John Hyde's blogs

Sado-masochism, that's the only possible answer.

How else do you explain why so many solicitors line up for conferences about the future of the legal profession, like lobsters clambering to the front of the tank for a better view of the cooking instructions? I speak as someone with considerable experience of these things - in fact I reckon I've totted up so many CPD points attending conferences and seminars I'm now a solicitor by default.

The formula is the same each time. A speaker with the title of professor will tell everyone they're doomed. Then an investment banker will tell them how long the agony will last.

There's a quick break for coffee, at which everyone scavenges for free pens, before shuffling back in to be told how terrible they are at running a business. If they're really unlucky the poor schmucks will then be told by a 'consumer champion' that the public hates them because a survey of six people and an Oompa Loompa told them so.

That's not to say the speakers aren't talking sense. Public perception of lawyers (not the perception of actual clients, you'll notice) is pretty low, largely because their only experience of lawyers is 'briefs' ham-acting on EastEnders.

And of course, those investors and academics are right. The market will contract and banks are lending to law firms with all the trepidation of Nigel Farage in a Bucharest bar.

Private equity investors tell me law firms are queuing round the block for capital like impoverished families at a food bank. Interestingly, the 'consolidation in the market' predictions are nothing new. I heard the same thing at these conferences two years ago (often from the same people) and yet still law firm numbers hold relatively stable.

But we shouldn't be naive enough to think this will last, and I've been told by more than one analyst of hundreds of 'zombie' firms where managing partners are running their businesses into the ground before taking retirement.

What would stick in my throat if I ran a firm is the idea that I'm largely responsible for my plight. For a start, solicitors are routinely criticised for being bad at business. That may be so, but what do you expect from people trained as lawyers? I'd wager most doctors, journalists and other professionals wouldn't know their way around a budget sheet either.

And how can you run a business when there is no certainty? When constant government reforms to your sector mean the goalposts are not so much moved as extended across the pitch with the biggest brands in the country lining up to take a shot?

There was a wonderful irony at the Modern Law conference this week. One investor said law firms were unattractive prospects because they had no certainty over their future. Just hours earlier the justice minister Helen Grant announced that a decision that could make or break firms was being delayed. How can you have any certainty when the government appears uncertain itself?

It feels like the government is meddling - hesitantly - while Rome burns. Only law firms then get the blame when they struggle for breath.

John Hyde is a Gazette reporter

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Given that most of the planet has been wiped out by terrifying aliens, the film Independence Day ends on a remarkably happy note. President Bill Pullman rallies his troops and assures them the future is bright. You survived, he tells them, and that’s reason enough to celebrate. Now get digging those graves.

There’s been a similarly optimistic message coming from Celtic Manor this week, where the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) has been holding its annual conference.

In fact, to see delegates last night, dressed in dinner jackets and ball gowns and dad-dancing to Blues Brothers tunes, you’d barely know the sector has had probably the most tumultuous year in its history.

Compared with last year, when attendees had their shoelaces and belts removed on entry, there has been an upbeat feel to #apil13. I swear I even saw someone smile last night, though he’ll probably lose that when he sees his bar bill on check-out.

Some of this will be the ‘head in sand’ brigade. Those who resolutely refuse to accept the effect of lower fixed fees and extensions to the claims portal. But there’s also an element to the conference of the relief that they survived 1 April. The world didn’t end; the aliens didn’t win.

Many have told me they are at pleased to have certainty about where they stand, even if the ground is shaky. Once the small-claims court limit is extended (although beware a further extension later this year) there can be no further kicks to the ribs.

It feels like the government has now moved on from attacking the PI sector to set its sights elsewhere, like those Independence Day invaders moving to a new city once they’d obliterated the previous one.

The optimism here may be genuine, but it would be wrong to say everything is rosy in the PI sector. For a start, those firms really struggling probably won’t be at the conference. I’m assured numbers attending this week have stayed the same as 2012, but it feels disingenuous to be talking about financial pressures in such grand surroundings as Celtic Manor.

And there is an acknowledgement that whilst there is calm on the surface, legs are furiously kicking beneath the water. Former president David Bott admitted there will be ‘carnage’ in the sector, and my only quibble with that would be that he should be using the present rather than the future tense.

My Twitter timeline certainly doesn’t reflect a content profession, with my followers either furious with the government or resigned to their fate.

The APIL conference has probably never been more parochial. I’m told national newspapers used to come down and cover the best bits – the press seats were conspicuously empty this time around.

There hasn’t been a single speaker from either the government or the Labour opposition. Last year then justice minister Jonathan Djanogly may not have showed up, but at least he sent a senior civil servant to read his speech.

I understand both Chris Grayling and Helen Grant were invited here this year, but were busy with other commitments.

The truth is this conference will make no ripples with the powers-that-be at Westminster. I’d be surprised if they even knew it was happening. When the ABI held its conference last month, they had the transport secretary, chair of the transport select committee and a former justice secretary – they have the ear of government and the claimants don’t.

Newport has been little more than a talking shop: preaching to the converted but failing to convert either the public or the political elite. But then perhaps that’s what the members needed this year – 2013 has been about laying foundations, not lobbying.

The fears and the threats are the same as when APIL members arrived in Wales, but they will at least leave with some of the joys of spring.

John Hyde is a Gazette reporter

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Since when did making a claim amount to an agreed settlement?

