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UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND

2ND MAY, 1990

The Law as a Career

I take particular pleasure in offering my congratulations

and good wishes to the graduates on this occasion. I propose

tonight to speak to you concerning "The Law as a Career".

However much time goes by, I find that my sense of kinship

with law graduates does not diminish. This was my qualifying

university and that fact remains very much in my mind. Although

as a graduate student I went on to another university, and

enjoyed that experience enormously, my qualifying studies were

all undertaken here. I still recall how hard examination fever

struck. Those are pressures which have to be surmounted before

life's further experiences can unfold. Some of the memories are

still so intense that it does not really seem so long ago. Some

wise person recently said that because a person looks old on the

outside it does not m~an that they are old all the way through.

In those years past, while I was completing my law degree

at this University, I was being guided through my studies by an

institution. which was remarkably different . There was very

little in the way of permanent academic staff in the law faculty.

There was the professor of law, one other lecturer and, in about

my third year, a second full-time lecturer was appointed. This

cast of three did not constitute the whole lecturing staff

because in a number of subjects there were part-time lecturers;

members of the profession, who out of the goodness of their

hearts assisted in the task of instruction. My companions and

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I did not fare too badly. Amongst our part- timers there were

three who subsequently became judges of the Supreme Court of

Queensland, one of them its Chief Justice, and another again who

later became Chief Justic~ of the High Court . This illustrates

that there were few academic careers in law then available. It

follows, that there was not in place a structure which, to any

extent, facilitated the process of legal research. Under our

present regime all of this is very different and academic careers

in law are now available in fair number.

In common with most of my fellow students of the era and,

without doubt, very much from the perspective of inexperience,

I did not consider that academics were part of the real world.

If I were to leave it at that, on an occasion like this, I would

be exhibiting great insensitivity, so I hasten to make a

correction. Of course, I now know better, although the question

for those at the beginning of their careers remains as before.

Which life we choose ~ust be decided by each of us according to

our notions of what will suit us best. I hope that the day never

comes when decisions of this kind are made wholly on the basis

of the material rewards available. If this notion were to become

established there would, for a start, be no more judges.

Before turning to consider some ways in which legal careers

have expanded in scope let me say something about the law

generally.

There is a risk that one may idealise one's own occupation.

There is, of course, an amount of routine involved whether one

practises at the Bar, in a legal firm be it large or small, in

one of the Crown Law Offices, as an employee in private

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enterprise, or in one of the teaching institutions. But there

is routine involved in all occupations. Something which tends

to set the Law apart is its intellectual nature. Here I do not

mean to conjure up images of Socratic dimension. I refer merely

to the Law's pre-occupation with ideas. One of the satisfying

aspects of a career in law is the extent to which its

practitioners are concerned with ideas and thought. At the Bar,

in those larger law firms where an extensive advisory service is

undertaken, and in the universities where, as the fruits of

research, articles are written and books published, there is

demanded an absorption in hard logic and analytical thinking, a

tireless pursuit of relevance and an endless resort to analogy.

This keeps life both busy and interesting.

One hears it said that lawyers are not popular, but much the

same could be said of a number of occupations. As a nation we

are not given to over-ready adulation and we tend to be critical

always, excepting in . cases where practitioners of sport are

concerned. It has been said that as a nation we have no heroes

other than sporting heroes and that it is only on them that we

heap unqualified praise. Putting sport to one side, I think that

Law as a career is admired no more and no less than other careers

and no less than it deserves to be. Modern societies are

many-layered and deeply complicated in their organisation and

there is a call for large numbers of lawyers to minister to

society's needs.

Let me consider briefly how careers in Law have expanded

over the last few decades. There are many more law schools now

than there were and they are turning out a vastly increased

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number of graduates but, even so, they do not cater for the great

numbers who wish to study law but are denied entry by the limited

capacity of the teaching institutions. The steadily- rising entry

requirements of the institutions attest to this.

To go back a few years it was the case that almost everyone

who studied law intended to practise. A few would be academics,

but virtually everyone else sought a career either as a solicitor

or at the Bar. This is now radically changed. Some recent

figures suggest that something less than two-thirds of those who

take a law degree intend to practise in the private professions.

Large numbers use their degree as a useful qualification in

earning their living but do not pursue careers in the private

profession. Just a few years ago, it was estimated that the

number of "in-house" lawyers, that is qualified lawyers employed

by companies and businesses, constituted 10% of the profession

as a whole in the United Kingdom and 20% in the United States

with, in both plac~s, the percentage figures increasing.

