Love my solicitor

What have we done to make an eminent politician dismiss us so completely? Why do the press love to berate us? Why did BBC's Watchdog recently single out a firm of solicitors and give them the roasting normally reserved for crooked double glazing companies or the manufacturers of unsafe products?
We are locked into a public image which our detractors are very good at perpetuating: we are said to be greedy expensive and slow. And on top of that we think we are gods and we think and speak in incomprehensible language.
A couple of weeks ago the Independent on Sunday took up nearly a page to castigate us. Apart from saying we charged too much for too little, it also claimed that our popularity was waning.
It is galling to be called expensive and slow if you are rich and fat. It is maddening to have that label when you are poor and working a ten or twelve hour day.

Here's the dilemma. Contrast our poor image with the reality: for the most part, our clients quite like us. Some clients even think we are quite wonderful. They send us Christmas presents and kind messages - even after they have received the bill.
For the most part too, we are quite well respected in the towns and villages we call home. I don't just mean the avuncular solicitor who is reputed to have sent this bill to his client:
To seeing you on the other side of the road; to crossing the road to say good morning to you; to finding out it wasn't you, and to crossing the road again:£5 + VAT
Almost every solicitor I know gives huge stretches of time to public work. Even my vegetarian partner (who used to mutter under his breath at any activity which did not directly yield fee income) has become a late convert. He was appointed a school governor just at the moment when LMS got into overdrive (if you don't understand what I am talking about you run a serious risk of not becoming a favourite solicitor). Now my vegetarian partner divides his evenings between curriculums and cucumbers, budgets and bananas, and minutes and mangoes. We even had a school day at the office when hordes of bearded men and women were vetted for the post of head teacher. The place became soggy with pedagogy.
I would venture that of the countless committees, societies, voluntary bodies and charities across the land, most of them either have a solicitor serving on them, or one in the background providing free help.
"Aha - got you" say the journalists, "They are only on the committees because they get business from them."
But journalists - at least the hard hitting investigative types - will not know (because they don't themselves sit on committees) that far from being a lucrative pastime, committee work by definition involves people expecting you to to give your time for nothing, to advise for nothing, to type letters for nothing and to wear out the bearings on the photocopier for nothing.
It is often the common sense which solicitors bring to these organisations that saves them from falling foul of the law, from lapsing into chaos or even ferocious feuding. Perhaps that is not always true. The only major rows in the past 2 decades on our Parish Council were sparked when I resigned (twice) as its clerk - that is another tale.
And it is the wisdom (derived from seeing the human condition in all its raw reality) which solicitors bring to the turmoil of daily life which seems to be appreciated by so many. We are not always seen as such but we are frequently the Davids fighting Goliaths, the runners of the extra mile, or simply the best hope that clients have of making sense of a wicked world.
Oh yes of course there are the brash, the bent and the beastly; they are the minority.
Nonetheless the blistering attacks on us by the media are often enough to make the eyes smart. You don't get doctor jokes, Accountant jokes or even policemen jokes like this:
Q What do you have when 11 lawyers are buried up to their necks in sand?
A Not enough sand.
We are easy targets, and we are not good at organising our public relations to give some sort of balance. So - how to correct these misconceptions?
We cannot normally claim the dramatic heroism of firemen or lifeboat crews. Yet not long ago a colleague of mine was by chance instrumental in saving a client's life - through her persistence. The client had been run over, and had banged his head. After the accident he started to get giddy spells and kept falling over. Initially the neurologist could find nothing wrong and those dreaded words "functional overlay" began to be whispered. Barbara had faith in the client and persisted - until a scan was carried out. It revealed a progressive brain tumour. It was nothing to do with the accident, but its timely discovery prevented his untimely death.
The real worth of the solicitors profession lies, of course in the fearless representation of the client's interests. When we do this we inevitably make ourselves unloved by those who challenge those interests. Almost by definition 50% of solicitors will be hated: those on the other side of the case but it is up to us to make sure that our positive side is emphasised.
We need to be loved. We need car stickers and Sweat shirts proclaiming the message.
We need people to demonstrate for us in the way they do for dumb animals (and sometimes I too feel like I am a live export). We need judges to spend days at a time in our offices to see for themselves what the blunt end of the law is really like. Members of Parliament too can come and take a look at us. Yes and journalists too.
Above all the ordinary unsung deeds of practising solicitors need to be proclaimed. We are 150 years old this year. The Law Society (for all its faults) is making determined efforts to use the opportunity to have some celebrations. The SOLICITORS JOURNAL will be finding its favourite solicitor. It's up to us all to make sure that the positive things about solicitors are spoken loudly, circulated in large print, written on the sides of elephants, stretched on banners towed behind aircraft and aerosolled on every county court wall (except the King's Lynn county court - beggin' your pardon your honour).
For my part, I shall nominate my vegetarian partner as my favourite solicitor, not because he is, but because that might delay his libel writ for a further half dozen issues of the SOLICITORS JOURNAL.

This article first appeared in Solicitors Journal in March 1995