I ask because we appear to have slipped into a world where the outcome of claims no longer matters to our national media. Take the case of PC Kelly Jones (take note, editors, she is not a WPC), a Norfolk officer who has reportedly started legal proceedings against a garage owner after she fell while investigating a burglary. The level of vitriol directed at PC Jones, given that we have yet to hear the full facts, has been staggering.

Former Met Police chief superintendent Dai Davies said she ‘looks like she regards the gym as an entirely alien environment’, while Richard Littlejohn (who knows a thing or two about devastating character assassinations) kindly suggested she was ‘visibly overweight with unkempt hair, she looks less like a policewoman and more like one of those ferocious female members of the ‘travelling community’’.

She was said in one article to be ‘in hiding’ at her parents’ home (roughly translated as ‘visiting relatives over Easter’).

I don’t know whether her claim will succeed, but given PC Jones is currently on sick leave with an unrelated medical condition so serious she needs an operation, perhaps jibes about her appearance are unwise. What strikes me as odd in the coverage is that everyone misses the obvious point: if PC Jones is on the take, then why not contest the claim?

From the coverage you would think this woman simply had to file a claim to pocket £50k, but there is the small matter of legal process to go through first. Instead, the defendant used the media to highlight this case and presumably hopes to bully PC Jones into withdrawing it. The danger of the media misreporting personal injury claims to suit a ‘health and safety gone mad’ agenda was highlighted in Lord Dyson’s marvelous deconstruction of the compensation culture myth last month.

You remember the McDonald’s coffee claim? That daft woman who couldn’t work out that a hot beverage might be, well, hot - and drove away with it between her legs?

Turns out the woman in question was a passenger in a stationary car when the coffee, heated to 190 degrees, spilt and soaked through her trousers to give her third-degree burns. She was in hospital for eight days, had to undergo skin grafts and was partially disabled for two years. McDonalds had been subject to 700 claims in 10 years arising from coffee burns. Still, not as funny as ‘cash bonanza for coffee slapstick’ is it?

There appears to be an assumption in much of the coverage that says police should never be allowed to make a claim for personal injury suffered whilst on duty. The redoubtable ‘proper copper’ Davies, who appears to have been transported straight from the set of Life on Mars, insists he would have regarded compensation for his various injuries as ‘laughable’. I wonder how hard he would have laughed if his house needed modifying to cope with a disability, or he needed costly round-the-clock care?

The police are entitled to the same duty of care from owner/occupiers as afforded to the rest of us. They’re public servants, not martyrs. And if they don’t make a claim, it doesn’t mean their injuries magically vanish: just that we, the taxpayer, end up paying their bill.

John Hyde is a Gazette reporter

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Watching the fallout from every budget is like being transported into the Truman Show.

Everyone says the same thing, moves in the same direction and ends up just where they started. Perhaps George Osborne’s tortured economic recovery will end, like Truman, running into a brick wall with a fake sunset on the horizon.

It’s just all so predictable, and not just because the Evening Standard told us what would be in it. Osborne revises previous forecasts like they never happened, Balls calls for a U-turn with all the predictability of a DVD menu display stuck on a loop when you’ve lost the remote control.

The ‘penny off a pint’ was classic political counterfugue. To claim your ‘free’ pint at, say, £3 a pint, you’ll have to drink 300 pints. After that quite frankly you’ll deserve a lie down, not a another drink.

All the while so many of the details get overlooked – and nowhere is this more prevalent than for the Ministry of Justice.

Despite the enormous benefits of our legal system to the taxpayer – put at more than £20bn by justice secretary Chris Grayling last week – his department has to get it in the neck with every budget announcement.

Like other non-ringfenced departments, the MoJ will lose another 2% from the budget by 2015 – a cool £142m in total.

Now, compared with the £2bn guillotined from the justice fund since 2010, it’s a drop in the ocean, but it will have to come from somewhere.

Don’t tell the pitchfork brigade, but the government has already cut costs through reducing prison numbers. Last week there were 84,501 people locked up compared with 87,870 a year ago.

As was pointed out in justice questions in the Commons this week, 3,359 cautions were given for burglary in 2011 (the last recorded year) – perhaps a hint that budgetary pressures are affecting punishment decisions.

The MoJ has already cut staff numbers significantly. According to the 2011/12 accounts, there were at least 4,000 fewer MoJ employees last April than a year before. Departmental efficiency savings, the rather vague all-encompassing miracle cure for cost-cutting, is surely exhausted.

Desperation to reduce outgoings has already led to the fiasco of the court interpreters’ contract, which is supposed to deliver £50m savings every year but which has seen nothing but trouble since its inception in February 2012.

The only remaining option for the MoJ – and perhaps the most unpalatable for the legal profession – is simply an extension of existing coalition policy: court closures and legal aid cuts.

The 142 court closures first announced in 2010 are mooted to save around £37m a year - and I’ve heard from a couple of sources that more closures may be an option.

And of course there is the issue of price-competitive tendering for providers offering defence services from 2014. Would that eat into the £142m? It’s difficult to know without someone actually explaining what the proposal would save.

However they choose to cut their cloth, there’s every chance it will affect us all in some way, yet we seem oblivious to it.

Perhaps, like Truman Burbank, we’ll awaken ourselves and escape this horror show. Or perhaps we’ll simply drink ourselves into oblivion holding out for that free beer.

John Hyde is a Gazette reporter

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