Cyberspace – the lawless mirage

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators” ~ William Gibson, Burning Chrome

Cyberspace is not a physical location; neither is “the internet”, or “the web”. It is worth bearing this in mind when listening to various people pontificating on whether or not “real world” law does or should apply to these “places”. William Gibson’s original definition when he coined the term Cyberspace is still accurate; like a corporation¹, day to day we all pretend that this mental construct has an actual reality in the universe instead of being a metaphor for a complex form for human interaction².

The reality is that when you sit down in front of your computer in Scotland, or anywhere else in the world, you are instructing a stream of electrical pulses containing the data you put in to go through a spider-web of cables to another computer, let’s say your ISP based in England. The information you send instructs that computer in turn to send more electrical pulses across the network to more computers spread across the world, each calculating a suitable path using a range of algorithms and routines to eventually reach the final destination, say a computer in the USA, which finally lights up its screen with your vital message: “LOL”.

But this marvellous, yet ubiquitous, wonder of the modern age- surely it is so new and unprecedented that no laws can yet bind it, there can be no previous model that matches it? No, on both counts. There is a previous model of communication almost identical in design – the universal postal service. Just like its C19th predecessor, the internet takes a message from one location, transports it through a route of network of processing stations in locations that the users neither know nor care about, to arrive at the final addressed destination.  With a couple of centuries of analogous law, whether using Civil Law principles, or Common Law precedent, topped up with equally well established telegraph and telephony law plus whatever special rules a country might choose to add, there is instantly a full legal regime in place to cover whatever actions anyone might perform “in cyberspace”.

Once you realise this, a whole lot of apparently complex legal conundrums immediately become quite clear. You upload your manuscript to a publicly accessible server for people to download and read; for the purposes of copyright the “place of publication” must therefore be the physical location of that server, because that is where copies are sent from. You send a defamatory message, you commit the wrong in the location you are in but the damage occurs where it is received. These are all straight forward applications of existing legal rules.

But what if you hack into someone’s computer to deliberately cause damage? Especially if it is in another country? Well then we look to the criminal law, and the immediate analogy is the postal bomb. In that case prosecution might be where you make and send it from, or where it detonates; also if you are a citizen of neither, the country of your citizenship may also claim jurisdiction. Exactly the same can apply to criminal acts committed “in cyberspace”.

But what if instead of a bomb you send a whoopee cushion? What if it is an item legal in the place it is sent from but illegal at the destination? What if you send a message, which is legal in your country, to a server in another country where it is also legal, but which automatically republishes it all around the world including to a country where it is illegal?

This is where the speed and ease of internet communications and of reproduction of communications make a difference from physical mail systems. Most people know where in the world a physical postal item is going – it’s at the bottom of the address. IP addresses being strings of numbers, it might not be apparent what the physical location is³, and an apparently simple, non-criminal act in you own home could be an international crime. Or like Gary MacKinnon, an action that is a minor offence at the location where you do it (couple of years imprisonment maximum, if that) leaves you facing extradition to a foreign country for trial in an alien legal system to face life imprisonment in maximum security if convicted⁴.

So while the transmission of messages over the internet is easily compared with the postal system, the other element being the ease in which messages can be reproduced, republished, or altered with or without the original authors knowledge or consent also needs looked at. Here again we have a well established, internationally recognised, field of law that applies – copyright. After a couple of centuries of international argument there is a core of copyright law giving certain minimum rights to the authors of works around the world – or at least the 165 countries signatory to the Berne Convention. Add in the internationally accepted rules on contracts to cover agreements between parties licensing reproduction, and that is everything sorted bar enforcement?

Well, yes and no. The problem is that the internet started off as a communication system for the military and academia, both of which culturally are strong on attribution and transfer of information but weak on copyright enforcement. As the internet expanded, this cultural apathy to copyright law became a strong thread in “internet culture”, which developed into two parallel streams: those who believe that “I can do anything I want with anything on the internet” (wrong), and the open source & “copyleft” movements (which are fascinating applications of existing law which is worth several blog posts to themselves). At the same time traditional media businesses saw a threat to their existing revenue models and sought stronger regulations and changes to copyright law in as many jurisdictions as they could manage but without these changes working through to international treaty law.

This means that if you create content, and you have the inclination and money to enforce this internationally, the law is there which allows you to do so. However the weakness is definitely the enforcement aspect. Ironically the very changes which the traditional media businesses sought mean that if they breach your copyright it may well be worth your while suing them while it would not be worth pursuing many of the “new media” businesses.⁵

The other problem with content is while the rules on who owns the rights to use content are internationally accepted, the rules on whether the content is legal or is some sort of civil harm to someone else vary widely from place to place.

Let us consider defamation, causing harm to someone’s reputation for which one may be found liable in damages. In Common Law jurisdictions the position is more complicated due to the distinction between “slander” and “libel” depending on whether a transitory or permanent (for given values of both terms) means of communication are used. Being in Scotland where this distinction does not apply, I’ll leave it to someone else in a relevant jurisdiction to discuss at length the complications that creates there.

The problem in essence here is that there is no international standard for treatment of such communications. Not even the defence of “veritas” i.e. that a message is a truthful statement of facts is a guarantee that no legal comeback can exist. For example in Scotland (not uniquely) we have the delict of convicium, that a communication (possibly truthful) is being brought into public without good cause in such a manner as to hold someone up to public ridicule. Therefore if you send out a message that gives you no civil or criminal liability in your own country, you may not know that is true in the country it is received in. Of course if it does make you legally liable in your own country, you can hardly be surprised when your own country’s legal system holds you to account.

Equally, a person who repeats an injurious message may also be held liable: whether this is automatically done by your computer equipment or manually done, whether the message can be removed on a complaint being received, whether you make any alteration to the message, all can affect liability. If you own an internet server which simply passes on the data packets as part of normal internet traffic, without you having any knowledge of what it is, it is unlikely that you can have any liability. ⁶ Likewise if you provide a service which simply automatically republishes messages from users you should not have any liability – although if your system retains the message for future re-examination there may be issues relating to having to remove these on complaint. If however you selectively republish messages, then you are making a deliberate choice whether or not to pass this on and you have a responsibility for that action.

However, with the quick turnaround of messages, these can spread over hundreds of legal jurisdictions within a day. This is therefore an area where the problem may not be that there is no law, but there are too many conflicting laws that present a maze to traverse before enforcing through courts, during which time that message is “out there” doing its harm.

