Always look on the bright side of life The beginning I have often been asked, and once upon a time asked myself: do I have what it takes to be a lawyer? A few simple questions provide the essential clues: Do friends seek your advice, are you risk averse,do you keep secrets, do you think in structures - a), b), c), do you think before you leap, do you see both sides of an argument, are you warm and empathetic, able to put yourself in the shoes of others, are a tad too selfcritical and with a dash of fear of failure?
Yes Forty years ago a self-critical, risk averse Simon Davis, fearing failure, walked nervously through the doors of Clifford Turner (now Chance) for my first day as an articled clerk. The firm in those days was a happy blur of typewriters, tippex, telexes and rooms full of proofreaders. In the evenings an elderly Scottish housekeeper called Alex trundled a trolley round the corridors and offered a ”wee dram” to anyone working after dark. 14 | www.cambslawsoc.co.uk
Which was quite often-best illustrated by the Christmas cards I received one year. The first was addressed to the “Pizza lover”, “from all your friends at Pizza Hut”. The second contained a multi-coloured calendar from the staff at the Modern Tandoori-delivery mopeds greeted me as I arrived home late at night. And the third was from the senior partner thanking me for all my efforts.
Plus ça change… The hard graft in my experience has not changed. I do not share the view that so-called Millennials or Generation Z's have a lesser appetite for work (although perhaps less for junk food). They do however quite rightly have less tolerance for some of the drudge work familiar to many lawyers growing up in the eighties and nineties which is now done by machine readers and scanners. And what has certainly not changed is the unpopularity of lawyers from time to time. When standing up for the will of Parliament judges became “the enemy of the people”, when standing up for the rights of the inured lawyers become “ambulance chasers”, when fighting the corner of refugees they are damned as
Simon Davis
“lefty lawyers”, and when questioning the legality of sanctions they are described as “absolutely outrageous”. But our job as lawyers is to keep a strong sense of proportion and perspective and not to overreact and indeed this is one of the reasons why our clients need us. Lawyers are not politicians. We are not part of a popularity contest and do not test our advice or positions with focus groups in advance. And furthermore it is not our job to give clients the advice that they want - it is our job to give clients the advice that they need and sometimes it will absolutely not be the advice that they want to hear. But no client will ever thank you if by giving them the advice they like they get themselves up a deep legal creek without a firm legal paddle. And almost by definition when a lawyer stands up for the rule of law or a person’s rights to property or privacy or personal freedom, they get in the way of someone else’s will and are unpopular with that someone else, whether a private individual or corporate or organ of the State. So we must get used to being unpopular at times with somebody, everybody: clients, the press, politicians,
