Statement of Pavel Klimov

MANIFESTO: HOLBORN

Statement of Pavel Klimov

Dear Colleague, “As the professional body for solicitors, every week the Law Society is working hard to influence the legal and regulatory environment on behalf of our profession and to promote solicitors at home and abroad. We support practice excellence, are an informed source of legal sector news and support members at every stage of their career.”

This quote is taken from the Law Society President’s email update. I want to ask you three questions:

– When was the last time you searched for legal information on the Law Society website?

– When was the last time you unwrapped the Law Society Gazette to read legal sector news?

– When was the last time you contacted the Law Society for professional or career advice?

I suspect many of us will answer with “never” or “I can’t recall”, and that’s very unfortunate. But this can change and the Law Society can become more relevant and helpful to you on a day-today basis, and you can help to make it happen. And this is how.

The Law Society Council is the main governing body of the Law Society responsible for setting the strategic direction of the Law Society’s work on behalf of all its members.

I encourage you to participate in this Council members election and ask to vote for me.

I have over 20 years of legal experience working for major multinational corporations in the UK, USA, Australia, Russia and Switzerland, including 10 years as a General Counsel for Europe, Middle East and Africa. During my career I had opportunities to work closely not only with solicitors practicing their trade inhouse, but also with many private practice solicitors in large City firms, regional and high street practices, and sole practitioners. That work covered a wide spectrum of legal matters and allowed me to observe and compare the issues and challenges facing in-house lawyers and their private practice colleagues.

Together with my team I was able to assist on a pro-bono basis many different charities and non-for-profit organisations in the UK and abroad. Our efforts were recognised by a prestigious Thompson Reuters Foundation award for the best in-house probono project.

This year I was appointed a Fee-paid Employment Judge and a Fee-paid Judge of the First-Tier Tribunal (Social Entitlement Chamber).

I am the Chairman of the Law Society Technology and Law Committee, a member of the Law Society Policy and Regulatory Affairs Committee and the Law Society Conduct Committee, and a trustee of the Law Society Charity. In those roles I regularly work on a wide range of issues facing the legal profession as a whole, and in particular the impact of emerging technologies on legal services, on access to justice, and on broader societal relationships.

The Law Society can and should play the leading role in maintaining and enhancing the prestige of the profession, and in helping its members to tackle new challenges and to remain successful in competing against emerging non-traditional forms of legal services. The fallout from the Coronavirus crises makes these tasks especially important and urgent. The challenges for the profession are unprecedented, both in terms of their complexity and the scale. Turning these challenges into opportunities requires a good degree of foresight, forward thinking, business acumen and serious engagement with all relevant stakeholders.

My experience working within the Law Society’s structures has been a mixed bag. The Society has excellent dedicated people committed to doing their best to help the profession navigate the challenges and promote the profession to the public, both in the UK and worldwide. On the other hand, some of the Society’s outdated governance structures and processes often frustrate these efforts, making the pursuit of these goals hindered by artificially created bureaucratic barriers and often lost in a maze of archaic structures and self-vested interests, which in turn causes the engagement between the Society and its members to become more distant.

The Council with its 100 seats and 6 committees, three different Boards, the Policy and Regulatory Affairs Committee, the Membership and Operations Committee, 25 Specialist Committees (with each of those committees having at least a dozen members), plus the executive team and hundreds of employees, makes, in my view, the Law Society’s governance and management structure unwieldy, and not providing value for money to the members, who have no choice, but to continue to fund it by paying their annual practicing certificate fee.

The good news is that the Law Society is aware of these issues and has already started the process of streamlining its processes and simplifying its governance structure, but more needs to be done – and to be done more urgently. A stronger business acumen and drive needs to be injected into the workings of the Society to make it more agile internally, and more relevant to all sides of the profession, so that it can truly serve all the solicitors it represents, and help them to prosper.

I would like to join the Council to drive these changes from the top of the Law Society’s governance structure.

With my extensive business and management experience, my considerable knowledge of the profession, and my personal insights into the Law Society’s strong and weak points, I firmly believe I can make the difference, and I am fully committed to succeed in transforming the Law Society into a modern representative body serving the needs of all its members. I ask you to support me in that pursuit. Thank you. ■