There are two obvious solutions. Firstly the internet savvy user may choose extra-judicial solutions – no, not physical violence but fighting communication with communication. Stories and reputation are the “native currency” of users in the non-existent land of Cyberspace, and with a good retort or counter-story a victim may well have become the victor in terms of reputation long before any court can consider the matter. The alternative is to “cut at the head” and raise legal action against the main person (probably the originator) who put out the message. Of course the message is still circulating out there but you include that in the claim for damages – except that if the originator has no money you can’t get blood out of a stone. That means other people who have got money and passed the message on might be brought into the firing line. There’s no point trying to get a court order (interdict or injunction depending on jurisdiction) because only some jurisdictions accept “against the world” orders, others (like Scotland) will only apply them against the parties you specify, and once the genie is out of the bottle you could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people across the world, if not millions, who have or might pass the message on.

Another approach to regulation is to use another well established international system: contract law. Because people in different countries have been making contracts with each other since…well as long as there have been different countries, the rules are there to already. If you are providing a service in Cyberspace, you can set contractual terms as to how people use that service. Every internet user will have come across these contractual rules already – they are the “Terms of Service” or “Terms of Use” that websites contain. These can, and should, contain a “Choice of Law” clause which says all use of the service is subject to the jurisdiction of X, usually the place the service provider is based but not necessarily. This will cover the interactions between users of the service, and also between users and service provider, but not third parties. So if a social media site were to say something “This is a free speech site; all users accept that they have no legal rights of action against anyone in the world for what is said here”, if the jurisdiction that contractually controls that site agrees that is enforceable then no user can sue any other user or the service provider. However, this does not affect criminal acts (which is between a user and their state) or claims by third parties who are not users.

So, Cyberspace is not a lawless frontier but simply an international system than is covered by a multitude of previously existing and new laws. The problem is having so many laws in different countries each covering a tiny bit of the “whole”. Getting international standardisation is unlikely since governments within individual countries have enough difficulty deciding what the rules should be and there is no chance that even the majority of the worlds governments can agree a common approach. If they did, based on attempts at legislation even in so called “free countries” it is likely that it would be some form of repressive approach that the majority of internet users would object to and actively oppose ultimately making it unenforceable without ending the whole internet as we know it.

Of course countries could pass laws exempting Cyberspace activities from usual rules of that country, or replacing them with different rules. But this would again be on a country by country basis, not on Cyberspace as a whole. Of course if a country passes law making a certain type of internet activity easier to carry out, such a ruling out certain types of legal action against users and/or actively making it difficult for other countries to take legal action against users or the service provider, that may very well provide an incentive for businesses to locate in that country, or at least ensure that country has jurisdiction. Back to William Gibson again⁷ -“Data haven” anyone?

–

1. “Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.” ~ Ambrose Bierce The Devils Dictionary

2. Does this make us all Plato’s Children? As referring directly to the philosopher, not to the Star Trek episode.

3. For Firefox users, I would recommend installing the very useful Flagfox plugin https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flagfox/ When you visit a web page, this shows a small flag in the address bar to indicate the country that server is located in.

4. At this point I would take this opportunity to remind all server operators, especially the US security services, to CHANGE THE DEFAULT PASSWORDS on your systems. Even though unauthorised access to your system is illegal in your country, not taking even basic security precautions is like leaving your doors and windows wide open to the world.

5. Those who live by the writ, die by the writ.

6. Of course there are countries which want Internet Service Providers to monitor traffic, and possibly inspect data to make sure it doesn’t contain undesirable information. Whether we would be happy to have similar laws having our postal service tell the government the amounts of mail we receive from various senders, or even steam open our envelopes to report of what they contain I leave to you to consider.

7. Actually he wasn’t the first to use this term, but his books did a lot to popularise it.

Software for nothing and your clicks for free

One of the expenses of setting up and running an office is software. With a certain popular word processor/office program coming in at a couple of hundred pounds per user, the costs for even a small legal office can soon build up. You pay for it when you get it, then every couple of year you need to pay for another “upgrade”.  Of course no lawyer is going to buy one copy and “pirate” in on all their users computers are they – that would be breach of copyright! While everyone is going to need a word processor, that doesn’t go for all programs, so perhaps you can trim costs by making sure that some packages are only installed for a couple of users, who do all of that type of work for the whole office.

Or perhaps you can get your programs at a price of zero: welcome to the world of Free and Open Source software.

Now lawyers will be among the first to say “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”, but the price for something needn’t be in money. There are two types of computer program you can legally get and use without paying for them. Often they are described as “free as in beer” (meaning you don’t have to pay for it) and “free as in speech” (meaning you can modify and pass it on). For the sake of this post I’ll call the first type “Freeware” and the second “Open Source”. As an end user the difference between the two may be academic; the legal distinctions are fascinating but lets leave that for another time.

The only real concern you may have is that Freeware, like all proprietary programs, keeps the code private; if the supplier stops supporting it or goes out of business that’s the end of that program. If it uses a proprietary file format, you may be stuck using a piece of software that is getting older and older simply to access files you cannot otherwise use. With Open Source, other programmers can take up where the original supplier left off developing the program, and if need be they can examine how the data files are constructed and develop something to transfer the date into a more modern product.

There are a number of reasons why people make and distribute free software. Sometimes a paid for program may have a reduced features freeware version: this is both a sample of and advertising for the paid version; also if everyone has access to a program that uses a certain file format, it may become so popular that it is the de facto standard.

A subtype of Freeware is “Adware” – that is software that you don’t have to pay for, but contains advertising within it. Apart from the suitability of such software in an office, certain types of Adware which download “live” adverts may create security weaknesses in your network system (whether deliberately or accidentally) giving more opportunity for unauthorised access by hackers.

When it comes to software, the initial creation has all the costs, whereas distribution is virtually free. Therefore it may be that someone has written a piece of software to solve an in-house problem then releases it for anyone else who might have need of something to solve the same problem. This is particularly true of people working in academia or government bodies where commercialising the software is more difficult. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Linus Torvald’s Linux, first written when he was at the University of Helsinki. He also provides an example of the other “currency” that programmers may be seeking in writing Open Source software; renown for their coding ability and expertise. If you wrote a program that has 100,000 satisfied users, and publish the code so your peers can see it that can lead to plenty of paying job opportunities.

