Context is all

Bloodcurdling prognostications about the collapse of residential property values should be treated with extreme caution. Halifax is forecasting an 8% dip in 2023, which sounds alarming if you own a house (though not so alarming if you’d like to own one).

Until, that is, one reads that this ‘slump’ will send prices crashing back to levels not seen since, ooh, April 2021. Still well above pre-pandemic levels.

The same perspective should be deployed in connection with new figures that appear to herald a sharp fall in UK law firm profitability. A respected Thomson Reuters bellwether found that profit-per-equity partner (PEP) at US law firms fell 4.2% for the 12 months ending November 2022 – the first decline since the global financial crisis. And, as we are often told, what happens ‘over there’ is soon evidenced over here.

This is – if not a reversion to the mean – surely an inevitable correction. 2021, after all, saw a record jump in PEP of 16%. One factor in last year’s decline is a steep increase in office expenses. But operating costs were bound to increase after the lights and photocopiers were switched off entirely in 2020/21. Entertaining clients and generally shelling out a few quid for quotidian social intercourse is back on the agenda, too. Good. Which lawyer wants to be the richest hermit in the graveyard?

Partners ‘may feel significantly less well-off than in 2021’, says Thomson Reuters. I suspect the vast majority will muddle through just fine.

Elsewhere this week, our timely feature on corporate crime does nothing to mitigate one’s impression of a generalised atrophy at Westminster. Government has become public relations. So we have a pile of much-touted legislation aimed at curbing white-collar felons, while enforcement agencies are starved of funds to actually bring them to book. Given recent high-profile scandals, there’s a conspiracy theory in there somewhere.

The same goes for crime in general (courts overwhelmed and a royal commission booted into the long grass). Civil legal aid too, where ministerial procrastination has likely ensured there will be no relief this side of a general election which is probably over two years away. And who knows what will be in either main party’s manifesto.