Eduardo Reyes's blogs

Monday’s news that midlands firm Blakemores, with a headcount of 250-plus, is the subject of an SRA intervention – effectively confirming that the SRA believes that the firm’s finances mean it cannot safely continue to trade – may leave principals of smaller traditionally run firms, who are staring at diminishing returns, struggling to plan for the future, wondering what on earth they should be doing.

Blakemores, and its consumer-facing brand Lawyers2you, ticks pretty much all the boxes that a firm planning for a viable future would want to tick.

It could take advantage of economies of scale.

It left its 14 high streets - with their Poundlands, charity shops, pawnbrokers and betting shops - behind to concentrate on a presence in the shopping centres that all those shoppers who actually had money moved to shopping in.

And its lawyers got out from behind their desks to meet the public – accessible people, accessibly branded. In an age when intermediaries have weakened the link between lawyer and client, driving down fee margins, they looked to face-to-face contact to re-establish that link.

In 2011 Gazette blogger Viv Williams wrote in praise of these forward-looking steps: ‘The lack of imaginative marketing and client care shown by many law firms is precisely why Lawyers2you is a good idea.’

It wasn’t just the outward-facing marketing (branded ‘undignified’ by some) that Williams referred to. The firm was serious about using its market data properly – recording and following up leads, looking for the links that could lead to cross-referrals, then making sure that the approach was leading to actual instructions.

Blakemores was consciously trying to pre-empt the challenge from ‘Tesco law’.

Put simply, the nihilistic question hanging in the air is this: with the sums of many old-style firms failing to add up, if the future isn’t this sort of thing, then what on earth is it?

Details are only gradually emerging of what went wrong here. It’s easy to deride the cheesy ‘Lawyers2you’ tag – it might be on the gravestone, but it’s unlikely to feature in the autopsy.

Instead, the failure of a firm like this should lead us all to dissect some incredibly difficult questions facing the parts of the consumer-facing market Blakemores drew its clients from.

Among them…

If a firm does do a big marketing initiative, in the minds of target consumers is it competing with rival law firms, or with all other big brands? If it’s the latter, you burn a lot of cash in the attempt to establish the ‘brand’.

Does diligent work on cross-referrals and capturing client data deliver a margin that is worth the effort in this market?

Blakemores grew by 20-30% over several years – should a law firm ever look to a fast-growth model?

No one in their right mind will be feeling smug and ‘I told you so’-ish about this news. The alternative to the sorts of things Blakemores tried to do is carry on in a world where margins are falling, the hard core of bank debt is rising, clients buy on price alone, and where a good piece of advice fails to lead to follow-on instructions.

Whether you like the Lawyers2you branding or not (I don’t), and whether you think you should have to stand in a shopping centre or not (I sympathise with the widespread hesitancy here), news like this is terrible news for the legal profession.

And that’s because the question really might be - not, ‘which business model is viable?’, and more ‘is this part of the legal market commercially possible, however you do it?’.

Eduardo Reyes is Gazette features editor

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• The Law Society and Birmingham Law Society today issued a joint statement on Blakemores, stating that they have implemented an action plan to support all those affected by the recent collapse. It added: ‘A dedicated online information hub has been set up for the Blakemores’ 250 solicitors and employees based in Leamington and Birmingham. The Law Society and Birmingham Law Society are also working closely with the SRA to help orchestrate a smooth transfer of client files in partnership with the administrator. A further note will be issued shortly with the intention of offering a speedy process for Blakemores’ clients to transfer their files to other solicitors in the Birmingham area.’

The annual civil service people survey is a great annual diversion, juxtaposing low levels of staff satisfaction and confidence in the Ministry of Justice’s leadership on the one hand, and hyper-positive confidence of senior management spin on the other.

This year my colleague Catherine Baksi reported it as news - in the past we’ve decided it’s a diary item. It’ll probably continue to alternate between the ‘funny’ and sad slots on our pages.

The appeal is obvious – in a year of heavy legal aid cuts, it’s nice to see the ministy’s leadership ‘getting some’. My instinct is that the senior ranks of the MoJ deserve this – but let me explain that.

It is at one level to any organisation’s credit both that it asks staff what they think, and that the staff in return feel they can give an honest reply – some of it difficult reading for their senior colleagues. Plenty of law firms and legal departments conduct similar exercises.

So can I suggest it is not the answers to the questions set in these surveys that draw derision – internally and externally – but the management spin that accompanies their release. That and the poor follow-up that flows from the poor self-knowledge evident in that spin.

The MoJ clearly has a problem with staff confidence in senior management. To me it looks as if confidence starts to seep away at the point when the spin is bolted on to these results.

If you are among the 69% of staff unable to say they would ‘recommend it as a “great place to work”’, then to read that ‘staff are confident in the leadership and management of change in the department’ makes you feel less listened to than if the survey was not done in the first place.