Another reason for releasing Freeware and Open Source is to sell subsequent support packages. For example anyone can download and install various versions of Linux operating system on their computer, but most businesses will want someone to provide technical support and who better than the company that releases the product. Other programs are effectively “data crunchers”, and the business value is in the supply of the data rather than the software. With both of these the supplier are giving up an initial capital payment for a (hopefully) long term income relationship with their customers.

So given that the “price” for the software is acceptable, what is there that you can use in your office. Well, there are many many programs, but here is a list of  some which are available for MS Windows and Macintosh operating systems.

Libre Office (http://www.libreoffice.org) is a complete office suite, word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database etc. It can load and save several different file formats (including those of MS Office), and can save directly to pdf as well.

PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org) is a database server and calls itself “The worlds most advanced open source database”. It is extremely robust, quick, and contains all the features one would expect and more.

To save money on Virus Scanner subscriptions, try Clam AV which in its MS Windows version is called ClamWin (http://www.clamwin.com)

Putting digital dictation to your secretary: the Freeware version of Express Scribe (http://www.nch.com.au/scribe/index.html) gives all the functions of a traditional transcription machine while the suppliers no doubt hope you will be attracted to some of their other paid for software to integrate with it.

Want to produce some graphics? For vector graphics try Inkscape (http://inkscape.org) while for bitmap editing you will find Gimp (http://www.gimp.org) is every bit as powerful as its commercial rivals.

Data security – comply with Data Protection requirements by encrypting and password protecting any client data leaving the office with TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org)

Of course once you have kitted out your office with these, you will still find a lack of specialist legal products for free, but hopefully the free products leave a bit more in your IT budget to shop around for the rest of what you need. Alternatively, if you are using Open Source software, why not pay someone to personalise it to exactly what you want.

Finally any discussion of Open Source software wouldn’t be complete without coming back to Linux – a whole computer operating system for free. There are many different versions, or “flavours” as they are described, of Linux these days; while it still has a reputation as “powerful but complicated”, many modern versions are designed to be used by “ordinary people” instead of computer experts, so it is quite possible to switch your workstations/laptops to one of these. Old computers can be given a new lease of life by replacing the existing large operating system with a smaller faster alternative. Even if you want to keep the workstations on MS Windows/Apple OS, you may well consider having your servers run Linux, particularly some of the versions that specialise in security. More than 60% of the internet runs on Linux machines, and computer viruses are extremely rare in Linux making it an ideal buffer to protect your other computers. All you need to do is ensure whoever deals with your IT support can deal with Linux, but that’s no different than using any other OS.

However, there is no need to switch to Linux to use Free or Open Source software as there are plenty of programs  for Windows or Mac OS. So what are you waiting for? Download some free software and click away…

Lawyers, and access to IT

There is not a lot of overlap between lawyers and IT professionals; there are a minority of lawyers who are keen on using IT (the bulk being addicted to paper and early C20th technology¹ and reluctantly dragged into using computers and the internet) but only a tiny number who can set up and maintain the required hardware or write computer programs. Likewise there are very few IT people who have any idea what it is like to practice law, and the bulk have no real contact with the legal profession until they instruct someone about a contract or copyright issue.

Of course, when you compare the two professions, one lot speak a language incomprehensible to outsiders, have esoteric debates with their peers, and spend their days and long hours into the night working on reams of text where a single punctuation mark or slight change of a word can totally change the effect; while the other lot…

Now because there is so little overlap this means that lawyers don’t know what IT solutions they need or could have, while the IT professionals don’t know what would be really useful for the lawyers. Whether because of this, or in some cases an idea that lawyers are all “loaded” and can provide a nice regular income stream, some so-called “IT professionals” provide a really bad, overpriced, service. Some examples I’ve come across recently:

• A firm was filing up the disk drive on its file server; instead of installing a larger hard drive (maybe £100 for parts and similar for time to install) the IT guy advised to buy a brand new server, couple of thousand pounds for the hardware and couple of days chargeable time to install.  There was absolutely no technical reason to replace the hardware; while the existing machine was a couple of years old, it was  justbeing an electronic filing cabinet, which it would continue to do perfectly adequately without adding further “bells and whistles” that would not be used.
• An IT guy advising that having TrueCrypt (free disk encryption software) on ones computer was highly suspicious and probably indicated one was involved in criminal activities. On the contrary it may indicate merely that one is complying with data protection legislation, making sure any client data leaving the office on USB storage is encrypted and password protected.
• Someone was asked to write a bespoke program to run in MS Word to perform a certain function for a lawyers office. This was then added to every single template the firm used, massively increasing their size, even though the task involved only needed the function to be available on one template. ²

In each case, the lawyer was fully satisfied at the time with the service they were given, and paid considerable sums for this, simply because they didn’t know any better.

It’s interesting that in both professions, the less able practitioners attempt to bamboozle their clients with technical terms, while the very best are experts at putting everything into plain language that their clients can understand perfectly. The client might not need to know every technical detail, but they do need to know the effect of what is proposed, and if they do ask about the technicalities you should be able to give a full explanation that they can understand.

One major difference between the two is that legal profession is highly regulated with specific standards and an easy route for clients to use a “rigorous” complaints system for free (i.e. paid for by the legal profession), while IT professionals are self regulating without a unitary professional body and no obligation on them to even join any such body. The argument for this  is that as access to justice is such an important element of modern life it is too important to leave to the profession to regulate itself. However, one could well argue that IT plays such an important daily role in modern life that errors can have devastating consequences and therefore on the same argument it is equally too important to allow the IT profession to regulate itself either³.

Be that as it may, in the event that a lawyer does find that IT services were less than adequate (and of course this may well not be found out until something goes devastatingly wrong considerably later), the only option is to sue for negligence, with all the costs and issues of proof that involves. If the service was merely adequate, it will do its job, but the lawyer will not be aware that it could function better, or that a cheaper option could have been used.

There are many excellent IT professionals out there, who are determined to do their best and keep costs as low as possible for their clients, but sometimes the problem is they don’t know precisely how a lawyers business operates, and it will take a lot of time on both sides working together to draw out what is the best solution. That is time during which the lawyer is not feeing and the IT professional is.

One option for a legal firm looking for an IT solution use a supplier that specialises in providing services to the legal profession. While this is usually a safe bet, these often have a generic package that they sell to every customer rather customising the product for each. Also they will be salesmen, trying to sell you as much as they can rather than what you absolutely need, and as “specialists” their prices can be on the high side.

