Blog archive
June 2012
It's the consumer, stupid
As you can imagine, calls for non-clients to have the right to complain about lawyers have gone down like a ton of bricks in some quarters. Apparently it will open the door to a flood of vexatious complaints from people unhappy they lost their case or who think their opponent’s lawyer was a bit rude or unpleasant. Worse still, it is being proposed by ‘quangocrats’ who have ‘no idea of the reality of legal practice’.
Read moreWhy Assange is no freedom fighter
We are all guilty of holding ill-informed opinions, at least I hope I am not the only one. This is particularly true when it comes to crimes reported in the media, if for no other reason than we cannot possibly know all the facts. I doubt there is a high profile case on which we haven’t all made up our minds long before the jury have delivered their verdict. The tendency is even stronger when other factors aside from the innocence or guilt of the accused are also involved.
Read moreTo tweet or not to tweet?
Lawyers, it has to be said, aren’t known to be the most tech savvy of professions. I say this as someone who likes to pretend they know what I am doing but as soon as someone starts talking about Ethernets, malware or RAM my eyes glaze over and I start to think about what to cook for dinner.
Read moreSticking your head in the sand doesn't stop the tide coming in
Consumers, it seems, still don’t trust lawyers. In fact, depressingly, while consumer satisfaction with the value for money of legal services has risen over the past year, trust in the profession has actually fallen. The 47% it started at wasn’t exactly remarkable, but it’s now only 43%. That may be more than for some professions, notably journalists, politicians and bankers, but it’s way behind doctors (80%) and teachers (68%).
Read morePies and prejudice: should obesity discrimination be illegal?
For a country that is getting increasingly large around the middle, we seem to have terrible trouble with fat people. How is it that almost two thirds of British adults are now either overweight or obese, a proportion forecast to increase, and yet a new report finds that one in five people had been victimised because of their body weight and that most of us are dissatisfied with our body image?
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