Of all Britain’s strange, sick national fetishes, there is surely none worse than the fetish for the “rule of law”. Houses unbuilt, sex pests un-deported, inconveniently truthful stories about oligarchs unpublished — the choking stasis that afflicts us always seems to be traced back to shibari-like knots of legislation tightened into place with quasi-sexual glee. Why, in a country where verbal ambiguity is an internationally recognised tic, do we follow rules, even other people’s rules, with such clenched-arse literalism? All the histrionics about leaving the European Convention of Human Rights distract from the fact that many countries simply ignore its judgements. Since 1975, the UK has ranked sixth out of 46 states for compliance, ahead of France, Germany and Italy.
Breakneck, a well-reviewed new book by Dan Wang, makes the case that China is catching up with America because the former is run by can-do engineers, and the latter by don’t-do lawyers. But if America’s lawyer problem is bad, ours is worse. Not worse because our lawyers are more powerful — America’s codified constitution and litigation addiction suggests the opposite — but because our lawyers simply weigh heavier in the makeup of our elite. The US has Silicon Valley, a colossal military-industrial complex and various other fearsome power centres that fight for control of the national steering wheel. In the UK, what is there outside of the City-adjacent, high-end service sector, of which corporate law is a dominant constituency? A few bioscience labs in the south-east, barred from expansion by bat-shagging Lib Dem councillors.
Corporate law, consulting and finance, the troika of City professions that Britain has bet the house on since Thatcher, are pitilessly effective at sucking up our elite graduate class. It’s the third and sometimes the second, closely identified with hyper-capitalist greed and PowerPoint-tweaking bullshit artistry, which get most of the attention. But corporate law might be the most symptomatic of a service-geared economy that’s totally dependent on the global financial tides for business — reactive rather than weather-making. “A bank is ultimately more real economy than a law firm,” says Jack*, an Oxbridge humanities graduate who works at Slaughter and May, one of the five “Magic Circle” companies which constitute the pinnacle of British corporate law. Banks have money, with which to do stuff. Corporate law firms are hired to help banks (and other businesses) do their stuff, whether it’s mergers, acquisitions, due diligence or whatever else. “We’re facilitators rather than actual doers.”
Jack, who’s around 30, is one of many humanities grads to have gone into corporate law recently. That’s another thing about the profession. Consulting and finance tend to attract those wanting to make a lot of money. But as mounting property and day-to-day living costs push formerly middle-class jobs like teaching into the precariat, corporate law has emerged as the profession of choice for clever, well-educated sorts who don’t have a particular facility with numbers or passion for business but would still like a salary that allows them the comfortable life they expected growing up. “When I was at uni,” says Adam*, another Oxbridge humanities graduate around 30, “there was a lot of quite confusing talk about finding a passion, that I listened to and got quite engaged with for a couple of years. And then I started to think a bit more practically about it.” He ended up at the London office of an American corporate law firm.
And neither are they especially worried about AI eating their Pret lunch. They use the technology to do basic research, but find it’s still too inaccurate to rely on without proper checks. Law firms don’t want to be feeding confidential info into AI systems anyway, which is perhaps why there doesn’t seem to be any immediate squeeze in hiring trainees quite yet. In the longer term, who really knows? AI evangelists would say that corporate law is exactly the kind of structured, fact-rich knowledge work that will be well automated sooner or later.
It certainly puts a faint crack into the profession’s reputation as the platonic ideal of a stable upper-middle-class career. But in the more immediate term, isn’t it the stability itself that’s the problem? Becoming a corporate lawyer “is the opposite of doing anything entrepreneurial”, says Jack. It’s for “very smart people who are fundamentally not risk takers”. The fact it holds such appeal contributes to Britain’s “massive growth problem”. When “the smartest people in the country go off to be fucking consultants and lawyers”, what hope do you have of founding companies and industries that actively shape the world rather than being dependent on globalisation cruising along as usual?
Reactive doesn’t necessarily mean constricting, thinks Jack, who says that though “excessive or incorrect legal frameworks are not helping the UK”, this is not a problem of bad lawyers but “a problem of bad laws” — and bad laws are the fault of politicians, who increasingly conceptualise law as an immovable obstacle rather than something that their mandate demands they shape and reshape. But maybe that conceptual blindness is, as Wang says of America’s politics, due to a legalism which ultimately flows from the profession’s popularity and prestige among our elite. If every politician’s son and daughter and partner and best friend is a lawyer, why wouldn’t they adopt a similar mindset?
“But a non-legalistic kind of politics knows a more effective trick: that the best way around something is often through it. You don’t unpick the knot — you take a knife to it.”
And in our case, there is no Californian tech idyll on hand as an alternative. There is, simply, the City. Trump 2.0 coupled up with Silicon Valley in its anti-legalistic crusade. Britain’s populist troublemakers will have to fight on their own, because there’s no extra-government power centre that shares their sensibilities. (That’s if the Labour government of lawyers doesn’t pre-empt them, as Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has recently shown intimations of doing.) Good corporate lawyers, and good lawyers in general, might know how to wind their way around Britain’s legislative maze with consummate skill. But a non-legalistic kind of politics knows a more effective trick: that the best way around something is often through it. You don’t unpick the knot — you take a knife to it.
*Names have been changed