The default position of a management that lacks self-knowledge viewing such results is to often to say any combination of the following:

• We are on a change journey, and people are uncomfortable with change – they do however need to embrace it.
• Look how much dead-wood we clearly have in this organisation – we need to import more highly motivated dynamism. Some consultants might also help.
• We welcome the fact that 1% more of our staff think we’re doing a good job than last year.

But to take those staff approval figures up to less risible levels, that is of course the wrong approach.

Staff need to see some changes that result from the things they said in previous surveys. Senior managers will need to start by talking to staff about the faults they identified in the survey – and that conversation can’t begin ‘I’m glad you are 1% more positive about the job we’re doing on this change journey, which I take to mean we are heading in the right direction – let’s talk about why you find change hard…’.

It may even be that the masterplan from which senior managers are working is at fault. After all, if one is prone to misdescribing something as basic as a staff survey, is there not a danger that some big decisions are being based on a world view that’s a bit iffy in the round?

There are businesses who say to their customers ‘You told us what you wanted from us, we listened and we’ve changed’. While organisations, public or private, are not run for the benefit of their staff, there are many that would run better if it’s a line the staff could hear, delivered with conviction and good reason, a bit more often.

Eduardo Reyes is Gazette features editor

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What sort of education should lawyers want there to be in our schools? It is the perfect time to ask this, as changes to GCSEs - specifically the introduction of the ‘English Baccalaureate’ (EBacc) in six core subjects - are in part prompted by those who purport to speak for both the professions, and the higher education institutions that feed many lawyers into the profession.

The charge, also leveled at A-levels, is that they have become too easy; that too many students get brilliant grades and therefore - faced with a sea of A*, A and B grades - no university, law school or subsequent employer, poor dears, can tell which of them are really bright. The charges go on, that coursework allows for both cheating and re-working (the latter a sort of legalised cheating).

Of course education should achieve many things other than preparation for the world of work, but let’s stick with the vocational needs arguments here. Not least, for a generation or more now each fresh change has been in large part justified by the need to listen to employers’ needs.

When Kenneth Baker was education secretary, the charge was (I simplify here) that the system produced elegant essayists who thrived on the adrenalin rush of the exam hall - and under-rewarded kids who applied themselves evenly over the course of the year, consistently outperforming those who pipped them to the post come exam-time. Project management and teamwork skills were never developed, and therefore the economy was let down.

So we come full circle. Elite bits of the professions are among those employers wrong-footed by ‘grade inflation’. But should they just go in flag-waving for the EBacc as proposed in the consultation that now follows, hoping that A-levels are next?

To answer that question, we need to look at two things. The first, of course, is what is actually going on in courses we’re all so happy to generalise about. The second area to consider is whether what’s proposed better matches what law firms and legal departments need to emerge from the education system.

Too often in public discourse it seems to me, supporters of more traditional reform options are too ready to cite the creation of less academic GCSEs (and A-levels where relevant) to support a general insistence that standards must have slipped. Put simply, in this argument the existence of a ‘food technology’ qualification becomes somehow fused with ‘grade inflation’ in traditional subjects valued in many legal careers such as English lit, history, languages.

I wonder about ‘grade inflation’ too. Consistently better grades occur year-on-year in traditional subjects. Have they got easier? Do stupid people now get As? (That is surely what’s ultimately being argued.) Are they doing better because they are being allowed to ‘cheat’ or constantly re-attempt things?

We should be wary about such conclusions. There’s a strong argument that teaching techniques have carried on improving - that whether a school is good at preparing children to gain a qualification has become less arbitrary across the board. Different things, from the old O-level, are being tested in some cases. What if current qualifications test ‘understanding’ above ‘memory’ in a subjects like history? And in maths, what if GCSE shifted the focus from a ‘knowledge-only’ approach?

Also open to challenge is the argument that grade certainty will return with the EBacc because it emphasises a single set of ‘terminal exams’. In fact, in the subjects concerned, we’ve been back there already for a couple of years with ‘controlled assessments’.

Historically the UK lagged decades behind countries like the US and Germany by clinging to the idea that the traditional ‘flair’ or genius of a fairly narrow elite would allow Britain to punch above its weight in design and industry. Meanwhile, the US opened business schools, and Germany trained engineers (Correlli Barnett is eloquent on this massive subject).

Of course, if general standards have been lifted in traditional subjects - if more pupils can do the same things - that is a headache for elite universities, and elite bits of the professions. How to engage in the crude sifting exercises of the past? Answer: you cannot.

This sifting headache should be a welcome opportunity - though often it is not being treated as such. Rather than being presented with the neat dashboard of a few candidates who made the grade, there is this bigger choice, and therefore a bigger challenge. But surely a challenge that intelligent and imaginative individuals can apply their minds to? (Unless, of course, their pre-grade-inflation education in fact wasn’t all that after all.)

