As the rain falls and the summer is looking a little soggy I am saddened at the families whose lives will never be the same as a result of poor driving and bad decision making by our young drivers.  I hope that 2012 will see better communication with our young with messages that resonate and which are attuned to the world they live in and not just ours.

My focus for 2012 is on a few areas:

• Helping my current clients do good business;
• Introducing many small businesses to legal issues so they can get on with doing their  business;
• Helping clever technical people better communicate their thoughts and ideas and thereby increasing their ability to influence; and
• helping develop our young practitioners as great lawyers and great leaders so we break the “great lawyer/hopeless leaders and managers” cycle.

Happy New Year

With a former ADLS President in that hot seat I am hopeful the language of reform will be more constructive, more considered and positive.

I am still haunted that an unsubstantiated one liner in a report could become the basis for such sweeping reform, which will see access to justice denied to the most vulnerable.

So my christmas wish is more thought, more consideration and more dialogue before we make law changes like that we have seen, motivated by the desire to punish a few fictitious practitioners.

The new ADLSi President needs to lead the charge, unfettered by considerations of political expediency.

We need as a profession to start having the conversations about ensuring that our profession is attractive to millennials and that our way of working works for millennials out in the workplace.

Just found this PWC report on slide share. Interesting reading. I was particularly taken by the graph on page 14 showing Training and development ranked highest on the benefits most valued index. How hard can it be for us to train and then retain our young?

http://slidesha.re/vIczVX

During my time on Council pre LCA I saw too many instances where complaints arose as a result of practitioners not knowing how to address small stuff ups. We take such pride in what we do, that admitting fault is often a step too far for us. That leads to a head in the sand and the inevitable consequence.

We already have a friend’s panel but we clearly need some thing else that will attract practitioners to speak out early on. A mediation scheme to resolve problems pre complaint filing would be of value to everyone in the profession and would be good to see.

I am not however in favour of a scheme that would keep helping serial complaint recipients, if there was no linked steps to pull them in line.

We are well advanced on Council in discussions about the available options and just need to pick a method and cost it out. We should not however in doing this, forget that only a percentage of our members or potential members, do the sort of work that leads to complaints. We need to allocate budget to new innovative programmes and services to welcome and attractive in more practitioners from across the country.

The Greek Bailout:

It is a slow day in a little Greek village. The rain is beating down and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit. On this particular day a rich German tourist is driving through the village, stops at the local hotel and lays a €100 note on the desk, telling the hotel owner he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night. The owner gives him some keys and, as soon as the visitor has walked upstairs, the hotelier grabs the €100 note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the €100 note and runs down the street to repay his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the €100 note and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier of feed and fuel. The guy at the Farmers’ Co-op takes the €100 note and runs to pay his drinks bill at the taverna. The publican slips the money along to the local prostitute drinking at the bar, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer him “services” on credit. The hooker then rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill to the hotel owner with the €100 note. The hotel proprietor then places the €100 note back on the counter so the rich traveller will not suspect anything.. At that moment the traveller comes down the stairs, picks up the €100 note, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money, and leaves town. No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole village is now out of debt and looking to the future with a lot more optimism. And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is how the bailout package works!

I hope that we can encourage our younger practitioners to take a big part in the review process because they are the ones who will live with its outcomes for years to come.

Would be a great one for RAMS to be involved with.

More to follow when I have read it for myself.

I love the review name of “The News Media Meets the New Media”.

Political reactions to emotive discussions like these do not help the maintenance of a balance in our justice system.

The complex issue of provocation is a good example of a situation where misinformed public discussion lead to political decisions that lacked rigour and comprehension.

As a profession we do not have a good enough medium through which to inform these important public discussions and it is time we carved a place and a position to improve the quality of discussion around all things legal.

We seem too often to be unrepresented in the court of public opinion and that must be the ultimate irony!

Talking to younger lawyers and comparing their experiences with mine from way back I am not convinced that as a profession we have grasped the difference nor how to do management and leadership in practice.

Maybe ADLSi has a role to start the conversation about leadership and management and look at a programme for emerging partners on how to do management and leadership well.

Does anyone agree?

The time since we jumped off the one society train has confirmed in my mind that there is a really good reason to have two different bodies. However, to make this work we need two large and strong organisations with a mandate of large numbers. I think there are many things that need saying publicly in support of the profession that it would be unwise for NZLS, as regulator to say out loud.  ADLS is the perfect body to raise these issues and start the dialogue and NZLS should encourage this.

We need to work out an understanding between the 2 organisations which will make sense of where we are at and set a clear pathway forward.

Our grads can only know what we are teaching them. Do we need to do more as a profession to help the law schools deliver the training we need them to have experienced?