Solicitors' Work and Environment

Extract

The Committee of the Cambridge University Law Society, when they honoured me with the invitation to address the society, had doubtless the expectation that a solicitor who had been in practice for between forty and fifty years might from his experience be able to explain the work and environment of the profession in a way which might be useful to those members of the society who, having determined to follow the legal profession, had not yet decided to which branch of that profession they should devote their lives. I will endeavour to fulfil that expectation. I will draw for you the picture of a solicitor's professional life and work and surroundings with such accuracy as my powers and the time at my disposal permit, not concealing its blemishes or exaggerating its merits. I hope that I shall be able to make you see the picture right. If so, you will, when I have finished, agree with me that though the highest honours and emoluments of the legal profession are not at present open to solicitors, yet theirs is a calling which renders to the community an important–indeed, an essential–service, and one to which a man of ability, and still more of character, may devote himself with confidence as affording ample scope for his energy and ambition. I claim for the profession that, properly practised, it can and does do nothing but good. Unless I were prepared to make that claim after forty-seven years' experience in the profession, I should not be here. I resent the representations by popular novelists and dramatists of the solicitor as a costs-pursuing pettifogger, if nothing worse. Dickens heads the tribe of libellers with representations which, even as caricatures, are grossly overdrawn. In his celebrated preface and first chapter of “ Bleak House ” he discloses his motive, which was the laudable one of the correction of abuses of legal procedure. At the time he was writing (the middle of the nineteenth century) those abuses no doubt prevailed. But I hope I need not assure my present audience that Messrs. Kenge and Carboy, Mr. Tulkingherne, Messrs. Spenlow and Jorkins, Messrs.