I was asked to speak at a roundtable on lawyers and careers at StudentSlingshot. The event was arranged by the indefatigable Patrick Guiney of UCD Smurfit Business School. It brought students from all around Ireland to Dublin Castle to meet and talk with entrepreneurs, techies, business people and, of course, lawyers.
The invitation said clearly "Dress casual". So guess who were the only people wearing business suits? Yes, the lawyers. Both men and women.
Given that there were many tech people at the StudentSlingshot--after all both Google and Facebook have their European headquarters here--I thought it would be useful for the students to know something about the influence of technology in law and the role played by legal tech startups. (By the way I wasn't wearing a suit.) During my talk I said something about the use of boilerplate documents by law firms (implicitly referring to Gulati's work on pari passu).
A managing partner of a sizeable Dublin law firm, sitting next to me, exploded. They never used such things and it was tantamount to heresy to suggest otherwise. I referred to research on this saying that bespoke legal work is very expensive and not all clients need it. She refused to accept this.
A barrister then talked about becoming a barrister in Dublin. I was reminded of the UK situation years ago. He said it was normal for an aspiring barrister to wait years before earning any money, let alone a living wage.
I have been travelling in a time machine here and I can begin to understand why the Troika demanded changes to the profession and its regulation. It creates too many barriers. I hope the legal services reformation bill passes into law soon. The legal profession needs to come into the 21st century.
The evening was great fun though.
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