A legal life in a time of change

Muddling through: law, complexity, and a career off-script

I have come to see my route into law, and my life within it, as anything but linear. Like many legal careers, it has been shaped by detours, uncertainty, and moments that made little sense at the time. That seems fitting, because law itself is rarely neat.

We often describe it as if it were a coherent system, but in practice it is full of overlap, complexity, compromise, and exception. Charles Lindblom captured something of this in his 1959 Public Administration Review article, “The Science of ‘Muddling Through,’” in which he described policymakers’ efforts to produce rational policy under imperfect conditions. That idea feels especially relevant to the future of work in law. As AI reshapes legal practice, the central question is not only what can be made more efficient, but how professional roles, expertise, and value may be redefined in a field that has always involved adaptation to complexity. This personal reflection is offered in that spirit: my own unconventional path is not separate from that question, but one way into it.

I am a member of the Board of Governors of the London School of Innovation. This is one of these roles that combines certainty and uncertainty, which is what makes it so attractive. There are legal obligations that governors must adhere to, but in addition there is much that is unspecified and must be imagined and created. Few of us are granted the opportunity to help bring into existence a new institution of higher education, and having been an academic for many years now, I feel great pride in being part of this new enterprise.

From school dropout to law student: failing forward

My life and career has elements of the conventional and the unusual. I was never terribly successful at school doing badly in examinations and ultimately dropping out when I was sixteen with a few O levels.

After a couple of years working in various jobs I went back to further education and gained my A levels. A tutor cajoled me into applying for university even though I was unsure. I applied and was accepted to read economics at the London School of Economics.

During my first year of economics I struggled with the high level of maths involved. The LSE economics department was heavily influenced by the Chicago school which relied on sophisticated mathematical and statistical modelling. However, I took a law course in this year and liked it and so I asked to change majors from economics to law. In doing this I learned a “life lesson” that has stayed with me ever since. Both departments agreed to the change but the school’s registrar had to sign off.

At the time of my appointment I went to see him. A number of women were in a typing pool outside his office. This was before word processing. They asked me why I was there and chatted until I was summoned into the great man’s presence. To my shock he refused outright to let me switch: “I had made my bed and must lie on it.” He told me to go. Outside the women of the typing pool quizzed me on what was wrong. They sympathised and I left for the summer vacation.

A month before the start of term a letter arrived from the school telling me that my application to transfer had been approved. Deeply puzzled, I didn’t question his decision and looked forward to a life in the law. Back in London I went to the registrar’s office for some bureaucratic reason and met the women typing away. They asked how I was: happy, I said, since the registrar changed his mind. They stared quietly at me for a moment and shook their heads. “No, he didn’t,” they said. These wonderful women (because they were) had taken pity on me and planned subversion. At the end of each day the registrar was given a collection of letters to sign by the typing pool, which he did without looking at them. Hidden among them was that letter, a guerilla tactic, and he never knew.

My lesson? Never underestimate the power residing in people who you might think don’t have power. I know of companies that successfully interview a candidate and are on the verge of hiring when they do the last test. Call the receptionists and ask them how did X present himself? Was he polite and respectful? If the answer is no, then no hire, if he can’t treat people equally well.

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Never underestimate the quiet ones: power in unexpected places

In my research the question of power and how it is exercised always fascinates me. Informal soft power can be devastatingly effective, more so than formal commands. The UK gained great influence through such efforts as the BBC World Service broadcasting in different languages and being seen as a trusted source of news; and by the British Council that sent academics around the world to talk and lecture about British culture.

I won’t go through every aspect of my career except to say that at this later stage of my life I learned the reason for my academic failure at school. I was undergoing various tests including on my hearing when I was told I was officially deaf and had been so since birth, but no one picked it up. I muddled through by using rudimentary lip reading and guessing meaning. Being fitted with digital hearing aids was a great day. I discovered the world was an incredibly noisy place: how did anyone cope with such a cacophony of sound all the time? But I no longer wander in a miasma of befuddlement trying to work out what is being said.

At Warwick University I carried out my first research project on a group of people called barristers’ clerks, whose duties included negotiating barristers’ fees, organising their diaries, and generally ensuring their careers run smoothly, for which they received a percentage of the barristers’ fees. They weren’t lawyers but they had street smarts. I hung out in barristers’ chambers observing clerks and going drinking with them (much work was done in pubs). I won’t go into detail on this as Faculti.net made two short videos of me talking about the research which you can see at https://faculti.net/traditions-symbols-and-the-challenges-of-researching-the-legal-profession/, and https://faculti.net/hes-fucking-marvellous-the-fall-and-rise-of-barristers-clerks/. But to reinforce my earlier point about power, it was interesting to see how much power and influence a working class group of mostly men had over middle class barristers.

A life across borders: from the Sahara to the seminar room

Two things happened. One was I became interested in what lawyers did and how they did it since this seemed to be the basis of what law is, to me. It was a question poorly explored so it left the field wide open. The second was my attraction to travel. I don’t mean holiday travel but going to other countries for study and work.

I next spent 11 years studying and working in the United States. After law at Yale I took a PhD in sociology at Northwestern University with Howard Becker. I needed both to make sense of the legal world. I give you one example of why it was not fully intelligible to me through the usual doctrinal analysis of law.

A friend and I were travelling fourth class in a train going across the Sahara Desert. We boarded the train at Wadi Halfa at the bottom of Egypt to go to Khartoum. Over a journey that was to take three long days the train filled up to the extent that people travelled on the roof by tying themselves to a pipe. It was illegal to travel on the roof but there were so few trains and so many passengers, officials seemed to condone it, and tickets were punched. All was good until a roof passenger fell off. Trains moved slowly so I don’t think he hurt himself, but the train halted. The roof passengers started to yell at him and then some policemen came down the track and appeared to arrest him. I asked what was going on and was told he was being arrested for travelling illegally on the roof. What?

Apparently, it was accepted that passengers used the roof but they had to stay on the roof. Falling off meant their illicit travel became visible and they were arrested. I have puzzled over this for many years and still do. I don’t know the answer, if indeed there is one that would make sense in law.

At the intersection: technology, innovation, and what comes next

My research has since moved from field to field and I have worked in several countries as a professor, including the US, UK, Italy, Germany, Ireland, and now Australia.

I’ve come to appreciate the subtleties of higher education since it comprises not just teaching but the production of knowledge as well. Researching ideas and is a wonderful way to live, particularly in times of complexity. It has led me into the globalisation of law, multinational law firms, how capital markets work, and now the impact of technology, especially AI and blockchain. The combination of these two technologies will further revolutionise work and the use of data. Essentially, I have lived at the intersection of different disciplines which prevents complacency setting in and extends one’s thinking and range of ideas.

For me this is what the London School of Innovation embodies. What more can one ask?