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Law is boring
I-am-a-lawyer. I’ve said it. You may feel that positions me on the level of an amoeba or vermin but I believe I am ethical, professionally competent, creative and that I and many of my colleagues often do good things fighting on behalf of the voiceless and the victimised. But I must admit there are problems within the profession domestically and worldwide. This article intends to illustrate some of the best and worst legal practice. Show me a lawyer who is genuinely intellectually interested for example in mergers and acquisitions law, save perhaps as the by-product of a professional skill well exercised, and I will call the person to book as a boor or a charlatan: not interested in mergers and acquisitions, but in the money to be got from fabricating an interest in mergers and acquisitions. The interest is fake. In fact an interest in mergers and acquisitions or taxation law connotes a deep-seated psychological malaise. There are far more interesting things in life and indeed law. Anyone who has ever worked in a corporate sweat shop, as I have – a place called Hughes, Hubbard and Reed in No 1 Wall Street “Hughes, Cupboard and Greed” – will confirm that to acquire the lucre you so assiduously seek you are boxed in a gilded corporate cage like a puffed battery hen spending as much time calculating the billable hours as actually working. Your friends think it is glamorous but you know it is ignominious. Much more important than the quality of work produced is the amount of time spent. And quality dedicated to securities and derivatives or mergers and acquisitions Oh super. Have you ever seen this stuff? You will serve as the twentieth-person backup in a deal represented by a composite document that is laboriously copy-checked and footnoted drawn from a crucial well-tested all-important template to produce something that might end up in a short hearing which you will probably not be involved in. Anyone interested in advocacy should steer far away from corporate law. There will be no showtime or theatrics. You will have no stake. This is anally-retentive churning, soul-destroying work. Practitioners of such ephemera subject themselves to endless, pointless work and no holidays. A good friend of mine, a corporate lawyer in New York, visited me for the first time in ten years on his first holiday in that time – a five-day break in Dublin – and he had to be at the computer for a few hours every day! Further, many lawyers I met on Wall Street in particular – but elsewhere too – seemed drawn unmitigated from the novel ‘American Psycho’, dangerously psycho- or socio-pathic – overorganised and compartmentalised, rigid and fetishistic. For the sake of completeness you may care to note that sex for these forensic Gordon Gekkos was a bookable appointment, boring and consumerised, between meetings. Dirty love in the afternoon. Don’t think of the day-to-day reality of the new you: shrivelled and desexed. Commodified. Ossified. Bored. Sold-out. Ascending the corporate law ladder: a misspent youth. For those who care for more gentlemanly or ladylike times there has been a foul but gradual, insidious penetration of American work practices into Ireland, blind to our native frugality, scrupulousness and indeed noble tradition of law dating back to bardic times. The IFSC is full of the elites of South County Dublin, lucubrating over the tedious clippings of global corporate avarice. Solicitors in the ‘big five’ firms are as specialist and hungry as any attorney on the seventieth story in Manhattan. They have even affected the jargon of brash US firms: corporate responsibility, doing a meeting and a range of moronic baseball analogies: touch base, rain check, curveball. In Ireland lawyers once loved – once had to love – language. Symptomatically, this country, the land of the Book of Kells and the monkish scripts, of Beckett and Joyce, characteristically generates poorly-written mass-produced textbooks like wallpaper: heavy on the facts of the law but low on criticism or analysis. In the end, anyone can write an Irish textbook on The Law of Dogs or of Parks, with a brief introduction by judge, probably over a bottle of wine, who skim-read the effort, expressing gratitude, nay respect, for the important contribution to our law. Better rather that someone should unleash The Irish Rumpole or true crime as Stig Larsen did in Sweden or as Scott Thorow and Grisham do in the states. Let us focus on law in reality not the paper rules of mass-produced textbooks. In fairness there is some civilised life at the Irish Bar. Adrian Hardiman was a famous Joycean. Frank Callinan, a senior counsel and Brian Cregan, a High Court judge, have tried their hand at Parnell with some éclat. John O’Donnell SC writes poetry and serves on the Arts Council. Not enough. Where is the Nell McCafferty who documented the dysfunctionalities of the lower courts a generation ago? We need a Dickens to chronicle the contemporary Jarnydyce v Jarnydyce that is our banking and debt collection mess. Corporate Law My East-End client was perfectly polite until after the acquittal. Then asked to meet for a ‘sing-song’ in a seedy alehouse: “I didn’t want to say it to you but you are Irish, and if you had messed up I would not have taken it kindly. Know what I mean son?” The threat was very clear. Needless to say I did not go for the pints. In any event it needs to be be said that police officers have issued me threats even more sinister – insinuating that I was some sort of juvenile delinquent gone wrong for anti-State work or Garda criticism; bugging my phones – an occupational hazard of a human rights lawyer, expressing their closeness to lower court officials and high ranking civil servants, perhaps issuing a death threat, as if we lived in a third-world police state. Nonetheless, give me an outing in criminal law for the Kray clan any time, over corporate law. East-end gangsters