Another option is to engage a consultant who is familiar with both the legal profession and the IT world to act as “translator” between the two sets of professionals. Such a consultant can find out what you actually want and need and produce the specifications for the best possible product for the job  as quickly as possible.  Since they are not tied to a particular supplier, they can offer a wider range (including the option of free software⁴)

As with many circumstances, this is a situation where paying for an expert to act as intermediary can end up a lot more cost effective than going direct to the supplier, unless you already know exactly what you want. For an example familiar to many lawyers, compare it with using an independent or a tied financial advisor. Equally, once you have found a good consultant, you can use them again and again when required without being tied to a specific vendor, and they will be familar with your history and be able to deal with your new requirements even quicker.

Or you can go out and spend a few years studying the subject yourself…

1 There are even some legal firms out there still dictating using cassettes!
2 The quality of the code also (unsurprisingly) left a lot to be desired, lacking any documentation or comments, virtually every variable global and using generic names, “spaghetti code”,  and so many other design flaws that if it weren’t for copyright issues I’d publish it as a guide how not to write a program.
3 Equally one could argue in the opposite direction that the legal profession is over-regulated. Pay your money & take your choice.
4 In a future post I’ll explain about free and open source software…

In memoriam

Eight years. Two thousand seven hundred and forty-one clients. Three Thousand Seven Hundred and forty-two cases. Five complaints (all Legal Aid cases).

Bill Robinson, ABA President: “ultimate success of one’s life is the degree to which you help others”.

That is all.

Carborundum

A lot has happened over the last couple of weeks, very little of which has been good news. Some day I will discuss the details, but this is not the time. Sufficient to say, the emotional effect was pretty much like being in a car crash only to be mugged by the ambulance crew.

The immediate effect was to pretty much undo most of the recovery I had made over the previous month, both physically and mentally. Due to basically being (repeatedly) lied to by certain people we should be able to trust, I had some serious anger and emotional turmoil, leading to a couple of adrenaline charged days with very little sleep (and one night with none whatever) which used up all the physical reserves I’d built up again.

The stress of events also knocked back my mental recovery: being given hope of things getting better only to have it snatched away by the same people is crueller than not having it at all.

During this time Mrs HL has also been severely worn down by the particular events. We’ve had tremendous support by a whole range of people; online and locally in “real life” there’s a lot of goodwill and moral support. It’s only the people who could and should actually be helping us who seem to be putting obstacles in our way, making a difficult situation worse. So we’ve got some very tough decisions to make, and some hard times to go through – harder than they really need to be. Bizarrely now that she has made so much progress in resolving the original problem, it’s now the “help” that is the biggest problem.

The hardest thing for me is watching Mrs HL getting so ground down by what is going on, with so little I can do to help, and with no-one else there to give her support. Really she needs someone else to give her not just moral support but practical advice and assistance to help her work through all this, since the people who are supposed don’t seem to be capable of doing so.  She has made big steps in resolving matters, but it is taking its toll and she often ends the day quite demoralised. It is perhaps fortunate that she usually starts the day full of fighting spirit when I’m down, and by the time she’s used that all up I’m in a more normal frame of mind, so we can support each other.

The one bright spot in our lives is the children, especially Wee One 2.0 who is busy trying to learn to walk and saying his first words and babbling away. However some of the joy of such a time is worn away by the other things going on, and their potential impact on our family life.

One of the decisions that I’m going to have to make is whether I return to legal practice at all, or at least in the foreseeable future. I’d already accepted that there would be some sort of delay while I recovered, but in light of more recent developments I’m wondering whether I want to at all. It would be big step after all these years, and I’ll need to think what else I would want to do. I could simply switch over to my IT side, but employed or self employed? Self employment would take longer to make money, employment would depend on what is available. Alternatively, I could look at some form of consultancy or management work. A lot of options, and how quickly I can recover will play quite a part: on the other hand doing some regular work, of a completely different sort than before, may well help my mental recovery; I’m not well adjusted to “doing nothing”.

Legal academia wouldn’t be a bad option, but in the circumstances not really viable yet – that would cost money rather than bring any in. What those people who should be helping us have done is costing us a lot of money (arguably completely unnecessarily), so any decision about what I do in the near future is going to depend a lot on financial considerations. There’s a lot of irony in that, but that’s a topic for another time.

After having spent a stressful year working 60+ hour weeks, a full time employed job might actually be quite restful. A “mere” 40-odd hours a week, doing something different might well be a “change as good as a rest”. It’s something I’ll be thinking on, whether on a temporary basis, or even permanently depending on what the job might be.

That’s not to say that I definitely will not return to legal practice in the future, but at the moment it’s not looking as appealing as it could.

So if anyone has suggestions for a suitable new job for me, feel free to pass them on.

Ups and downs and am I me?

So things move on; as much as I would like the world to stop and let me get off for a break, it’s not going to happen. Sometimes that’s helpful. I’ve discovered however weak and powerless my legs might feel, Wee One 2.0 crying will galvanise them into action (however sore they might be after).

But in many ways it’s not. Mrs HL has been left to deal with many difficult and complex things, especially with the business,  effectively by herself and under a lot of stress. Quite apart from the normal difficulties of keeping everything running (which I know from during her illness exactly what a strain that is), she has to deal with the crisis that tipped me over the edge in the first place.

According to medical advice I should have nothing to deal with sorting any of this, but according to my heart I have to do anything I can to help her. Plus of course if I knew that was dealt with, it would be one less distraction from recovery.

Now I seem to have developed a fairly stable pattern for a while – wake up at ridiculous hours unable to sleep again, tired and weak but not particularly emotional, slide down into a depressed state of one level or another then start to pick up again afternoon until feeling emotionally “normal” and only physically impaired in the evening. But just now this pattern seems to be changing; whether it is medication effects, changing circumstances, I don’t know.

I started the “day” at dark o’clock after a few hours sleep, couldn’t get back to sleep so spent some time quietly doing stuff. Some hours later the rest of the household started to wake, and Mrs HL went off to the office. We’d worked out what some of the practical implications of events, so I tried to take these one by one to try to see practical options for each of them. One, fairly important one, was financial arrangements for the business.

Suddenly I felt an enormous burst of calm and peace that I hadn’t felt for so long come over me; I felt energised, all the weakness washed away, and suddenly I had what seemed an amazing idea – divine inspiration even. It seemed so simple, so obvious, and would remove so many problems at once. Suddenly I had to rush to see about it, get things done.

