Aware beware

It has become a truism of law firm marketing to bang on about commercial awareness - but how important is this much-touted state of mind? This issue was recently highlighted by RollonFriday, which got hold of a questionnaire intended to test the business knowledge of a group of Freshfields LPC students.

The poll, which is reasonably demanding without being ridiculously obscure, resulted in an average score of 43%, leading one Freshfields graduate recruitment officer to ruefully observe: “A person who claims to be a commercial lawyer but who doesn't have much of a handle on what is going on in the commercial world isn't, in the end, going to be fantastically credible to clients.”

This has led to some jokes at the expense of highly-paid aspiring lawyers who have trouble identifying the chief executive of Tesco (a Freshfields client), UK interest rates or - the shame of it - what CDS stands for (credit default swap, in case you were wondering).

But I’m not sure that’s all that justified. Realistically, how commercially astute is the average City trainee to be going to be? Joining an institution like Freshfields, you know you’ll have plenty of time before you get much client contact, and you don’t need to be that clued up to man a photocopier.

And, anyway, the business smarts of partners can’t be taken for granted. For every charming, Renaissance man and woman with a wealth of commercial knowledge, there is a technical geek without the slightest grasp of what’s going on outside their own narrow discipline. And there are a few banking lawyers out there whose grasp of financial markets can charitably described as a bit rough around the edges. Maybe City firms should try testing the partners before they hit up the junior ranks.

The aforementioned recruitment officer goes on to suggest aspiring Freshfields lawyers should read one business article a day in a newspaper “with enough thoroughness so as at least to identify whether you understand it properly”. Actually, that doesn’t generally work too well as a first step, as you need to have commercial awareness to get much out of a business paper in the first place. That’s why The Economist, which focuses on overview, context and analysis rather than news, tends to be used to teach junior reporters about business.

Another good source are the best books on business, like Barbarians At The Gate, The Death Of Gentlemanly Capitalism, Politics And The Pound, All That Glitters and Liar’s Poker. Of more recent tomes, The Accidental Banker and The Last Tycoons are both excellent introductions to the topsy-turvy world of high finance and the rise of the superstar chief executive.

Still, perhaps I should brush up on my own business knowledge; I took the test and got 72%. That’s good in that I beat the Freshfields trainee average, but bad in that one precocious brat wiped the floor with me, scoring 84%.