The Exquisitely English (and Lucrative) World of London Clerks
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
As office boy I made such a mark
That they gave me the post of a junior clerk
I served the writs with a smile so bland
And I copied all the letters in a big round hand
I copied all the letters in a hand so free
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navy
In serving writs I made such a name
That an articled clerk I soon became
I wore clean collars and a brand-new suit
For the Pass Examination at the Institute
And that Pass Examination did so well for me
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's NavyA very, very expensive PRNG which allegedly requires "combining academic brilliance with emotional fragility".
(I kinda understand that it's not a topic for me-the-peon to grasp)
I'm almost positive that litigation will never be fully automated. Some aspects of it already have (such as document review and discovery). But the majority of the work (negotiating with the other side, questioning witnesses, arguing pre-trial motions in court, researching legal questions, writing memos and briefs, advising clients on strategy) is far too reliant on humans to ever be replaced.
And also what is it going to cost to staff AI professionals to create and support an algorithm vs the salary savings of the 100 guys who must do that job in the UK...
Also worth noting that, at least here in Scotland, advocates (who are our equivalent of barristers) still get paid for the case even if it settles!
There are three other categories of cases you missed and (1) can and should be divided up further into two categories. The third situation arises when one party to the suit simply cannot afford to lose under any circumstances but somehow can still afford to keep paying lawyers indefinitely. Frequently you will see this with large companies fighting to prevent or delay a class action or against an adverse regulatory decision which poses an existential threat to their industry. $50m in legal bills per year doesn't even register against a multi-billion dollar class action risk.
The fourth situation is when one of the parties has a non-financial incentive to continue the litigation, often from a political perspective. For example, when Hobby Lobby in the US sued to get out of the Obamacare birth control coverage requirement. They would have spent themselves into the ground on that case because the principle mattered more to the litigants than the cost.
The fifth situation is when one or both parties have bad lawyers. We (lawyers) don't like to admit how often this happens, but frequently one of the lawyers just completely misinterprets the law or fails to recognize essential facts. They may oversell the case to the client and then paint themselves into a corner which they can't gracefully back out of, and so drag the case out well past its proper expiration date just to avoid admitting they screwed up.
Regarding your (1) point, the evidence for both sides is roughly evenly matched in some cases, so the judge or jury's interpretation of the facts will dictate the outcome. How people weigh and interpret evidence can be incredibly unpredictable, which may prevent settlement in those cases. In other cases, the law is unclear or unsettled, whether because previous cases were poorly decided, a law was poorly drafted, or the issue is truly novel. So unclear law or unclear facts. In an ideal world, those would be the only reasons that anyone would ever go to court.
All of these situations are extremely rare. In terms of quantity of cases, unfortunately people that hate each account for the overwhelming majority, though that tends to be most common where the parties have a B2C or or close business associate relationship, or in non-commercial litigation (most visibly and notably in family law cases). B2B/arms-length commercial relationship litigation tends by and large to be a more coldly rational affair, though not without exception.
One anecdote from around the same time, possibly apocryphal,
is widely shared. At a chambers that had expanded and was bringing
in more money, three silks decided their chief clerk’s compensation,
at 10 percent, had gotten out of hand. They summoned him for
a meeting and told him so. In a tactical response that highlights
all the class baggage of the clerk-barrister relationship,
as well as the acute British phobia of discussing money,
the clerk surprised the barristers by agreeing with them.
“I’m not going to take a penny more from you,” he concluded.
The barristers, gobsmacked and paralyzed by manners, never
raised the pay issue again, and the clerk remained on at
10 percent until retirement.
A penny being the smallest unit of currency. So he's simply stating that he'll not take any more money in recognition of the fact that he was very well compensated.
This implicitly discounts the possibility to reduce the amount of money he'd take - and so if that's something the barristers wanted to do they'd have to explicitly bring it up. Which, I think we can all agree, would be simply too awful to contemplate.
In making so, the cost/risk of the Clerk was minimised compared, in modern language, to changing vendor. There were no more hidden costs.
No idea why you were downvoted.
He said "I'm not going to take a penny more [than 10%] from you."
They heard "I'm not going to take a penny more [than all the money I have already taken] from you."
They were too polite to press the case once the misunderstanding became apparent.
>Clerks are by their own cheerful admission “wheeler-dealers,” what Americans might call hustlers. They take a certain pride in managing the careers of their bosses, the barristers—a breed that often combines academic brilliance with emotional fragility. Many barristers regard clerks as their pimps.
Managing relationships between lawyers? I think it seems a bit more tricky than playing Go.
They're a very close-knit and rambunctiously boozy clique.
In Scotland the grouping of advocates with a clerk are known as "stables" which perhaps describes the relationship more clearly!