The  sudden thought came to me. A whole pattern of how this could work formed almost fully formed in my mind, but I’ll not bore anyone with the details. But it had all the details… When I sit and go through it step by step it all seems logical and functional, the legalities are all covered – but was I too optimistic when I thought it could work, or too pessimistic when I believe it can not?

So then I sat down to plan it all, step by step and it seemed possible. But then the optimism and excitement started to drain away. I felt doubtful, it was too easy, too silly even. It was something I’d never heard of being done, and why would it work? The sudden burst of energy was gone and I felt physically exhausted again with muscles aching as if I’d been exercising.

Was it a manic episode or a genuinely inspired idea? An effect of the medication starting to work, or a symptom of the illness; a sign of getting better or getting worse.  Was I high, or have I been low so long that normality now seems unreasonably up? What is frightening is the uncertainty this creates about how reliable my own thought processes are. Especially for someone whose work relies on clear thinking.

I actually typed it all then hesitated to publish it. I selected it for deletion then left it a couple of times. I’m vacillating over a couple of paragraphs describing an idea, for heavens sake. That’s not me! I can take decisions, it’s been my job over many years now to listen to other peoples situations and help them take decision for goodness sake. What has happened to me,  the real me, the me who can get things done! That it my real concern.

So I’ll not describe my idea. But even if it isn’t a good plan for us, perhaps it will give the seeds of an idea for someone else.  So, I spoke to a few people I trust, and decided to delete it all. Some thought it was a great idea in principle. Maybe when I’m feeling better I’ll describe it, when it might benefit someone else.

What it does bring up though is why don’t the Law Society run a members credit union? Or maybe it would be more the thing the Scottish Law Agents Society would do?

Why would a bunch of Solicitors want to lend money to someone they don’t know who is a competitor in the same profession? And in a business where at least one of the partners is ill and likely to be unable to practice for some indeterminate time? Well for one, it is someone else in the same profession and we have always had professional courtesy and support for each other rather than outright competition. For another, the interest; we don’t expect to borrow money from anyone for free, and why should the banks get all the benefit. Someone who had some spare capital might be quite happy to invest it in private loans for 5 or 10 years for more interest than it gets at the bank. Whatever, I would certainly be happier putting my savings into that than with the banks the way things are just now.

But more importantly, as I fight my way back to feeling normal, I now have a big question: How will I recognise “normal”? That scares me.

Dante’s Holiday Tours

When I started this blog, I wasn’t meaning to write a lot about myself personally. However recent events means that I have been learning a whole lot of new stuff in in a very personal way.  Since “informing and entertaining” is my goal, perhaps sharing my new lessons can help at least someone out there at some time.

When I got ill, I was feeling all sorts of things physically and emotionally. I knew I needed medical help – collapsing or the floor does sort of give one a clue – and was quite happy to take the doctor’s advice and whatever treatment was prescribed. This included the pills; when one lot was for “anxiety and depression”, I took it as being the overall description of them. I was certainly suffering anxiety, but not depression… little did I realise that the depression was to follow.

Depression. What an innocuous little word. Until now I hadn’t realised that it means “all inclusive holiday package in the depths of Hell”. Not the hell of firey pits and pitchforks. It’s like the old Norse hell, a freezing desolate wasteland of loneliness and isolation.

I’m lucky: I have daily episodes, like little excursions to provide some variety from the periods of anxiety and exhaustion, rather than being a full time resident in the depths. It has given me some interesting insights that I can share.

Firstly, I can understand why depressed people self harm. When the depression hits, the aches and pains of my muscles from my exercises give me something to focus on, something physical pulling me into action from the freezing mental snowbanks. But sometimes, the depression is deep enough to mute or remove the pains, and that feels worse.  That lets me understand why someone would self harm; for the physical pain which says “I am still alive”, a goad to keep going.

I’ve often heard people say about suicides “how selfish”. But if you are a full time resident in hell, escape looks mighty attractive, “sensible” even for a certain viewpoint. Myself, I have a wife I love dearly, and the children; I would die for them if necessary, so surely I must be prepared to live for them even more so. Also as a “day tripper” to this particular hell I know that I don’t need that route: but it has intensely taught me to understand a very different viewpoint that before I could only have an intellectual understanding of.

My other new experience has been insomnia. I go to bed, I fall asleep, a few hours later I’m fully physically awake but still tired in mind and body. I try not to toss and turn too much, completely fail to get back to sleep, then tiptoe up so not to wake anyone and find something to occupy myself. Just what I need to recover from exhaustion…

What I find so hard to deal with is letting go of work. The doctor told me I must concentrate on getting well, then deal with work. But I’ve put so many years into building up the business, and just as a bolt from the blue threatens all we’ve done and built I’m not able to help Mrs HL deal with it. It’s not the absence from work, it’s the absence at a time of crisis, the feeling that I’m failing other people. The emotional turmoil is intense.  When the depression hits, all the doubts are magnified a thousandfold: I feel guilty that I can’t do much about it, and if I let myself dwell on it too long I feel anxiety turning to blind panic. But then one of the Wee Ones will need something, and an innocent child leads me upwards from my hell to at least temporary salvation.

I thank all of you who have given me messages of support and encouragement; it has been a help. I must especially thank various people who have shared with me their own experiences of insomnia and depression, helping a newcomer to these. You are amazingly strong people to have dealt with these; I pray I can be as strong as you. The road ahead is long and dark but I will not abandon all hope as I enter…

Last straws and rays of light

This is a difficult post to write in so many ways. Partly to keep it relevant and prevent it simply being an incoherent ramble.

On a January morning I was in the office, working away much as usual. It’s been a difficult year: Mrs HL was unexpectedly seriously ill when having Wee One 2.0, as in really, really seriously ill, and needed to continue medical treatment afterwards, followed by a requirement to rest or light duties only. In the meantime I’d done the hours to keep everything ticking over in the “challenging” financial climate. I was feeling somewhat tired and had the occasional “why am I doing this” moment, but otherwise generally upbeat and looking forward to Mrs HL returning to full time work in the office.

In the office we have an expensive piece of proprietary software we bought some time ago. What the program does is not relevant to this post. Unknown to us this program contained a bug. It also used a proprietary data system; which means while were provided with a “data extraction” tool, we cannot access the full contents of what it has or has not done. They say “To err is human, to really f*ck things up requires a computer”, and this proved to be the case.

