Lawyer Monthly - December 2021 Edition

lawyers. And I understand why. After a period of time working as a professional – it certainly happened to me after 15 years or so – if you are a criminal lawyer, you are used to the usual question: how do you defend people when you know they are guilty? There is an obvious and easy answer to that question: everybody is entitled to a fair hearing, and so on and so forth. But I think as a profession, whatever aspect of the law you are in, be it as a solicitor, a legal executive or a barrister, for too long we have been in retreat. We have failed to remember how important what we do is. I understand that that sort of rot has set in for some time. There is that joke, “What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start.” But I do not think we have ever lost the social currency as lawyers, regardless of what part of our community you occupy. What I think we have done is allowed ourselves to become part of a conversation which has forgotten our pride in what we do. In other words, when you say to somebody or you meet somebody and they say what do you do, and you say, “I am a lawyer”, you can feel very often that kind of sense of apology. It happens across the board. And that might be because it has been pretty exhausting, 17 DEC 2021 WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM me, we are dealing with questions about concerns over custody. We are dealing especially with questions like “I think my child has learning challenges and they are entitled to some sort of state benefit. I do not know what that is and the school are not helping. Can you?” This is one of the largest areas of legal aid, special educational needs. Exactly. Same, of course, with housing. It is interesting with the special educational needs provision, because that really is something that we can reach for as lawyers to have a good quality example of outcomes depending and consequent on your privilege. It is just the tragic fact that if you are somebody who has access to that network and can pay for a lawyer, you can consequently muscle the relevant counsel, the relevant education or department - whoever it is you are talking to, because it is an incredibly complex landscape - if you can navigate that with that sort of legal assistance, and you can do that in time, the outcome for your child is wholly different from somebody who lacks that privilege. We are talking about a child’s life. That should never, ever, be dependent on your capacity to pay for that access. Often it can be resolved with really limited money and effort. or the work may be repetitious, or whatever it is. But if you are a personal injury lawyer, for instance, there should not be any apology there. What you do is critical. I sat down with a group of personal injury lawyers from a large firm in Manchester, Fletchers. Listening to the stories of what they do, as they take somebody who has been critically injured from the beginning of their journey over three or four years, they become critical members of that person’s family. They do not just problem- solve; they provide that long-term legal resolution that, but for them, that person would not have. And that is true in so many instances. No, I do not think it is a panacea, but I do think as a legal community it is always worth remembering – in case you have forgotten – that what each and every one of you do, what we do as a legal community, really, really does matter. Whatever you do and wherever you do it, you provide individuals and people the right that they are fundamentally entitled to, which is the right to access to justice. Without you they would not have it. And if you leave with nothing else, I ask you never to shrug when somebody asks, “What do you do”. You should be proud to be a lawyer. Of course, you have seen a lot of this first-hand through your pro bono work. You have seen the need for greater legal aid in this country. Yes, but it was not just working alongside that law firm. When I first started answering questions in the Sun, I received a lot of criticism. People were quite sceptical, and they have their own reasons for that, but I have always been quite proud of it. because themailbag has by and large been from people who have not had access to a lawyer, and they are asking first-instance questions. What has been interesting over that half decade or more has been to see how that mailbag has grown and also the types of questions that we are getting. We started off with parking and so on and so forth. What has happened now is that, each week as the questions are triaged for “ If you leave with nothing else, I ask you never to shrug when somebody asks, “What do you do”. You should be proud to be a lawyer. “ If you as a lawyer are not able to communicate the law so that everybody can understand, then you are a bad lawyer.