Affectionate nicknames dished out like dirt

On the odd occasion the press discovers that it is not just lawyers who can be difficult, but also clients.

The Guardian's Brief Encounters column last week featured an anonymous 'employment tribunal lawyer' reflecting on a meeting he had that week with a company facing a discrimination claim (6 September).

It was running the 'we may be shits, but we're undiscriminating shits' line, he said, 'somewhere at the very outer limits of that defence'.The manager explained how the general atmosphere on the shop floor was not that of a ladies' tea party.

So, explained one underling, everyone has a nickname.

'Well Greg here is bald, so we call him Wiggy,' he said.

'And John's a bit of a spastic, so we call him Spazmo...

Bryan's got a big nose, so we call him Barry for Barry Manilow.' The applicant also enjoyed an 'affectionate' nickname, he went on.

'Paki.

Or monkey.' The lawyer wrote: 'The manager took a lot of persuading that affection like that has to be paid for.'

The Independent reported that a British smoker bringing a case against tobacco company Philip Morris in the US could signal a resurgence of litigation against UK companies (5 September).

The claimant's solicitor, Alan Care of Russell Jones & Walker, said the contingency fee system in the US made a case viable, especially in the wake of successful cases brought in the US.

Mr Care also said Legal Services Commission funding was a possibility.

'If ever there was a case "in the public interest" this must be it,' he told the paper.

'There should be no waste of public funds if the court allows the case to proceed on the real question.'

Human Rights Act scare of the week came, unsurprisingly, in the Daily Mail, which reported that 'prisoners are planning to unleash a tidal wave of lawsuits challenging their conditions' - such as being denied adequate access to fresh air and conjugal visits (6 September).

The paper quoted Sir David Ramsbotham, the chief inspector of prisons, saying that the Prison Service should use the threat to improve conditions in jail.

The paper said: 'His prediction will alarm critics who have warned that the new Act is a "complainers' charter" likely to bog down the courts in spurious cases.'

The Financial Times's Observer column reported on last week's get-together of the International Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers in Edinburgh, where London solicitor and former Tottenham Hotspur chairman Douglas Alexiou took over as president (5 September).

'What do you call a gathering of divorce lawyers,' the article began, 'apart from horribly expensive?' Mr Alexiou prefers to emphasise the family law aspects of his work, rather than the divorce aspects, the paper reported.

But he is 'not going to weep crocodile tears' for the growth in divorce work.

'It's a fact that if people weren't ill we wouldn't need doctors; as for lawyers, we're here to help people through very difficult times.'

Neil Rose