Why are councils and unions cross with a certain lawyer?

There is a long tradition of lawyers being unpopular. Take the jokes: What’s the difference between a catfish and a lawyer? One is a slimy, bottom-feeding, slippery creature and the other is just a fish. Or what’s the difference between a dead rat on the road and a dead lawyer? There’s a skid mark in front of the rat.

Ho-ho.

But there is one lawyer who actually describes himself as the ‘most hated lawyer in Britain’. His name is Stefan Cross and, no, he hasn’t made people cross by robbing little old ladies of their life savings, molesting children or torturing cats. What he has just done is win a huge compensation deal for low-paid women council workers who, despite employment policies and equality legislation to the contrary, have for years been consistently paid less than their male counterparts.

The ruling, announced last month, found that 4,000 women council employees in Birmingham should be compensated for a pay and grading structure that had discriminated against them for decades. Incredibly, some men had been earning more than £50,000 a year, while women on the same grade were earning only £12,000 a year.

This was just the latest of Cross’s successes, following on from 1,000 Middlesbrough council workers winning over £10m in payouts, and workers in Scotland’s 32 local authorities receiving £117m in equality compensation. And it’s not just women who have benefited from Cross’s efforts. In June 2009, some 300 men won equal pay and sex discrimination claims against Hartlepool, South Tyneside and Middlesbrough borough councils.

He sounds like a splendid chap and the very model of a crusading lawyer defending the poor and vulnerable. So why is he hated?

Cross has become very rich, that’s one reason why. He took on these cases on the basis of damages-based agreements. His thousands of clients pay him no fee, but he takes a proportion of each and every compensation package those thousands of clients receive. That quickly adds up to a lot of money. He has now apparently traded in his Porsche for a Ferrari.

Why else is he hated? He has cost councils millions of pounds that they can ill afford, but then arguably they should have implemented equal pay policies years ago. The government hates him too, Cross says, again because of the money. And most surprisingly, the trade unions hate him, he says, for showing them up for not serving their membership properly. The unions, he claims, had come to discreet deals with the councils to avoid trouble and big bills. If that is the case, Cross has ruined that cosy arrangement in a very public way.

Good for you, Mr Cross – that’s what lawyers are supposed to do.

But before we get too dewy-eyed over a much-maligned profession, let’s get back to the general unpopularity of lawyers. The Romantic poet John Keats took time off from penning odes to nightingales and Greek urns to characterize lawyers thus: ‘I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.’ An anonymous American wit said: ‘A lawyer is someone who makes sure he gets what’s coming to you.’

And finally, there is our very own Harriet Harman. In November 2003, when she was solicitor general, she addressed the centenary dinner of this august publication, the Law Society Gazette. She said: ‘Two things run through the last 100 years of the Gazette. First is the disappointment that solicitors find themselves to be unpopular. But second is the relief of solicitors that though they are deeply unpopular, there are those who are even more unpopular - barristers.’

Perhaps there is hope for solicitors yet.