To the platinum anniversary dinner of the London Solicitors Litigation Association, which took place last Tuesday in the august environs of the Law Society Common Room at Chancery Lane. A welcome excuse for Obiter to squeeze back into a dinner suit that has been mouldering among the mothballs since before lockdown. Fortunately, we didn’t have to walk very far – only about 50 yards from Gazette Towers as the crow flies.

Present at the feast were former LSLA presidents and committee members who had served as far back as 1975, when we had a referendum on membership of the ‘EEC’. The same subject cropped up on Tuesday once or twice. Nothing new under the sun. But what were members talking about in 1952?

Sadly, president Nicholas Heaton told revellers, the organisation’s institutional memory doesn’t extend that far. But that didn’t stop him engaging in a regretful reverie. ‘It’s not easy to put oneself in the shoes of a solicitor whose practice must have been so very different from our own,’ said Heaton. ‘No electronic document questionnaire. No witness statements. No costs budgeting. No online hearings. No Rolls Building. Just 58 High Court judgments reported that year.’

So what was Heaton’s verdict on life as a litigator in 1952?

‘Sounds like bliss,’ he quipped.

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