ILY, Legal Profession. I Mean It.

On critique as care, ungatekeeping as ethics and what the next generation actually deserves.

For The Sceptics

Let me get the obvious thing out of the way.

I talk about what is wrong with the legal profession a lot. If you have been around here for a while, you will have noticed it. If you are new, you have probably already filed me under “disgruntled former insider with a podcast”.

Fair enough.

There is a version of my platform that is just catharsis. Fifteen years inside the profession, one year building something outside of it, a lot of things to say and finally somewhere to say them. If some of what lands here looks like frustration looking for an exit, you would not be entirely wrong.

But you would not be entirely right either.

I am not angry at the legal profession. I am not disillusioned. I am not here because I burned out and needed someone to blame.

I genuinely, deeply, actually love this profession. The collective. The people. The relationships and rituals and culture that form around the work and give it meaning. The profession, not necessarily the law itself, which is a separate conversation.

I critique it the way you critique something you love. With urgency. With the kind of rigour that comes from believing it is capable of more.

I am an eldest daughter to my bones. We hold the people we love to a higher standard because we believe they can meet it.

The Pattern

Some of the brightest, most intellectually rigorous, most genuinely curious people I have ever met came to law. Not entirely because of the salary, though the salary is not irrelevant. Not entirely because of the mythology, though someone should do a proper reckoning someday with the cultural influence of Legally Blonde and then Suits on a generation of law students.

They came because the law promised something real. Justice. Language. Rigour. A framework for making sense of the world and a set of tools for showing up for the people inside it. The ethics and governance questions. The kind of thinking that requires you to hold complexity without collapsing it into something more comfortable.

They came, in other words, with exactly the qualities the world needs most right now.

The profession takes those qualities and routes them through a system built to reproduce itself, not to develop people.

The hours are not the real problem, though the hours are a problem. The salary compression is not the real problem, though it is a problem.

The real problem is the silence. The assumption that the people who thrive are the ones who figure it out without being told anything. The weaponisation of tradition as a reason not to change. The conflation of resilience with the capacity to absorb a culture that was designed for a much narrower group of people than currently fills the rooms today.

The brightest ones often leave. Not because the work stopped mattering but because staying started to feel like a loss of integrity.

I think you have probably watched this happen too. Maybe you’re one of them.

An Assessment, Not A Feeling

We are living through a moment that places very specific demands on the skills the legal profession, at its best, knows how to deploy.

AI is restructuring work at a pace that makes most governance frameworks look embarrassingly slow. Trust in public institutions is fractured in ways that feel structural rather than cyclical. The questions that will determine what kind of societies we inhabit over the next thirty years are ethics and governance questions. Questions about accountability, power and the space between what is technically legal and what is actually just.

The people trained to reason carefully about those things, to understand precedent and consequence, to hold complexity without collapsing it, have never been more needed.

The question is whether we waste those people on the way in, or build something that lets them stay, develop well and do the work that actually needs doing while staying well.

The Tradition Is Not The Problem

The tradition is not the problem.

Precedent is not the problem.

The accumulated weight of thinking about how humans should treat each other, refined across centuries and tested in real cases with real consequences, is one of the most extraordinary things the legal profession holds.

Those bits are precious.

The stewardship of that tradition should not remain the exclusive property of people who already had access to it though.

The wisdom being quietly carried by practitioners at every level of this profession should not stay quiet. The silence that protects the wrong things needs breaking, because it has never, in all the years of its existence, protected the people who most needed protection.

Ungatekeeping information is not a content strategy. It is an ethics imperative. A kindness imperative.

A new generation of extraordinary students and young lawyers is sitting in front of us. They deserve the full inheritance. The weight and the beauty of the tradition. The privilege of being someone who knows how to think about justice.

Not a system that grinds them down before they have had a chance to change it.

Going Further

Earlier this year, The Honourable Michael Kirby AC CMG reviewed my thinking on all of this.

He engaged with it seriously. He read what I was building and told me to go further. To double down in this direction. He did not hedge that.

When one of the great legal minds of this era, someone who spent a career at the intersection of law, justice, and the harder questions of what the profession is actually for, tells you that what you are doing is right and that you should do more of it, you pay attention.

So I have been.

Nothing about this is delusional. Nothing about believing this profession can be better than it currently is requires naivety. The extraordinary people coming into it are real, the skills the profession holds are real and the moment that needs those skills is real.

The question for the next generation of leaders already inside this profession, the ones who know the dysfunction intimately and have the influence to do something about it, is whether that assessment becomes the basis for action, or just another thing everyone privately agrees with and publicly says nothing about.

We critique because we care. We name the problems because we can see what things could be.

This is what building toward that looks like.

Stay close.

💖