So, I looked at what this piece of software was saying, and thought something looked odd. I checked a few other details, and saw this was obviously wrong. In fact seriously wrong, as in WTF! wrong. In a matter of minutes things had changed from “everything is just ticking over fine” to “we have a big problem”.¹

This turned out to be the last straw. Actually the exact cause probably doesn’t matter to most people reading this blog, but I’m still saying what it was anyway.² Maybe one day when addressing an IT/programming audience I’ll point to this and say – just because your program isn’t for something like air traffic control, doesn’t mean that bugs won’t hurt someone. But I digress…

In retrospect I’d been running on adrenaline for a lot of the last year and this was too much. I really can’t recall much about the rest of the day. I collapsed at one point with head whirling and heart racing, and was taken home where somehow I managed to tell Mrs HL what this new problem was. I was passed a telephone and talked to the doctor at one point, and some pills arrived later.

What I do remember was the pain of the simple task of breathing. After many a long distance race or endurance training I’ve experienced that achy chest of drawing in lungfuls of air in a last gasp finish, but this was an entirely different type of pain, cutting through my whole body. Also, the incoherent babbling of some uncontrolled part of my brain, down below shouting out the “me” part that usually makes decisions based on coherent thoughts.

So the medical diagnosis was a combination of physical exhaustion/fatigue and stress with severe anxiety/panic. I got medication, dosage being tweaked with instructions as to how much rest and exercise to do. It shows how false the common distinction is between “physical illness” and “mental illness” – they are both just “illness” with most cases having a bit of both. The physical treatment is familiar – I’ve had my share of rehabilitation exercises from sports injuries, this just seems like the same only for the whole body. I do some exercise, I get exhausted, I rest, repeat accordingly. The mental side is different.

The mornings are the worst. I wake up with a start, sometimes confusing and meaningless thoughts racing through my head, sometimes just with a general but unspecified anxiety. I take my pills, and spend some time just breathing and meditating or giving Wee One 2.0 some milk until that noisy part of my brain calms down or can get overridden by “logical me”. Some days I have severe nausea, sometimes just lack of appetite, but that normally disappears by the afternoon or evening.

I admit that at one point early on thoughts of suicide did pop into my head; not as some form of escape, but as a pseudo logical solution to the finances of the firm. I did reject that pretty instantly, as no amount of money from life policies would replace me for Mrs HL and the Wee Ones, and what is the point of putting all that money in the business if the business cannot actually run afterwards. However, it was both frightening, and an important lesson how it might seem attractive to someone who was depressed and unable to think so clearly.

Am I burnt out? I don’t think so – I still have a desire to carry on working in the same job, and still hold the same principles dear and true about law, justice and “how things should be done”. Whether I will be physically able to, and how soon I will be fit enough to do so is a different question, at present I just have to take one breath, one morning, one day at a time.

However, what has got me through things so far, and maybe stopped me from being burnt out, has been the support I’ve had from other people. In the darkest hours, they’ve been little rays of light keeping me going forward, making it worthwhile fighting through the pain of some of those breaths. People who’ve been willing to pray for me when my own faith has been weakest; someone who has suffered major personal loss and major surgery letting me know how supportive they’ve felt I’ve been in the past and passing it back; even just little expressions of concern, sympathy and virtual hugs on Twitter.³ If you’ve ever thought whether or not to give a little word of support to someone, do it – you may never realise what a big help it may give in some cases.

It still looks dark. That problem that appeared still has to be fixed, and like so many others we used all our financial resources clearing off debts, so now we need cash again but lending is tighter than ever. Assuming we do get it, being in a similar financial position to when Mrs HL & I first started our business, but instead of being young and independent, having a couple of small children will not be pleasant. I feel guilty (unjustifiably, but undeniably) that my illness will affect the business; with me unable to work or doing less work until I recover what will happen to turnover, client footfall and ultimately the staff? We have a trainee starting later in the year, will I be recovered enough by then to start my side of the training, or will we need to reorganise our training schedule to give me more recovery time? All these and others are the more coherent thoughts that whirl past in the stream of panic in the twilight between sleeping and waking, and that I slowly and methodically try to chip away at with Mrs HL in my more logical hours.

But in the evenings, when the panic has faded, resting from my exercises, there is another more cerebral concern that unwinds in my thoughts. That is from some of those little rays of light, the words of support I have received from people I deeply respect for their passion & compassion, justice and good works, pillars of legal society, the “good guys” for whom the law is more than a business to profit from. The number of them who offer support from their experience: “when I had my heart attack…”; “when I collapsed with…”; “when I started having panic attacks…” “when I had my angina…”. A silent epidemic, that I’d never heard of until I joined their numbers.

I don’t consider I’m a workaholic, and never sought to make a vast fortune; I’ve always considered work life balance important, kept time free for the family. All I’ve done is tried to do enough work to maintain a business that I believe in, look after clients, make a living wage and support people I care for.

I’ve got no smart summary or clever comments to add to this. No lessons, quotes from great philosophers, religious texts, or even puns. All I have is my own story, and invite you to take from it what you will.

1. And no, it’s not something covered by the PII.

2. Oh, and we can’t sue the company that sold us the software, because they’re no longer in business. Just confirms my belief that if you aren’t using Open Source software, it should at least use an open standards data format. That would make it a lot easier to track exactly what it did wrong.

3. You all know who you are. Thanks from the bottom of my heart, and know that you have made a difference.

A living wage from Legal Aid? The tale of Petunia Perfect

Petunia Perfect, the perfect Solicitor, sets up her Legal Aid practice in Scotland in November 2011. She is 5 years qualified now, so able to be a sole practitioner, but she’s going to stick to working 9 to 5 with an hour for lunch, 5 days a week, with 28 days a year holiday.

Since she is only doing Legal Aid work, obviously her fee income is going to be based on SLAB rates. These are quite complicated, but attendance with a client under Advice & Assistance is £51 per hour. Since Petunia Perfect is perfect therefore every single hour of her working week earns this rate; she saves up all her work on correspondence, preparing papers etc. until she has enough that she can bang enough of them out within an hour that she will still get the £51.

She does all her CPD outside office hours, never does pro bono work, and never even sees a client in the office who won’t qualify for Legal Aid. Every minute of every working day is spent earning that £51 per hour.

For, at 35 hours a week, 48 weeks a year of perfect work, her accounts to SLAB will be £85,680.00. Pretty good fee income don’t you think.

But wait: that is gross fee income, which need to have all the costs of the work deducted. So what does she need to spend?

