Always look on the bright side of life

Simon Davis

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.

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 “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,

whoever, whenever, and must not be overly sensitive to criticism, despite that sensitivity being often what makes a fine lawyer in the first place. But at the same time we must not hesitate to stand up for the profession when it is being traduced in a way which undermines the confidence of the public in us and in the rule of law.

Keep perspective

It does not however follow in any sense either that the role of a lawyer is an unhappy one.

It is a treat to be the person who others turn to in their hour of need, who they rely upon to get them out of trouble not further into it and who they see as a therapist, confessor, problem solver and professional friend.

My career as a lawyer would never have happened were it not for listening to a solicitor from Wokingham give a careers talk at school.

He was the only one in a series of speakers who laughed, whose eyes danced when he spoke, who did not sound like he was “working” and who was clearly in love with the life he had chosen.

Often when solicitors work hard (see above) they are portrayed as “workaholics”. I am not for a moment saying that there are those who work too hard and need to be protected from themselves, or those who are worked too hard and need to be protected from their employers and sometimes even from clients and I am not downplaying the mental health issues which exist in this and other professions.

All I am saying is that a client in trouble needs someone who pulls out all the stops and yes sacrifices time which might otherwise be spent with friends or family works late into the night and weekends and cancels holidays.

And what I am also saying is that when that time flies by, when eight in the evening feels like five, when the clients‘ business or home or freedom is saved, when they outwit the powerful opposition and when the dark future they thought they were facing turns into sunny uplands due to your and their combined efforts, these are wonderful times and put all the difficult and unpopular moments into proper perspective.

As for standing up for ourselves we must not pretend that we are perfect. There will be those who allow themselves to be taken advantage of by unscrupulous clients and who go too far in their attempt to promote their clients’ interests.

The reality

The starting point however of the overwhelming majority of solicitors when they get out of bed in the morning, and what gets them out of bed in the morning, is to do the right thing.

When I was Law Society President and able to travel the country in real life and then virtually in Covid, I found solicitors fighting for the rights of those in care homes, those with mental health problems, those facing imprisonment, those trying to move home, or to make valid wills, those trying to escape from a domestic abuser or a miserable marriage and on and on-all represented by solicitors doing the right thing.

The City of London would not be the economic powerhouse it is were it not for solicitors putting together complex often multi-national transactions and deals and making sure that they work legally and practically. Doing the right thing for our economy and clients, domestic and international.

The majority of these who invest in our companies, our properties and our industries, who choose our laws for their contracts and our courts for their disputes, do not do so because we are havens for money launderers-but because they know that the rule of law in this country is respected, that we have a top quality impartial judiciary and that personal and property rights are upheld and not open to abuse or expropriation by the State. All with barristers and solicitors being at the heart of upholding the rule of law not undermining it.

If our government had chosen to break the law in its understandable desire to thwart the vile invasion of Ukraine it would have junked our reputation for upholding the rule of law and threatened our desirability as a country in which to invest and to partner with.

They have made themselves unpopular by instead taking the time to act lawfully-but standing up for the rule of law is not always popular…

Simon Davis President of the Law Society of England & Wales (2019-20)