News & Views

Yo, Kids, Mr C here.

I don’t know about you, but I’m much more Follow-the-Leader than Pokémon Go. Until someone put me right, I thought Angry Birds was a Hitchcock film. I’d like to think it’s maturity but it’s more likely to be my age.

‘Just so I’m crystal clear on this,’ said Santa, with just a hint of frustration in his voice, ‘you’re telling me that, from May next year, I can’t use my database of good and naughty boys and girls unless I spend Mrs Claus’ Christmas money on GDPR consultants?’

I met one of my favourite authors recently at a book signing. No, not the famous ‘7 Habits’ author Stephen Covey (who is sadly no longer with us) but Robert Harris, whose latest novel ‘Munich’ is set 75 years ago during the negotiation of the Munich Agreement.

As Benjamin Franklin once said, it takes many good deeds to build a good reputation and one bad one to lose it – as a few jewellers, airlines, car manufacturers, newspapers and banks have discovered in recent times.

Like beauty, risk is in the eye of the beholder. A key business decision can be seen through one person’s eyes as a clever entrepreneurial market move and, through another’s, as a reckless bet-the-house punt.

We all know that nothing in life is certain. As the actor, director and philosopher Clint Eastwood once said: “If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.” He also said he’d tried being reasonable and didn’t like it. They should teach this kind of philosophy in law school.

As the Queen starts to relax after her Christmas broadcast and I rise with a flush in my cheeks to carve our Cambridge Bronze, I will spare a thought for our cherished legal profession. Like the bird beneath my knife, it has had a good stuffing this year.

Had Isambard Kingdom Brunel been a lawyer and not an engineer, suspension bridges might have remained the domain of orthodontists and we might still be rowing wooden boats to the Balearics for our summer holidays.

With the Government, the Competition and Markets Authority, the Legal Services Board, the Law Society and the legal services regulators all flashing their sequined blouses like contestants on Strictly Dumb Downing, the idea of leaving a ‘secure’ job and setting up a new law firm is likely to feature alongside bareback-rodeo and base-jumping on most people’s personal risk register.