This week I am celebrating 20 years working in the law. On Monday 19 September 1994 I started training as a solicitor at a large provincial law firm. I was fresh of out of law school, keen as mustard and full of vim. And I hated it.
My employers thought that the best way to get to know a firm well was to start in the property department. I very swiftly discovered an enormous dislike of conveyancing work. I also discovered that, despite the Distinction I had achieved at Law School, I knew more or less nothing. There was no substitute for experience. At the end of my first day as a trainee solicitor, I trudged home in a state of deep depression. Had I made a terrible mistake?
After months of property purgatory, I moved to the Litigation Department which was a far more to my liking, and then finally to the Family Department where I found my niche. I found (rather to my surprise) that I enjoyed practising family law and that I had an aptitude for it.
Much has changed in the legal profession since 1994. In Colchester, there are about half as many law firms as there were back in 1994, largely as a result of mergers. On the other hand, while in 1994 (and even in 2004) I would have considered the prospect of setting up my own law firm as utterly daunting, now it is much easier than you might imagine. Advances in IT, such as the internet, email, broadband, the cloud, websites, dictation software and document management systems now mean that a sole practitioner can work from anywhere, with minimal staff.
Things were very different in 1994. Back then, my phone had a ring dial (although to be fair, that was old-fashioned even then). I did not have a computer on my desk until 1996. When I started, the firm had just 3 computers. One was a firm-wide accounts system, accessible through dumb terminals that could do nothing more than give us access to the accounts system. The second one was a PC used by the Litigation Department. The third was a Mac in the Property department, manned by a formidable woman who wouldn’t let anyone else touch it. None of these computers could talk to each other.
The way in which family law is practised has changed massively in the last 20 years. Back when I first started work as family trainee in January 1996, the approach was much less constructive. Most family solicitors had joined the Solicitors Family Law Association (now known as Resolution), but my recollection is that most just paid lip service to their Code of Conduct. There tended to be lots of litigation by correspondence, pointless letters trading allegation and counter-allegations. Nowadays, this is much less the case; we recognise that this rarely leads to a satisfactory resolution. Family practitioners usually comply with the Code.
We were much more likely to issue court applications to resolve disputes about finances or children, something that was made all the easier by the relatively good availability of legal aid. I recall my former partners telling me that during the recession of the early 1990’s, they relied upon the monthly legal aid cheque to pay the staff’s wages. When the last recession began in 2008, legal aid payment rates had fallen so far in real terms that we struggled to make a profit on legally aided work and were in the process of giving it up.
The withdrawal of legal aid from most family proceedings has meant that while back in the 1990’s it was relatively rare for a solicitor to have to deal with someone who was representing themselves, nowadays it is very common indeed. I would estimate that about one-third of my cases involve a litigant in person.
Back in the 1990’s mediation was almost unheard of and collaborative law was a strange North American thing that no-one in the UK knew anything about. Over the last 20 years, these alternatives to court have grown and increasingly are becoming the norm. Resolution no longer refers to them as Alternative Dispute Resolution, just as Dispute Resolution. They still aren’t used as much as they should be, but they are more and more common with every passing year. Court proceedings are becoming rarer.
Finally, the old two court system of County Courts and Family Proceedings Courts has finally been abolished with the creation of a single Family Court in April this year that handles almost all family cases.
Not everything that needed to change has changed through. We are stuck with the same antiquated divorce laws that have been in place for over 40 years and no government has so far been prepared to introduced a law on cohabitation. Hopefully these things will come with time and before I retire in 20 years from now.
19 September 2014