Liverpool Street Station Installation
Several years ago when I began tracking the changes in the legal services market, new types of law firm (or practice) were forming. Some were virtual, others were dispersed without formalised, central offices and some were not even law firms in the traditional sense but companies that offered legal services.
One of these I looked at was Keystone Law. It's idea was to get rid of expensive offices and use technology to coordinate its dispersed expertise. Lawyers would control their own workflow rather than being set targets, illusory or otherwise. The entity would deal with the administration and compliance.
To promote this way of working Keystone is running an installation in Liverpool Street Station called "Law Set Free". The central idea is that legal careers ought to be more responsive to personal needs than those of an organisation. It's a simple concept that speaks to enterprise and self-actualisation in these days of precarious careers.
Keystone foreground their move with a "Lifestyle Calculator", which asks you to input billable hours, salary, and more, then presents you with a pie chart of what your professional life looks like in order to compare it with their alternative. Apparently over 2000 lawyers have used it.
There is far more discussion and academic analysis now of the stresses of professional careers and especially lawyers. Depression isn't rare: what is difficult is how hard it is to talk about it without being seen as weak or inefficient. See, for example, Patrick Schiltz, "On Being a Happy, Healthy, and Ethical Member of an Unhappy, Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession" for a discussion of the importance of this topic. The legal profession is trying to face up to this but it's only made baby steps. Law schools have yet to tackle this. They tend to present legal careers in rosy terms as do most law firms. Just look at the publicity material they publish on how attractive legal careers are. For more on this see Richard Collier's fascinating work on well-being in law as well as this article on representations of trainees.
Traditional models of legal careers still hold sway and will continue to do so for some time. But during the Great Recession the legal profession ruined the trust it built with those who worked in law. Indiscriminate layoffs and increased financialization have have pushed the business philosophy way ahead of the professional ethos. They are not necessarily incompatible, but they do need to co-exist.
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