Page 9 - Liverpool Law Sep 2017
P. 9
Feature
Meet Simon Davis
The Deputy Vice President of
the Law Society
Inspired by a television diet including Crown Court, the Paper Chase and LA Law, I joined what was then Clifford Turner in 1982 and for the first year believed that I had made a serious error of judgement. My personal assessments after the first two seats in transactional departments were poor. I found that every time I tried to draft clauses in Share Purchase Agreements or Leases I would find ways to get round my own drafting, with the clauses becoming long and labyrinthine and my stress levels going through the roof.
After a year of this torture, I was sent to our Paris office for a fresh start. My career was saved. Within a matter of weeks I was asked to liaise between our litigators in Hong Kong and a French client who was being sued for trade mark infringement. As I read the affidavits and pleadings I felt goosebumps of excitement and discovered quite quickly that I was a born litigator, with a mind which could pick holes in anything. This sole "talent" had made me a self- destructor, not selector,in our transactional groups.
What this taught me was that a career in the law has something for everyone, so long as you are lucky enough to find an aspect of the law you are good at and enjoy. I am often asked in this context whether I would recommend someone now becoming a solicitor. My answer is always "Absolutely". Because solicitors are everywhere,sorting out people's problems, using modern technology, arguing in court, resolving and negotiating seemingly intractable issues, wrestling with intellectually challenging conundrums and above all else, providing a service. And although solicitors firms today have to be run like businesses i.e. efficiently and profitably, this does not mean that they treat their clients as "customers". In my own experience, the desire to provide a top class service to "clients " is what binds all solicitors, large or small,external or in- house.
My concern that reforms proposed by the Ministry of Justice were having consequences, possibly unintended ones,on the profession and our underlying clients, led me in 2002 to join the Civil Justice Committee of the Law Society, with a view to at least trying to achieve that the proposed reforms reduce complexity and expense, rather than add to them. There I met two Council Members, Mike Williams from Cambridgeshire and Nigel Day from Manchester, whose obvious sense of duty,combined with humour,inspired me to join the Council in 2004.
Amusingly, when I joined, the reputation of the Law Society was that it had no interest in the City, or at least so I thought, because on arrival at the Council, member after member told me that the Law Society was only interested in the City.
The reality as I have found over so many years is that the Law Society is actually interested only in ensuring that the solicitors profession is given the freedom to provide a professional,high calibre service to its clients, making sure that solicitors are not hamstrung along the way by lack of funding, by ill - conceived reform or by the rubbishing of the solicitor brand by politicians.
What I also found is that the Law Society covers so much ground, making representations now to Government on Brexit to protect practitioners rights, opening markets to remove protectionist barriers abroad, fighting legal aid cuts, making our legal system accessible to all, that it sometimes finds it hard to demonstrate to every member its relevance and relentless benefit to the profession and its clients.
This is why I have become Deputy Vice President and my mission is to work with the Law Society staff, with local Law Societies , with relationship teams, with the SRA, with Government, with the public, and with solicitors,all to ensure that solicitors are allowed to get on with what they do best: representing clients, upholding the rule of law, in the public interest,and that we do not become just one kind of provider of legal services. We are solicitors of the Supreme Court of England and Wales, regulated, qualified, insured, diverse,and, in a word, professionals.
Simon Davis
Deputy Vice President of the Law Society
Clifford Chance
