Maurice Fooks and Victor Gersten have, between them, been practising law for an extraordinary 120 years. Last week they were kind enough to share some of their memories with Obiter.

Fooks (pictured), a conveyancing specialist who, at ‘93 and a half’, is still a consultant with London firm Moon Beever, says: ‘People don’t realise how different things were before the war. We had to make a personal search at the Land Registry, go to the Bank of England to get the physical bank notes, then go to the vendor’s solicitor to examine the title deeds before parting with the money.’ He came into law, as many do, ‘with a romantic idea to right injustices’, and recalls how he paid his principal 200 guineas for articles to learn how to do so.

When he started out he received 15 shillings a week. ‘It was enough to pay for my underground fares and lunch, and left me enough to take a girl to the flicks on a Saturday night,’ he says. The law and solving clients’ problems, he adds, gave him much pleasure.

Seventy-seven-year-old Gersten – a general practitioner who only recently retired from London firm Gersten & Nixon (now part of RadcliffesLeBrasseur) after 50 years in the business – compared receiving a letter from the Law Society congratulating him on his time in practice to receiving a telegram from the Queen. The letter said he would doubtless have seen a lot of changes in the profession, not all of which he would have liked. ‘I was, of course, conscious that the profession was different from the one in which I started to practice and, being a grumpy old man, resented the difference in a general way without working out exactly what it was that I resented.’

On reflection, he observed that the things that irked him most were the demise of the general practitioner and the move towards commercialism. There is, he says, ‘too much law, too many rights, too many lawyers, too much time-costing, too much commercialism, too much technology, too much greed’. Yet, he reflects, he has loved working in the law: ‘Everyone likes giving people advice, and to be paid for doing so is an amazing pleasure.’