Report comment

@Anonymous 12:12
I feel I need to respond to your post. You state that junior lawyers have “woeful standards” and their drafting is “semi literate [sic] and ill constructed”. With the increase in competition and difficulty in obtaining a training contract I suggest that the standard has only increased. If I were to apply for a training contract now (11 years PQE at a top 100 firm) I might face some very stiff competition. Perhaps you should reconsider your training and recruitment policies? I suspect you are more to blame than your juniors for the difficulties you face.

The previous generations of lawyer faced very little competition to make partnership and were often made up within a couple of years of qualification. The quality in partner approach is telling – poor management skills (never having been managed themselves or having been managed poorly) and appalling letter writing and drafting. How many juniors have been sent on wild goose chases by partners who give poor instructions or do not understand the law?

The greed of those who have made partnership and pulled the ladder up behind them adds to junior stress levels – the no carrot big stick approach to giving hard working juniors more and more work reduces quality and increases stress. There are times when I look at work I produced years ago and wonder at the good quality – it’s all about having the time to do a job right. If junior lawyers workloads are not managed (by themselves and their line managers) of course quality will suffer. You state that the quality of work adds to stress but this is not correct – you misunderstand the issues of causation - stress reduces work quality, not the other way round.

Finally, if you think juniors are looking for a 10:30 start and 3 hour lunch (even if you say that flippantly) you fundamentally misunderstand the issues the article is seeking to highlight. Junior lawyers want fair treatment and support to do a good job. Many of them do a good job in spite of their treatment.

There are also comments on this thread implying that the pay a junior lawyer receives at 5 years’ PQE is justifies the stress as a “fact of life”. Again, very little insight into life and the profession from the person commenting.