Richard Barr Lawyer and Writer
Behind closed doors
I have sympathy for both sides. The trouble with solicitors' offices is that there is no clear division between the shop floor and the public relations and personnel departments. Worse than that, like some primaeval stew, they are all mixed together.
Within the chaotic pressures of a working day one has to try to achieve a balance between the need to get the job done and the desire to create an atmosphere where people give their best.
We used to have an open door policy. There was once free access for all except when we were seeing clients. But that was when there was a comfortable gap between income and overheads, when you could clear your backlog in a matter of hours and when, even, you went home on Friday and did not return to the office till Monday.
Now we are all increasingly bad tempered, under pressure and unlikely to take kindly even to a visit from the friendliest face in the office. One by one, our open doors have come to remain closed; few now work with them open.
The unhappy Industrial Tribunal hearing in April involving a dispute between two solicitors Mr Aaron and Mr Taylor over the issue of whether the latter should or should not have kept his door open is, in a way, a paradigm of life in the nineties: an employer who wants an open and friendly office, and an employee under pressure who wants to work.
Those conflicts came together recently in our office with the intervention of a deus ex machina. The BBC decided that the area around our office represented Dickensian England. This autumn's costume drama series will be Martin Chuzzlewit. We will be watching it carefully.
During the summer some men in anoraks were seen to be taking a keen interest in our buildings. We pondered whether to call the police or invite them in. If they were burglars we could show them we had nothing worth stealing.
The burglars claimed that they were from the BBC and were looking for suitable locations for a film. We showed them all the places we thought they ought to film: our cellars, Colin's Linda McCartney photographs, my untidy room.
But they had other ideas - and returned some weeks later with more men, this time in expensive anoraks. How would we mind, they asked, if they took over the office for a couple of days?
And saw the clients too? We asked eagerly.
No - we could keep the clients.
And so, in between the snows of Easter (the sooner we have a change of government so we can have some decent weather the better) three sides of the office had all signs of the twentieth century carefully expunged from them. Wires were removed or disguised. No waiting signs disappeared. The white painted windows were rendered black.
We committed a minor breach of the Solicitors Practice Rules by sharing our premises with someone not from a learned profession. The south west corner of the building sprouted extra walls and became a shop front for:
ANTHONY CHUZZLEWIT & SON
DRY GOODS
A further breach of the rules was committed at the front of the office when a new brass plaque was erected denoting that we were a fictitious international bank. I hope that spies from the Law Society do not read the Solicitors Journal.
As the day for filming drew near the streets filled with sweeps, barrow boys, whelk stalls (with the whelks nailed on), fruit stalls (I saw the blue labels being removed from the oranges the night before) and artificial manure (which was later supplemented by the efforts of several real horses).
Inside, wooden floors were laid over our board room carpet and several thousand pounds worth of oriental antiques arrived to lend an air of unaccustomed opulence to the room.
The film crews and actors arrived. And then came a new office policy: the open window policy. If anyone was missing, they could almost certainly be found on the top floor. At least their bottoms could be found. The rest of them was sticking out of the windows looking down on Sir John Mills, Elizabeth Spriggs, Julia Sawhala and Keith Allen. For hours on end street life sprung into ACTION on the word of the Director before he shouted CUT, and out came the 20th century: people in anoraks and the cigarettes.
One of the best vantage points was from the window of Aileen my assistant from Singapore (via Dereham, Norfolk). She normally does work with her door shut - and she feels the cold. During the filming was no exception: while others were looking out of her window she was tapping on her computer, her overcoat on and a scarf round her neck.
Courtesy of the BBC, our open door policy gave way to a closed gate policy. Along with the crumbling masonry of our listed building, we acquired a fine set of wrought iron railings and gates. One of the scenes you will be watching in the autumn is of several top hatted men fighting to get through the locked gates of the Anglo Bengalee bank.
They were so vigorous in their efforts that we had to tell them to calm down or the gate really would have been broken.
A large crowd gathered to watch. We could not tell whether it was to see the filming or the spectacle of what appeared to be a posse from the Solicitors Complaints Bureau trying to intervene in our practice.
Too soon it was over. The cobble stones were rolled up. The carriages rolled away and the actors moved out of our reception. The shop front was dismantled, and the brass plaque was taken away. All we have to show for it is a little manure ingrained in our carpets (we have not checked if it is real) and a scratch on our board room table which should send the BBC scurrying for that well advertised number for a French Polisher in the Yellow Pages.
And now the gates remain open, the windows are closed and the doors.... well curiously more of them are open at the moment. You never know, the next group of men in anoraks might be talent spotting for extras.
This article first appeared in Solicitors Journal April 1994
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