Murders, kidnap, robberies and many more unthinkable acts; there is no end of storyline possibilities for writers and producers centred around one role in particular. The lawyer.
Read more...Sometimes I think people forget what the law is for. There are lawyers, I am afraid to say, who think the law is there so they can make a living, a very good one in some cases. Government ministers seem to think it is either a drain on the public purse or a means through which liberal trouble makers can block or upset their policy initiatives. And some newspaper columnists seem to think it’s only for the educated.
Read more...I know I’m a bit late. I know you already have some, most of which you’ve probably forgotten or are at least ignoring. I know the start of the new year seems an awfully long time ago. But it is still January (just) and because my last post was about complaints, I thought it would only be fair to give you a chance to avoid them. Most should be glaringly obvious, but you’d be surprised.
Read more...We Brits like to complain. We are renowned for moaning about the weather (with good cause), unreliable trains (ditto) and bad service in restaurants (quite often ditto). Mostly, however, the complaining comes to naught because it is done in private to our family and friends and nowhere near the people who might be able to do something about it.
Read more...Looking for part-time, flexible work is not as easy as it should be in this day and age, unless you want a telesales job or to act as a rich Hampstead lady’s personal assistant (not that there is anything particularly wrong with either). I know we are in a recession and all that, but you’d think people would want to have top talent for less than their annual entertainment budget.
Read more...My first LP was Rio by Duran Duran. At least, that’s what I like to tell people, conveniently overlooking the Bucks Fizz album I had bought a year earlier. Before then most, if not all, of the music I listened to was recorded onto cassette tapes from Sunday night’s Top 40 on Radio 1, complete with inane voiceovers and sudden pauses. To be honest, I can’t remember if I bought it in HMV, but I know I didn’t buy it on the internet because it barely existed.
Read more...It’s time to get festive, and so I bring you the alternative Twelve Days of Christmas, designed especially for the lawyer in all of us. It has been a bit affected by the state of the economy, as you will see. Unlike the traditional version, there is no need to sing this one, I doubt it scans very well.
Read more...Education is a wonderful thing. Yes, at school you have to do fractions and you might have to go out on a wet and cold day to play hockey, but you also get to learn amazing things about the growth of volcanoes and Henry VIII’s appalling record on relationships and try your hand at writing poetry in French and making pretty pictures with iron filings. You might also, ahem, get a snog behind the bike sheds.
Read more...There is nothing quite so satisfying as a celebrity divorce. There is a pleasing sense of schadenfreude in knowing that people for whom everything appears so wonderful and perfect can have as miserable and depressing a time as the rest of us. We can also gloat in having known that it would never work because ‘she’s so talented and he’s, well, a bodyguard’ and because getting hitched only weeks after meeting usually turns out not to be the good idea it seemed at the time.
Read more...Mercifully Danny Boyle’s astonishing opening ceremony to the Olympic games on Friday, in which I am proud to say my dad was drumming his heart out, neglected to pay homage to at least one great British institution: the law.
Read more...I have just finished reading Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. If you haven’t read it, you really should, especially if, like me, you are a ‘humanities graduate with little understanding of science’ and who wears my ‘ignorance as a badge of honour’ (well, less so the last bit). It got me thinking, if it’s dangerous not to understand science (witness the MMR scandal) it must also be dangerous not to understand the law.
Read more...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’.
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