Kill All The Lawyers

Kill All The Lawyers

Has the public finally lost all respect for the legal profession? In this mesmerising critique, top Sydney lawyer Michael Bradley argues that the profession has never been less popular - and it has only itself to blame. The problem lies in the way lawyers work: they reward themselves according to the second hand on the clock - imposing absurd charges on their hapless clients - and not according to their perceived 'value' as legal counsellors. In consequence the law itself has become a base commodity, manufactured and sold in precisely timed chunks - or templates - by the world's most highly remunerated assembly-line workers.

Not since Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker has a book so completely blown the whistle on a profession. Tracing a lurid history from a time when lawyers were not exactly liked but at least trusted to their present-day incarnation as time-billing rip-off merchants, Bradley urges the industry to wake up to itself and do justice to its ancient values. This finely tuned polemic - grounded in astute observation and research - is essential reading for anyone who values the law, works as a lawyer, or has ambitions of entering law.

Michael Bradley is a practising lawyer in Sydney. After 19 years with the large national law firm Gadens, progressing from graduate lawyer to Sydney managing partner at the age of 39, he left in 2008 to establish the boutique commercial firm Marque Lawyers, with the single stated ambition of completely changing the way law is practised. Named '2012 Australian Firm of the Year' by both of the leading anti-establishment legal-industry websites, RollOnFriday and Firm Spy, Marque has attracted a lot of attention due to its commitment to doing law differently. Michael writes regularly for The Australian Financial Review, and isn't short of a controversial opinion about his profession.

Kill All The Lawyers
Hampress
Author: Michael Bradley

Interview with Michael Bradley

Question: What inspired you to write Kill All The Lawyers?

Michael Bradley: It's a distillation of most of what I've been thinking about for a long time, and brought very sharply into focus for me by our experiences over the past few years since we started our own law firm and tried a completely different approach to legal practice. You feel a lot more confident making bold statements about what's wrong once you've been able to prove the principle. I do feel very strongly that the legal industry is in a deepening malaise and that something is going to have to give. This is my attempt to inject some honesty into the debate.


Question: Has the public finally lost all respect for the legal profession?

Michael Bradley: Not quite all, but close enough. If you look at how lawyers are viewed in the US, you can get a fairly clear picture of where it's going to head here and in the UK at least, because the conditions that caused the demise of the profession there exist here too. Why wouldn't the public see us as money-grubbing sharks?


Question: What are the main reasons the public has lost respect and trust for lawyers?

Michael Bradley: My thesis is that nobody ever liked lawyers, and that's no surprise. But we were held in high regard because of the importance of the lawyer's role in society as an independent and incorruptible arbiter of the rules that govern us all. The profession, particularly in the last century, became infected by the pursuit of money, progressively to the exclusion of all else, and ended up as just another business venture which is now very deeply corporatized, and the public recognised that change. At the same time however, lawyers haven't understood the implications of the change and continue to see and treat themselves as if they're on a pedestal. That creates a disconnection between self-perception and external perception which results in alienation between lawyers and the rest of the society, as basically the public has come to see us as a bunch of self-interested, pompous parasites. The loss of respect is inevitable in those conditions.

Question: How have your colleagues reacted to this book?

Michael Bradley: I haven't heard much yet, no negative feedback but it's early days. I expect some lawyers will go yeah, that's exactly right, and others will remain convinced that I'm tilting at windmills.


Question: What advice do you have for lawyers and the legal industry?

Michael Bradley: Get real. My view is that the industry faces an existential crisis of its own making, and if it doesn't get its collective head out of its collective arse and start thinking more honestly about what a lawyer is supposed to be, then we will end up being held in contempt. That's going to be very bad for everyone. So - drop the pretensions, and think about service.