If you accept that’s one large item for your in-tray, then here’s a couple more difficult items to ponder. There’s an argument that some of the skills the legal profession might want demonstrated by all staff have already been partially taken out of the school curriculum with the introduction of controlled assessments. To quote one history teacher: ‘The old coursework units were good - opportunities for independent reading and independent study, and both well-structured and open-ended at the same time, which was good for weak and very bright alike.’

Likewise, ‘too formulaic’ is a charge leveled at current sciences and languages GCSEs. Similarly a maths teacher contacted this week notes that with controlled assessments ‘all the stuff that was hard to assess went’. She continues: ‘what we've now got is effectively O-levels for all. So the idea of going from this to something more academic/dry is completely ludicrous.’

So, for professionals worried about the skills base they will have to draw on in the future, an added concern could be that not enough is up for discussion. At any rate, the link between the hardness of an exam, and the quality of education that responds to it, is at best loose.

Of course, a complicating factor in this debate is that almost anyone I know who has done okay in their professional life, myself included, is almost mawkishly sentimental about the educational route they took. They are panicked by the idea that a future version of them might have to take another route - one which they might thrive less well in.

In arguments about education that is true around my office - and it seems to be true across government too.

Education ministers seem to suffer this same tendency. For Lord Adonis, who grew up in care, that extended to the desire to create more schools like the very particular state boarding to provide more similar children with the same route ‘up’.

In one telling Newsnight Review discussion Michael Gove showed his attachment to the version of Elizabethan history he grew up believing at school. He had got an enormous amount out of it, and apparently recoiled from alternative views of the past.

We all have our biases on questions of education - I’m sure mine are clear here. But whatever outcome you would like to see, do look carefully at what is actually happening in education at the moment, what happened over the last 20 years - and what is in fact proposed this week which, despite the name, isn’t even a baccalaureate at all.

Eduardo Reyes is Gazette features editor

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Fiji’s interim government craves democratic legitimacy. Yet its members, and a supportive armed services, are unwilling to consider any option that carries the risk of losing power, or being held personally responsible for, actions they took to gain or hold power.

There are practical reasons why what is widely perceived as a lack of legitimacy is a problem for a country’s rulers. Close to home there is the possibility of foreign-held assets of individuals being frozen, or their international travel rights being restricted – as happened in recent memory to the rulers of Zimbabwe, Libya and Syria.

For the country, there is a cost to the enhanced isolation. Symbolically, in Fiji’s case, suspension from the Commonwealth. Economically, trading confidence is affected. And when it comes to dealing with natural disasters, such as Fiji’s floods earlier this year, it is more difficult to accept important outside assistance while maintaining the line that all opposition to your rule is being stoked up by interfering neighbours and former colonial masters.

Meanwhile, the home forces at your disposal – police and army – cannot be deployed effectively. Use the army to full capacity, and a disgruntled police force may make a move on the leadership. In the Philippines’ 1986 ‘People’s Power’ coup, key player General Ramos (later president) led the police at the point where he moved against his boss President Ferdinand Marcos.

Put simply, it may be nice to be in power, but doing it without any legitimacy – as Fiji’s ruler Commodore Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama has since a 2006 coup brought him to power – is awkward. Even styling himself as ‘interim’ prime minister, heading an ‘interim’ government, feels like an attempt to lend some legitimacy to governance arrangements that persistently failed to deliver promised elections.

The importance in his government of Attorney General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum and Director of Public Prosecutions, the New Zealand lawyer Christopher Pryde – both also prominent spokesmen deployed to rubbish government critics and to sound offended at implications of impropriety – feed the impression that this government is more than a little needy on this front. Hence, also, the rather shrill reaction to the Gazette’s report on the ‘rule of law’ in Fiji.

Six years on from the coup, though, Bainimarama needs to do something. He does not want to return to the 1997 constitution, which contains no provisions to give members of the government immunity from prosecution. So he has set up a Constitutional Commission. The commission process has coincided with an NGO being taken to court for merely mentioning our own Law Society Charity’s critical report on Fiji’s ‘rule of law’. Key opposition figures find themselves facing various charges – ‘tax avoidance’ charges, for example.

These parallel moves – where Bainimarama would get ‘immunity’ and a constitution, suppress the opposition before having an election, and then win the election – sounds a little like a governmental version of a pre-packaged insolvency, where the dictator comes out the other side clean, legit, and with nothing to pay.

Footwork like that is the stuff of dreams for heavy-handed governments who crave legitimacy, job security and immunity in retirement, the world over. If this all sounds not just difficult but well nigh impossible, that’s because experience shows it pretty much is.

Eduardo Reyes is Gazette features editor

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