Law firms no longer get passed from father to son

I am enthusiastic to be entering the legal profession and excited about my future as a solicitor.

I am enthusiastic to be entering the legal profession and excited about my future as a solicitor. “Slow down there trainee”, I hear you say, “stop being so optimistic.” Considering the constant battle for clients, fees being driven down at every turn and a regulatory body that doesn’t instil confidence in its members, I am sure the eyebrows of many more senior lawyers have just hit the ceiling. Do give me a chance to explain myself.

I should qualify at the outset that my experience, and this article, is based very much on life at a regional firm. If it sounds detached from the reality in the City, then I’m afraid that’s because it probably is. Freshly out of the LPC boot camp, with my work experience behind me and my work reality in front of me, I was realistic about what life as a solicitor would be like. I did not expect to be spending my weekends on a yacht in Monaco, and I was not proved wrong. Enough of my fellow students had been left looking foolish after swaggering in to the beginning of their legal careers. I knew that life in a regional firm was not going to be very much like the TV programme Suits.

The training contract is no longer exclusively about legal training. It’s also heavily about marketing and business development. There are senior lawyers out there who will tell you you’ve gone mad if you think in order to sell your services you have to promote them. It certainly gets negative press, but the truth is, gone are the days when a firm of solicitors will be passed down from father to son along with the war medals. In reality, marketing events give me the chance to talk about anything with those who are, on the whole, interested and enthusiastic. What can there be to complain about then, especially considering that, in my opinion, doing an excellent job for the client is already over half the battle won.

The current state of affairs is all that I know. Yes, I hear many lawyers reminiscing about the times that clients used to fall into their laps and would negotiate their fees upwards if they didn’t feel their solicitor was being paid fairly. Times have, of course, changed significantly for solicitors and I chose to enter the legal profession despite this. All the negativity aside, I get the valuable chance to complete gritty legal work, assist real clients and have a direct impact on the success of the firm. In fact, life at the regional firm is as close to life as a ‘traditional’ solicitor as I think you can get. I’m excited, and I think when more and more junior lawyers come through with this attitude the profession will be a lot more positive. It’s not blissful ignorance, it’s blissful awareness.

Hopefully I’ve managed to lower some of those raised eyebrows.

Stuart Price is a second year trainee at Warners Solicitors