Friday and sunny weather, see passim.
It is finally the end of “Pro Bono week”, and as such a time of festival and celebration. Today will be the last of the great influxes of the unwashed, unminded and down right strange. Not that I’m opposed to the concept of pro bono, however, it is shall we say one of the more disingenuous of occasions. Particularly the “Pro Bono awards”, a ceremony which has much more to do with free publicity than actually doing something worthwhile.
The sad truth of modern law is that it is really only the vast multi-national law firms that can afford to do pro bono. And before someone starts jumping and shrieking I really need to validate that last statement. It is really only the big law firms that can do high publicity pro bono. On the whole, sole practitioners and small firms actually do more per capita/ income pro bono than the likes of say CC (I’m hoping that is obvious enough for me not to have to use their highly litigious name). They do it in a quiet, rather English manner. They don’t charge the little old lady down the road for altering her will when she is on state benefits only. They take kids in for work experience and actually get them to do stuff more interesting than the photocopier and making tea. They give up their time for the CAB service and in a hundred other small but quite expensive ways really do probably more total good than say a hundred Kamlesh Bahl, Imran Khan or Michael Mather’s.
For us and I include myself in the collective us, we spend this week dealing with and trying to help all those people that the less than honest solicitors send onto us. Usually the solicitor will say something along the lines of “Your’s is a very complex case and I think you should speak with the LS, they have all the people who can help you.” or “We’d love to be able to help you however we just don’t do legal aid work, speak to the LS I’m sure they’d be able to sort your funding problems out” or “What? Can’t you speak English (said very slowly and very loudly - followed by writing the address of LS on a large piece of paper and pushing them straight out of a door) and so on. Generally speaking those who come here tend to fall into one of the following steps:
Set A Asylum seekers looking to appeal decisions;
Set B Lunatics who have had their appeals heard countless times and are in denial about their chances;
Set C Rough sleepers who want someone to talk to, dribble on, scream at or just have a nice cup of tea;
Set D Someone with a grudge/ grievance against their solicitor and or barrister and wants a screaming match;
Set E Someone who got screwed with their trousers on and really needs and deserves help.
Now imagine the main lobby as being the box around a Venn diagram and accept that all these sets interact and crossover hence you get a morass of curiosities. Add to this temperatures in the high 20’s, a soupcon of overstuffed egos and the occasional Minister of State. The end result really has all the makings of a loose hand grenade rolling around on the floor and no-one entirely sure if it is going to go off. So this week has been tiring. My guys are amongst the best out there and they usually do a brilliant job. This week is about as bad as it gets and we have so far got through. Today though is the grand finale, today is Attorney general, Lord Chancellor and a mystery barrister renowned for her Joker like smile. I look forward to this evening with the hope of a drowning man capable of seeing a ship on the horizon.