Glum senior partners lack the guts to move in-house PRIVATE PRACTICE: staff lack motivation former City lawyer Unhappy senior partners in private practice lack the guts to make the move in-house, a former City lawyer now running the UKs largest property development company claimed last week.Christopher Digby-Bell, a former Frere Cholmeley Bischoff partner and now managing director of Palmer Capital Partners (PCP), said: I am struck by the number of unhappy partners I know whocannot bring themselves to make the break and start a new careeroutside private practice.Mr Digby-Bell set up property venture capital company PCP after leaving Frere Cholmeley where he was senior property partner in 1998.With a 725 million investment programme involving 31 development schemes, Property Week recently estimated that the former lawyers company was the biggest of its type in the UK.The problem, according to MrDigby-Bell, is that the decision to move involves taking risk and lawyers are not good at that.He added: The real issue is that law firms are failing to motivate their senior people.

It seems that career development programmes in most firms stop at age 45.

After that you are on your own.Mr Digby-Bell welcomed recent survey results showing that in-house lawyers are twice as likely to bepromoted to the boards of their companies as they were three years ago (see [2001] Gazette, 22 March, 8), but added: Commerce and industry in the UK have tended to hire lawyers purely to perform legal functions.

He said US lawyersare appointed to the boards ofcompanies to perform morecommercial roles.Therefore, UK in-house lawyers are selling themselves short of their US counterparts, and should develop a more entrepreneurial approach, he added.Jeremy Fleming