First off, before she even sees her first client she needs to pay for her annual Practising Certificate from the Law Society of Scotland – that’s £1295. Before she can get that, she needs to pay for her Professional Indemnity Insurance: as sole practitioner who has never had a claim against her (she’s perfect after all), with Insurance tax included that’s £5157.96. She is also required to do Compulsory Professional Development (CPD), so let’s say that costs her £1000.

Then she has her office. Using national average statistics for 2011 of £138 per square metre, for a 150 sq.m. office that is £20,700. However, we’ll assume she qualifies for the Small Business Rates scheme, so has 100% rates discount.

She needs all the furnishings and equipment for the office, which we’ll keep pretty basic and capitalise over 5 years, so that’s £2500 per year. Add on stationery – paper, toner etc. and that’s another £2000 per year.

She has a single member of staff, who is also pretty perfect. He is able to be receptionist, secretary, practice manager and cashier, so can do absolutely every non-fee earning task for Petunia, but he’s so enamoured with her perfectness that he’ll do all this work for National Minimum Wage. He also has perfect attendance – never sick so never needs a substitute. Working 9 to 5, with usual paid holidays and Employers National Insurance, that comes to £14,265.14 per year Petunia Perfect needs to pay out.

Since she has an employee, she needs Employers Liability Insurance, as well as Buildings, Contents, and Occupiers/Public Liability Insurance; since she’s perfect she gets this all at a snip for £250 per year. She also gets a deal on her telephone/fax/internet of £1000 per year, and on Heat & Light (electricity) of £2500. Postage costs her about £500 per year. She’s just so perfect.

Also, when you do Legal Aid, if a client has an outlay to pay, you don’t get that from SLAB until you get your account paid, so in effect you need to lend the client/SLAB the money. Petunia Perfect can afford to do this from her own capital, so all it is costing her is the interest she loses – rates are poor now, so say 0.5% interest on £10,000 – that’s  £50.00

So totting up all these expenses we get:

Law Society Practising Certificate	1,295.00
Professional Indemnity Insurance	5,157.96
CPD	1,000.00
Rent	20,700.00
Office Equipment	2,500.00
Stationery	2,000.00
Employee (Minimum Wage)	14,265.14
Insurance	250.00
Telephone/Fax/Internet	1,000.00
Heat & Light	2,500.00
Postage	500.00
Interest	50.00
Total	51,218.10

That’s £51,218.10 to deduct from the fees of £85,680.00, leaving an annual gross income of £34,461.90

Give the sole employee a more reasonable salary – say £8 per hour? That will cost Petunia £18,936.32, dropping her income to £29,790.72

Now, of course since Petunia Perfect is perfect, she doesn’t need to spend anything on advertising, which for most firms would be at least a few hundred pounds a year. Since her work is perfect she never gets any abatements from SLAB, which most firms are reporting at around 10% upwards of fees lodged. Since her employee is perfect, she never needs to spend any time on admin. so gets to charge 100% of her working time (most Solicitors are pleased if they can bill 80% of their time; plus of course most such highly trained staff would want more than National Minimum Wage). She’s got no finance to service, no provision for repairs, maintenance, water rates, or sundry expenses.

If you were to factor in all of these, someone less perfect would have a lot more costs from less income. So Peter Practice, his NMW employee is not so efficient as Petunia’s therefore Peter only manages 80% of his time billed to SLAB, and SLAB abates this 10% – that’s £61689.60 fees from SLAB. Even Petunia Perfect’s expenses would leave him only £10,471.50 income, which is less than minimum wage. Also he spends £500 a year on advertising, he’s got water rates of £200 a year, puts aside £200 per year for repairs & maintenance and another £100 for sundry expenses.  Also he needs finance to cover the outlays, that’s 8% on £10,000 is £800 interest. That leave’s Peter working full time for £8,671.50 or £5.16 per hour with no paid time off – time to find another job Peter!

But let’s get back to Petunia’s original gross income of £34,461.90. How does that compare to other graduates. Well let’s see, and just for comparison we will include NMW as well.

Average Salary (2011) of

NMW Worker:	£12,646.40
Petunia Perfect:	£34,461.90
Teacher:	£35,000
Police Officer:	£39,000
HMRC Civil Servant:	£40,915
Train Driver:	£42,000
Police Inspector:	£58,000
Salaried GP:	£63,000
Backbench MP:	£65,738

So Petunia gets less than an average teacher, and that’s without any pension, paid holidays, sick leave or other benefits; if she is sick or wants maternity leave, that reduces her income, and she needs at least a few thousand a year out of it to pay into a pension scheme, which all the others get on top of their salary.   Of course that’s also paying her employee NMW only – if she pays him more, she’ll drop even further below the teacher’s income.  And this is for Petunia Perfect doing Legal Aid work, as we’ve already seen it’s very easy for that to drop well below National Minimum wage: poor Peter Practice, he’s off to become a train driver!

Am I arguing that Legal Aid rates need to go up? Not necessarily. It is theoretically possible to make a decent living wage on Legal Aid, operating on bare minimum costs (or cross subsidising these with private client work) if all work done can be charged and paid but the killer is the administration which cuts into chargeable time, and the (apparently unjustified) abatements of fees by SLAB.

The provision of free finance to SLAB is a nuisance but on these figures not an overall major cost. Late payment by SLAB, affecting cash flow and meaning that one has to pay income tax on fees rendered but not actually paid are much more significant issues.

There’s also an issue not covered above that if a client “recovers or preserves” property, their Legal Aid account has to be settled from this property. Quite apart from the fairness or otherwise to the client in various circumstances (you manage to avoid your house being repossessed, but then have to sell it to pay the legal bill!) this often leads to the Solicitor acting as unpaid collection agent, pursing the client for the money due under Legal Aid but not being paid for anything involved in this.

There’s also frequent arguments with SLAB about whether there has been a “recovery or preservation” (which again is unpaid time), such as “this client was advised what they can do at the Small Claims Court; they may or may not raise an action but they have 5 years in which they can do so; we therefore consider there is a potential recovery and you don’t get paid until they raise the court action, when you demand the money off them, or when the 5 years is finished”, or “this client got their spouses share of the family home worth £x thousand in exchange for taking over £x thousand of debt; we are disregarding the taking over of the debt and hold there to be a recovery of £x thousand, client must pay the Legal Aid bill.”¹

If more of the red tape were removed, and Solicitors had no doubt that for providing certain work to a client they would get a certain and prompt payment from SLAB, there would be more willingness to provide Legal Aid work. How do we go about doing this, while still maintaining accountability to ensure taxpayers money isn’t used unnecessarily? That’s a question that will need to be worked out between the legal profession, SLAB and the politicians.

