'Definitely no lawyers'

I DISLIKE lawyers at the best of times but the more I think about it, the more I see a problem.
 
Last Friday the Fin24 and Finweek teams were invited to attend a lunch briefing at law firm Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr to meet with some of its senior staff. For those who don't know, these are the people building that horrific glass monstrosity in Sandton across the road from the new Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) building.
 
Coming out of that lunch, a couple of us were discussing how over-the-top many of these law firms were becoming and I wrote a rather tongue-in-cheek blog about it over the weekend.
 
Does nobody else see a problem when the Deneys Reitz building overshadows the new building for Absa Capital, one of South Africa's premier investment banking groups, or when RMB can't get any natural light to its new green building because the sun has been blotted out by the Cliffe Dekker edifice?
 
In a lot of ways, the legal profession is losing its way.
 
Opulent office buildings and lawyers selling Tannenbaum Ponzi schemes and dicing sports cars down William Nicol Drive don't surprise people any more. I have chatted to many small business owners and incubators, and they see the legal profession as one of those which is holding back growth in the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector.
 
Recent personal experience confirms this. The lawyers for Standard Bank, my banker for nearly 20 years, argued that they had "exhausted every possible avenue" for getting hold of me before obtaining summary judgment against our SME.

The day after the judgment was issued, they miraculously discovered how to get hold of me via email and cellphone to tell me how clever they were.
 
Then the banks want to know why nobody trusts them.
 
I've just ordered a book by international legal professional Richard Susskind called The End of Lawyers?. One of the issues Susskind argues is that the market is increasingly unlikely to tolerate expensive lawyers for advising, drafting, researching and problem solving - especially if those tasks can be performed equally well or better by smart systems and processes.
 
Whether it is relevant to South Africa with its overburdened legal system is questionable, but I will post a review of it shortly.

With lawyers fresh in my mind, I downloaded the annual report from the Law Society of South Africa and picked up two issues which I think are relevant to this discussion.
 
Firstly, the collapse of the SA property market has hurt the legal profession. According to its survey of 2008, 67% of law firms earn some of their income from conveyancing and almost 30% of firms earn more than half of their income from conveyancing. Law firms are closing down all over the show.

Calling Vodacom and Pioneer shareholders
 
The second issue highlighted is that it is extremely difficult for new entrants to establish legal practices and win clients.
 
We are all jumping up and down this week because Pioneer Foods has been slapped with a massive fine by the competition commission, but did anybody go and look which legal firm was employed by Pioneer? You guessed it: Cliffe Dekker.
 
What has this case cost SA taxpayers and Pioneer shareholders?
 
Who was the attorney on call for South African Airways when it had competition issues around ticketing, with the complaint brought by Nationwide and Comair? Who represented Vodacom against the entrepreneurs at Gogga Tracking Solutions? Cliffe Dekker.
 
Luckily, competition is alive and well. We have lawyers able to profit from it and throw up massive buildings around Sandton, flaunting their Italian and German sports cars in the name of consumer activism.
 
There is a TV advert for one of the whisky brands, which shows two guys sitting in a pub discussing what negotiations were like in the old days. They flash back to battle scenes and bar room brawls, where people actually have to work their problems out for themselves and not pay a fortune for a faceless intermediary to fight for them.
 
The punch line? "Definitely no lawyers."
 
Maybe there is a call to action for Vodacom and Pioneer shareholders in this column. Do you believe it is in the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation in the country?
 
Do you believe it is appropriate that your shareholder money is being spent to fund these shocking buildings with their awful in-house chefs?
 
My humble opinion: just remember that those new buildings come with costs attached and your investment, as the client, is footing the bill.

 - Fin24