Corporations have come to see the advantage of employing their

own legal men, benefits which are reflected in terms of cost,

accessibility, detailed familiarity with the employer's affairs

and the degree of assurance given in that inevitable moment when

it is necessary to deal with independent lawyers outside the

structure of the organisation . The lawyer who is fully employed

by a commercial entity does lose something in independence and

to some personalities, although not to all, this is a

disadvantage. One attraction of being a member of a profession

is that it gives a healthy degree of independence from detailed

direction. On the other hand, in-house employment with a

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commercial enterprise provides job security even though, at

present, the level of remuneration cannot compare with the top

sala~ies available in the private profession.

Another change which .all are anxious to assure us is both

fast approaching and attractively beneficial is to be founq in

a regime of increased specialisation. For quite some time

specialisation has been evident in the legal scene, but it is far

from clear that a complete takeover by the specialists is

inevitable or that, if it occurs, it will be an unqualified

advantage. The Bar is a body of specialist advocates and, it

has, to date, been the usual source of specialist legal advice.

The Bar now begins to face competition from the larger firms of

solicitors in the business of providing legal opinions but it

appears to be quite secure in its virtual monopoly of advocacy

in the upper levels of the court hierarchy. The larger legal

firms which have resulted from mergers, affiliations and linkages

on a nation-wide basis. (sometimes with overseas offices for good

measure) now provide quite comprehensive legal services catering

for the needs of their large corporate clients. In the process,

some of them have moved away from giving broad based legal

service to the wider community. The driving force responsible

for the amalgamation of firms appears to have been the need to

compete with accountants, merchant bankers and others to retain

the large corporate clients. Latterly, part of the drive has

come from the need to compete between themselves. Employment

within these large specialist legal firms can be very

remunerative. The work there is hard certainly, but very

satisfying and with a high status where interesting work and

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access to the leading figures in the commercial and business

world are part of the picture. So effectively have the large

firms organised themselves and so attractive have they made life

appear within their fold that they are tending to divert to their

ranks a large part of the cream of university law graduates.

Their recruiting has become very effective and fundamentally this

is so because of the attraction of what the large firms offer.

This wider horizon for the young law graduate is a feature of the

last decade, or a period not much more than that. Although

individual preferences always come into the matter of choice, the

position which used broadly to be that the Bar tended to get the

pick of the crop of university graduates, no longer automatically

applies. In terms of status and prestige the partners in the

large firms concede nothing to the Bar or, indeed, to any other

single group which comes to mind. In saying this, I do not mean

to imply that the Bar's attractiveness has diminished. However,

the advice to the you~g must remain the same. Having thought it

over, if a graduate ~ishes to go to the Bar or to follow an

academic career he should not allow himself to be deflected or

stampeded by his contemporaries.

Great changes will overtake legal careers in the years

ahead. Of this we can be sure even though the precise details

cannot be accurately forecast. There are pressures for change.

Cost factors which, in their impact, bear heavily upon middle

society appear irreversible. Alternatives to costly full-scale

litigation, those legal fights to the finish, will have to be

found. The modest start which the self representation of parties

in the Small Claims Court represents, is one limited area which

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may have to expand in response to new pressures for adequate

widespread access to justice. Alternative dispute resolution,

supervised mediation and other developments in the areas of

counselling and arbitration will involve young lawyers in the

years to come. Our increasingly complicated society will engage

them in new tasks concerned with welfare rights, planning and

environmental issues, anti-discrimination, family law,

administrative law and the ever-present revenue law . To

undertake service to the community in these areas young lawyers

are training themselves well. Lawyers nowadays are, by and

large, trained within the tertiary institutions, and not through

apprenticeships, and so undertake comprehensive studies which

equip them for a wide variety of careers. The combined courses

offered by the universities tend to be the ones taken, that is

courses where Law is combined with Arts, Commerce, Economics or

sometimes Science or Language studies. Graduates then are

attractive to a wide variety of sui tors. They can undertake

careers not just as legal practitioners or legal officers, but

elsewhere in government departments, large commercial

enterprises, accounting firms and the like. As a general

qualification, Law stands with the highest.

You must not think that my message is that you should ignore

the profession in choosing your career. Life within the private

profession has a great deal to recommend it . There you will feel

yourselves to be an important part of the profession, sharing its

standards and its high ethics. Fortunately, for many young

people today the sense of community service is strong. It would

be most regrettable if any of the graduates now qualifying were

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to think that they have been trained as free hooters, simply to

do the best for themselves without more. I trust that the sense

of community service to which I refer will not die because the

community has a great need of it . There are not only the

impressively rich and the dauntingly powerful but also the poor

and underprivileged, those relatively defenceless members of

their generation. Attractive though material rewards are, they

are not everything. The young graduates of today are singularly

blessed in the career choice they are offered, even though there

will be pressures upon them as well. I extend my good wishes to

all of the graduates as they set about their tasks.