What’s in a name? / That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet (Romeo and Juliet).

I’m getting all Shakespearian about names here because the moniker - the Junior Lawyers Division (JLD) - defies easy definition. For starters, lots of its members are by no means ‘junior’. Some have grown-up children and one gentleman I spotted the other night even had grey hairs.

Or maybe, like mine, they were just cunningly applied silver highlights.

JLD members are not universally bright eyed and bushy-tailed, then. And nor are they innocents abroad. But they are intelligent and committed, serious without being too earnest - and great party animals!

So what’s behind this name JLD? Well, the group has between 55,000 and 60,000 members - and that’s not a typing error. Many of them are not active members, but you automatically opt into the JLD when you begin your legal practice course and remain a member until five years post-qualification. The numbers soon mount up.

I’m writing about the JLD because I was invited to its second annual chair’s dinner two weekends ago. It was a posh-frock-and-business-suit do in a hotel near the Tower of London. The wine flowed freely, the food was toothsome and the company, both during the pre-prandial drinks and at the table, was lively and stimulating.

And as for the JLD being party animals, one otherwise demure-seeming member of the executive committee has since told me that she got home at 4.30am - by night bus.

This year’s JLD chair is Hekim Hannan, a personal injury lawyer at Liverpool firm QM Costs. He told me that there was serious intent behind the hospitality. He said: ‘We do a lot of work on policy - and not just education and training, but also diversity and mentoring - and the annual dinner is a chance to get the message out there. It’s a chance to put faces to names and meet members of other solicitors’ representative groups.’

Delegates from the Association of Women Solicitors, Black Solicitors Network, Commerce and Industry Group, Lawyers with Disabilities Division, Solicitors in Local Government, Sole Practitioners Group, Law Society and Solicitors Regulation Authority were all at the dinner.

There were journalists, too, which is how I came to blag an invitation. ‘Call us if you need a quote - there’s no need to be shy,’ Hannan reassured the shrinking violet that is me. I most definitely will call the JLD. I left the hotel feeling that the profession was in safe hands with this (mostly) younger generation of lawyers.

Of course, it wasn’t the JLD that Dick the butcher in Shakespeare’s Henry VI part two had in mind when he said: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ And neither was Hamlet referring to the JLD when he spoke of ‘flaming youth’ or, for that matter, Miranda in The Tempest when she marveled at the ‘brave new world’ of ‘goodly creatures’ and ‘beauteous mankind’ that had suddenly appeared on her desert island.

I could go on like this, but since ‘brevity is the soul of wit’, to quote Polonius, the father of Hamlet’s squeeze, I’ll sign off right now.