Hat tip to @infobunny.
Punters. Yea, we (whack job Dan Hull excepted) hate them all; with scant exception they are whiny sniveling wretches: an honourable dispensation is granted for those that take Geeklawyer drinking and whoring, of course — they are the very finest of fellows and Geeklawyer overcharges them only modestly.
But the Daily Torygraph retells a Legal Business magazine story of what is, short of an execution style slaying, hands down the classiest response ever to the non-payment of a bill. Suing? Nah:
A City firm reacted to a client’s failure to pay its fees by taking a large group of junior lawyers to a bar owned by the client. Having drunk the bar dry, they left without paying the bill.
Geeklawyer rarely doffs his wig to any man on the matter of proffering cold dishes but this unknown firm (someone please say who) gets the much coveted Geeklawyer Revenge Award 2008.
Geeklawyer would have done it better. He’d have hired the bar for the weekend (& had his regulatory law partners arrange an extended bar license) invited all the firm, including non-fee earners secretaries the janitors their family & friends, to drink what they pleased in what quantity they desired.
The bill? Oh, he’d have sent it back with “Charge to our ‘SetOff’ credit card please”.
Published on
18 February 2007 in
legal profession.
Tags: adsense, blogging, Dear Leader, ego, fees, House of Lords, Impact, law firms, lawyers, Legal 500, OSx.
Geeklawyer is pleased by the recent modest growth of UK law blogs — we have a long long way to go before we reach the same relative numbers as in the US. But there is something of a contradiction here: while welcoming more bloggers Geeklawyer is concerned …
Continue reading ‘Why should an English lawyer blog?’
So, fed up of having sand kicked in your face? Want to set yourself apart from the herd? Want to make yourself more attractive to the opposite sex? Why not apply for Silk? Here is Ruthie’s easy step by step guide…
1. Start being extra nice to all your professional contacts. You’ll need them for references (10 required).
2. Dig a big hole.
3. Throw money in (3k to be precise)
4. Fill in a long form, send off your references.
5. Wait
6a. Failure, whoops, better luck next time. Start again from the top next year.
6b. Success!! Now..continue
7. Dig a big hole
8. Throw money in (3.5k)
9. Buy fancy clothes (700 quid)
10. Organise party and other sundries (2k)
11. Change your email address from joebloggs@mail.co.uk to joebloggsqc@mail.co.uk
11. Wait
12. Hope that the premium you can charge for doing work as a silk makes up for the value of all the work you can no longer do.
For further information check out the website or send 50 quid in non sequential notes in a brown envelope to Ruthie marked “Get me Silk”. You may still not get silk, but Ruthie promise to invest the money back into the blog. Or a new snowboard.
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Watch the ships go down as the Carter provisions on publicly funded criminal defence kick in. Irwin Mitchell (now primarily a commercial firm, but founded as a criminal firm) has dispensed with the services of its general crime department. There will be many more; Ruthie will update this post as the names come in.
In the meantime consider supporting the Law Society’s campaign to defend legal aid.
A short reprieve was won last week with a climbdown by the Lord Chancellor on the introduction of fixed fees rather than hourly rates for work, and market based reforms have now been pushed back to 2008. Question is, will there be any demoralised criminal lawyers left in business then to implement them? Ruthie thinks the inevitable is simply being deferred and in the meantime its death by a thousand cuts.
Ruthie is constantly perplexed by the myth perpetrated by certain members of the Bar that a licence to place a tatty piece of horse hair on one’s head in public somehow ascribes to the wearer the status of demi-god. Certain sections of the Bar (still) seem to think they belong to a sub-section of humanity to whom the normal rules and exigencies of life do not apply.
The days when the Bar was seen as a respectable profession for members of certain families are long gone. Along with (very shortly I believe) the inability of barristers to sue for their fees. The Bar is now a business like any other, and barristers would do well to think of themselves in terms as consultants, rather than ministers of religion.
Ruthie gets particularly upset when barristers seem to assume they know more than her about the law. My dear, maybe I know more than you, I’ve just got better things to do…
Ruthie is also amused at the notion that the term barrister carries more status than that of solicitor. Once upon a time maybe.
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