Some City lawyers are lousy capitalists

Are City lawyers actually capitalists? You’d assume so, given their background and working lives, but the casual observer might come to wonder reading some of the comments on legalweek.com in recent months as the global economy has moved from boom to bust.

There does seem to be at least a small minority that have developed deeply contradictory attitudes towards capitalism that celebrate free markets when they deliver what they want, but have a pronounced capacity to ignore messages the market is sending when it is something that they don’t want to hear.

Fundamentally, I just don’t get it. If you’re into the whole free market thing, then surely you still subscribe to the concept, whether it dumps on you from a great height or comes up trumps.

This contradictory tendency is sometimes evident at partner level, but it is more common among the junior ranks. The line of thinking in question leads some to conclude that it is always someone else that should take the hit when things go bad. Fair enough, £1m-earning partners are an easy target, but what about support staff or junior lawyers in other practice areas where business has tailed off? The same crowd that decry ‘stealth lay-offs’ on one hand seem to argue that law firms should be cutting out the deadwood to tackle the economic downturn.

Yet this is the essence of a stealth lay-off – getting rid of marginal performers whose work is just about acceptable during busy periods when good staff are hard to find but aren’t needed when work is scarce.

Some lawyers jump between contradictory positions that one minute laud fairness and the next propagate Darwinian survival of the fittest. The only consistent thread is that it is someone else that should take the consequences. Well, in theory at least, that just isn’t capitalism.