How will the market changes impact upon the values and behaviours of this year's trainees?

The annual intake of new trainees gives me greater cause for reflection with each passing year. Perhaps this year it is particularly heightened in anticipation of the change likely to be unleashed upon a post-recession world by the impact of the Legal Services Act.

I came into the profession in the late ’70s which, in many respects, hadn’t really changed since the Law of Property Act 1925, save that the limit on partnership numbers had been lifted in the late ’60s and so firms were larger. However, there were no mobile phones, nor even faxes. We had a big room with a telex machine in it, although I can’t really remember ever seeing anything come out of it.

Lawyers, on the whole, were much more generalist in the work that they carried out and, at that point, I am not sure we had seen the first lateral hire of a partner. I didn’t have a training contract; it was still articles of clerkship to one particular principal which kind of gave a direct link to a 1950s world with 1950s values and norms of behaviour.

Like most of my peers, my aspiration was to work in the business post-qualification for a few years, gain partnership by the time I was 30 and stay at the firm until I was 65. It sounds fanciful now, particularly as young partners were working through traditional locksteps to achieve parity by their mid-forties.

The downturn and recession in the ’90s had a very different flavour to what we have experienced in the past three or four years. Following what seemed like class warfare in Thatcher’s Britain of the ’80s, the ’90s recession seemed to have a much bigger impact for the man on the street – but professional life didn’t seem to suffer particularly.

My own firm enjoyed the benefits of industry consolidation among clients, which generated a great deal of work, while traditional insolvencies generated a huge amount of transactional activity.

It is true that there was a paradigm shift in the wake of markets maturing, with increased competition and a need to meet the buying expectations of increasingly sophisticated consumers of professional services. However, it was possible to flourish and, generally, workforce fluidity remained extremely limited.

The latest recession has had very different characteristics. Many firms have had to take very severe measures to remain viable and we still look as if we might fall back into recession within the next six to nine months.

The collective experience of the measures of the harsh realities of life in professional service firms during the recession upon ‘generation Y’ must surely have further fuelled workforce fluidity.

There seems to have been a convergence of views as to the likely trends following in the wake of the Legal Services Act. I need hardly rehearse all of those.

While there has been an examination by various commentators upon the likely impact upon corporate behaviour and governance required in a brave new world, I am not sure anybody has really addressed how the culmination of change to date, coupled with the continually accelerating change of the future, is likely to impact upon the values and behaviours of this year’s trainees.

My reflection is not a melancholic yearning for a return to the past, but a genuine interest as to what values and behaviours will be held by this year’s crop and where, and from whom, those will be derived. I would like your views.