Among sayings that can be thrown at armchair commentators on the Israel/Hamas conflict, the most striking one for me comes from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein:
'Wherof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'.
I am slightly above the bottom rung of those entitled to comment. I have personal connections to the Jewish community, and did a Masters dissertation on the intersection of law and history in relation to the Holocaust.
Nevertheless I try to tread carefully on the subject of Israel, although I repeat now what I wrote on LinkedIn a week or so ago: Hamas are terrorists, and you can't do peace negotiations with terrorists
But I reckon I can talk confidently on one subject:
I owe my career as a Gentile lawyer to what was once known as a Jewish law firm.
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At my University there was little careers counselling. My personal tutor said that as I was good at the commercial subjects - contract; tort; land law - I should apply to the large London law firms.
I duly did this. It was not a happy experience initially. I found the big City firms stuffy, and intimidating to someone with fragile self-confidence despite the bravado exterior. Applicants had to have a pet question. Mine was on what image the firm felt it had. I thought it was a good one, playing to the marketing side of practice.
Not so to begin with, as most City firms seemed to think that it was insulting to their status for the question to be posed, but eventually, with two firms showing serious interest in me, one of them on final interview said it was a very good question. When left with two offers I chose that firm. The firm was a large commercial West End outfit then called Nabarro Nathanson.
When in later years giving talks on my career path and being asked what was the key thing that made up my mind, I responded that I just felt comfortable with the firm and with the individuals I had met, notably having a sense that they were down to earth, or otherwise put that they were not up themselves. I was not so naive as to ignore the name, but for me this was a big firm with a Jewish name. Nothing more than that.
I got stuck in as a trainee solicitor under the two year programme then quaintly called articles of clerkship. There were Jewish partners and there were non-Jewish partners. We held them all in awe as brilliant lawyers.The culture was of high demand on quality of work product and of high support. Support included training, but the essential element was supervision. Supervision involved feedback, not just on how to do a task to best outcome but why the component parts were important. Clients' interests were at the heart of everything.
A rose-hued account? Certainly not - there were impostor syndrome days, and I found the lauded commercial awareness elusive, but I bumbled on, and somehow I started to make progress, to the point where they offered me a job on qualification.
It was a decent run after that. Once I was a year qualified they gave me a trainee solicitor to supervise, and I became a salaried partner after another two years and a full equity partner after a further three. Any lawyer will know that this is unthinkable today, but it was just how the firm did it in those days if it thought you had talent. I could do the faux modesty thing, but I must have been good, though never knowing why it worked.
Two things bring me back on topic. The first was a culture of family - they cared, and were delighted when I got engaged and then married. Even more delighted when first child was on its way, although the joke amongst the associates was that this would mean you were committed to work even harder to look after your family. Why not?
And it's the small details you remember. When I was struggling to get a mortgage to buy our first home, the head of department offered to personally guarantee my mortgage repayments, not needed in the end as I was introduced to the firm's principal bankers. Much later, when as a partner I had just come off a deal and stepped in to help a fellow partner who was near exhaustion trying to close another transaction, afterwards he drove round to my house one evening to deliver a thank you present of crystal glassware. From his own money. I am happy that I sensed family as a Jewish value.
The other thing? Not so much fun to recall. Casual anti-semitism from lawyers I encountered outside the firm. Today's phrase had not yet been invented, and I don't want to exaggerate, but it amounted to occasional snide remarks about Jewish lawyers being sharp and untrustworthy. The other barb was over our being a 'West End firm'. You needed to be in the business to understand this properly, but it was an imputation that business law firms not located in the City or in the old-school world of Holborn and the Inns of Court area, were not reputationally top-notch.
Which was absurd where directed to my firm. Yes, there were some dodgy lawyers out there in the wider lawyer community, Jewish and non-Jewish, and there were some dodgy users of law firms out there, Jewish and non-Jewish. I learnt over the years that you can be a dodgy operator with a pure Anglo Saxon background, cut-glass public school accent, and impeccable connections through the clubs of Pall Mall.
The firm's ethics were first-rate in everything I saw, but it was combined with commerciality. I struggle to explain the latter conceptually, so I will give an example from one of the (Jewish) partners. A client would come with a desired outcome to a business scenario. The partner would say that there were three possible courses of action, and each would meet the client's needs:
Option 1 was unlawful so we couldn't do that
Option 2 was lawful but the firm would breach the Solicitors Code of Conduct so we couldn't do that
Option 3 caused no problems, so let's do that one.
Commerciality, creativity if you like, but ethics were central.
I talked above of rose-hue accounts. Of course there were bad times, and there were personalities with whom I gelled and personalities with whom I did not gel. But looking back at the big picture, I fell on my feet. And I must also make clear that so much in law firms has changed culturally for the better since my time.
It's not easy to sum up in a way that looks appropriately towards what has sadly been happening. I am clumsily trying to warn against the danger of prejudice. That is judging a person, a group, or even a community or nation, with an inadequate understanding of their strengths,weaknesses, personalities, issues, history, and anything else you care to throw into the pot.
So we should be careful before we hurtle another missile of words out of the armchair. I'm delighted to recount briefly my own, as one says today, lived experience.
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The author is a writer, speaker, historian, and former Managing Partner of law firm Nabarro (now part of CMS)