 60 hour week. Being self-employed, most barristers will be looking at about a 280 to 300 day year. Being generous and taking the lower figure, this comes down to a daily rate of £164.29 or £16.43 an hour.

I'm not trying to act as an apologist for barristers. They are well paid in comparison to many people, but it still isn't the sort of money that the Ministry of Justice has been slinging around.

Many criminal barristers will be earning much less that £100,000 too.

My point is this. Barristers generally work long and hard for what turns out to be a good but far from generous salary. Their representative body should be shouting about this from the roof tops. Yes, of course some barristers earn millions - but so do some doctors and we rarely begrudge them.

It is important that the message - the right message - is got across. Barristers are good value - that is the word we should all be using.

What Do Lawyers Care About - Weekly Result

So - a whole week of analysing the news page of "The Lawyer" (on the principle that this will reflect the things that lawyers care about) and what can we say. Well - let's first look at the charts.

The split of topics discussed (and I immediately admit that my categories are completely arbitrary) is as follows (click on the picture for an enlarged version:

I then further grouped my categories into "About Lawyers" and "About Clients":

So - after a week of looking at the news topics aimed at lawyers, it would appear that most of the discussion (90% in fact) concerns lawyers themselves rather than anything at all about their clients. Given that "The Lawyer" is a public forum, I'm a little surprised to see that lawyers are apparently so little concerned about their clients. Surely the best advertisement about the quality of a firm or a lawyer is success on behalf of their clients - and yet stories about "Client Success" occupied only 3.3% of the news. Maybe it was a quiet week...

Less surprising to me was the fact that a third of the stories were to do with lawyers moving firms and that a further 16.7% were about the money that lawyers earn. Together these made up a very neat 50% of the news - and therefore, arguably, what lawyers care about.

So what?

Well - even if lawyers really do care so little about their clients, I'd suggest that their PR people work harder on positive stories about the work done for clients. We do look at these sort of news pages, you know. And if lawyers really do care about their clients - and lets say that most of them do - then they should be talking about that more, and about how much they and their firms earn a great deal less.

Focus on the Client

There seems to be something wrong - either with law firms or with the way that the industry is reported. I offer as evidence the main news stories (as shown on the front page of the web site) from "The Lawyer" on Sunday 17th January 2010, which I believe is fairly representative:

1. K&L Gates smashes through $1bn turnover mark
2. Former Mayer Brown partner gets seven years for fraud
3. Jackson proposes sweeping reforms to cut litigation costs
4. Simmons named Stonewall's top gay friendly law firm
5. Withers faces Commons investigation over email to MP
6. Eversheds covets commoditised market with South African pilot
7. Fried Frank and Simon Thacher to advise on Virgin Media's £1.5bn bond
8. Ashurst acts on National Express' £350m bond issue
9. Linklaters names next Asia head as Shao departs for JP Morgan
10. Ashurst revamps management board as Sparrow vacates seat
11. White & Case sends London partner to head Singapore arbitration practice
12. Latham scoops Ashurst partner for City corporate push

This from one of the two industry voices. What can we tell from the list: two stories from ten about clients (and both about money); the big news is "look how much money we made last year; two worrying stories (numbers 2 and 5) about the sort of people who may be in the industry; and the rest of the stories very inward looking. Perhaps no client has ever read "The Lawyer", but there certainly doesn't seem to be any interest in them as a group - other than from the point of view about how valuable (in cash terms) they are. Even the stories that don't seem to be about individual earnings often are. "The Lawyer" has a story about legal fees ("Legal costs emerge as defining issue of 2010’s biggest cases"). In all the discussion about high costs in cases, there is no mention of the fact that the high costs come from the high fees charged by the lawyers - i.e. personal earnings.

From reading this news, and from further digging in the web site, it would appear that the industry and the lawyers who make it up are obsessed with their own earnings, their own position within the industry and see clients as "cash cows". This cannot be good.

In case this is normal in any industry, I also examined "Third Sector" on the same day, one of the main "voices" for the charity sector. I'm not going to list the news stories out again, but lets look at the break down:

1. Stories about fraud - or poor practice: 1
2. Stories about training or new developments in the industry: 4
3. News roundup: 1
4. Appeal for funds (for the DEC): 1
5. Industry news: 1

Note, please. No stories about people inside the industry. No stories about personal earnings. No stories about how much charities turned over (and surely that is something that one can be proud about..?)

My point is this. The law is about clients - serving them as well as possible and serving them as efficiently as possible. The client's wishes should be at the fore-front of the industry. If this was true, it would inevitably be reflected in stories about the industry. "The Lawyer" would be reporting the benefits of cases won  - the benefits to the client that is. There would be stories about pro bon work - and I know that there is a good deal of this done. There would be stories about new practices in the industry which are designed to save costs to the benefit of the client and not to protect or improve PEP.

Focus on the client and the rest of your business will fall into place. Make every decision by saying - what benefit does this have for our clients. Save money so that your firm can charge less or do more pro bono work - not so that PEP can increase.

Follow up: this piece from "Legal Week" seems in line with what I'm saying.