Providing detailed, itemised accounts is no doubt a useful tool to ensure that work is being properly carried out.  However, fewer and fewer Law Accountants will now prepare Legal Aid accounts (and of course if they do they charge a percentage fee which eats into the resulting income) which means that Solicitors or their staff need to prepare these, eating into chargeable time.

However it is particularly galling to do 2 years work, lodge an account then be told that SLAB hold the last item they will accept as chargeable was halfway through, it is therefore more than a year since the last work they accept as covered, so you will get paid nothing.² That is an extreme example, but it is commonplace to be told that several items in a file are not accepted for payment, or are to be abated because SLAB do not consider the work was actually needed – appointment with client was too long³, deed should be “formal” i.e. a standard “insert name here” style instead of bespoke for the clients instructions. Unfortunately this leads to cases where SLAB state they will only pay for certain work, but the Law Society considers that only doing only that work is “inadequate professional service” or even professional negligence to the client – leaving the Solicitor damned if they don’t and damned unpaid if they do.

As SLAB now require all Legal Aid practitioners to use Legal Aid Online, perhaps Solicitors could lodge accounts of work item by item as it is done, and have each of these accepted or not as lodged – even if the fee itself is only going to be paid at the end. At least that way Solicitors would know what was going to be paid and if SLAB do not want to pay any more the Solicitor can tell the client (who can argue this directly with SLAB) instead of carrying on doing work which will never be paid (or pursue the client for payment on the basis that the work was assessed retrospectively to not be under the Legal Aid Scheme, knowing that the client does not in fact have any money to pay a bill). Also if an increase on authorised expenditure is needed (an initial grant of Advice & Assistance only authorises £95 of fees and outlays), all the details of what has been done to date are there, simplifying the request to increase this. No need for stage reports or peer review – everything is there in front of SLAB as it is done.

Alternatively, set up an independent Auditor; the Solicitor simply submits the final file to the Legal Aid Auditor who fixes a “fair and reasonable Legal Aid fee”, tells the Solicitor how much it is and instructs SLAB to settle that amount. This removes any certainty from the Solicitor of how much will be paid, but reduces the administration required and guarantees the prompt payment. It also reduces the number of staff needed at SLAB itself. Not perfect, but arguably an improvement over what is happening just now.

Also, if there is a claim of “recovery” by the client, deal with it directly between SLAB and the client, not SLAB to Solicitor, Solicitor to client, client to Solicitor, Solicitor to SLAB, repeat ad nauseam.

However, what will certainly NOT reduce costs is to replace private Solicitor Legal Aid with SLAB employed Solicitors (Civil Legal Assistance Office or Public Defence Solicitor’s Office) because SLAB will need to pay for all the same expenses as a private firm but is not permitted to pay the Solicitor less than Minimum Wage and almost certainly will need to pay at least as much as Petunia Perfect is earning, with pensions, Employers National Insurance and other benefits on top.

Note 1: Both these examples taken from genuine client cases.
Note 2: So is this one; apparently it is not enough for a client to give instructions by letter, they need to telephone or physically attend to confirm that you are still instructed by them. Go figure. Incidentally, SLAB also don’t pay for you to read instructions given by letter or email, only by telephone or in person .
Note 3: Never have worked out how a civil servant in Edinburgh can tell that an upset and emotional client giving the detailed history of 20 years of domestic abuse of self and children only needed 30 minutes instead of the hour they actually took. Presumably that’s why I don’t work for SLAB – insufficient psychic abilities.

So, why exactly am I practising Law again?

After one of those long days after struggling with the Scottish Legal Aid Board to get them to actually pay the pittance due for Legal Aid work done; dealing with a client who is complaining that we did not make them a multimillionaire in the process of their divorce from their unemployed penniless spouse; taking instructions from someone who has just walked in the door with tomorrow being the last date to oppose their home repossession; at the same time trying to sit down with a 40 page commercial lease that needs quick turn around for the business client who has workers and contractors on standby for completion; and all the other similar tasks that makes practice so much fun, you sometimes ask yourself “What on earth am I doing this job for?”

It certainly isn’t for the money. I could immediately increase income by moving from rural to a city firm, and/or dropping all Legal Aid work. That wouldn’t get rid of all the stress, but it would be more lucrative. As they say “Money can’t buy happiness, but it can make your misery a lot more comfortable”.

It isn’t lack of other options. I have a sideline in IT – I could drop the legal profession and switch to that full time and make at least a similar income; alternatively I could apply to work for half a dozen different managerial or other type jobs which would probably make more.

The reason that I stick in at the practice of Law ultimately is because I believe in justice and I want to provide people with access to justice. Now Law is not automatically the same thing as Justice but it can be a route to it. For this we need to consider “The Rule of Law” and “Rule by Law”.

Rule by Law means that there is a set of rules or laws stating what is or is not permitted by the government, which will be applied identically to everyone. However as Anatole France said “La loi, dans un grand souci d’égalité, interdit aux riches comme aux pauvres de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain” or as commonly abridged in English “One Law for Rich and Poor Alike; No Stealing Bread or Sleeping Under Bridges”. In essence it is the ability of the governors, the rich, the powerful, to control the rest of society as they see fit.

The Rule of Law on the other hand includes the principle that “All are equal before the law”. Obviously everyone is not “equal” in the sense of having identical abilities, opportunities or resources. However, everyone has equal rights to use the law to protect themselves and regulate their lives; every person is just as “important” as every other so far as the legal system is concerned. An individual can sue the government just the same as the other way around; rich and poor, weak or powerful, all have the same redress to the courts to access justice.

So, if there are members of society who do not have access to knowledge of the law or use of the courts, we no longer have Rule of Law, and justice is replace by privilege. That is real access, not theoretical access. So financial constraints should not prevent access; location, being in a rural rather than urban area, should not prevent access. That means some form of Legal Aid system needs to exist so that those in financial need can access the Law as of right, not from charity; that means good quality lawyers need to be spread across the country (not some call centre system).

So that’s why me, and others like me, do this job with all its problems, stresses and strains. More money would be nice, but at the end of the day so long as we can make a living wage there are more important things in life. To amend a quote from a rather well drafted historical document: “Non enim propter gloriam, diuicias aut honores pugnamus set propter justitiam” For it is not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for justice.