The ugly shape of the post-crash world is becoming apparent as time passes. Certain structures that were primary causes of the economic crisis are still standing, with their practices more or less unchanged - banks and other financial institutions, for instance - while innocent parties are squirming and suffering. One of the defining characteristics of what survives and what suffers is whether the institution is Too Big To Fail. It is clear where lawyers fall in the dividing line: we are among the sufferers. Can you imagine the prime minister casting his famous veto in Europe if it had been the legal profession at stake?

At European level, governments and other competent authorities are chasing the legal profession in various countries to make it more economically efficient. This may or may not be a good thing, but I do not think that anyone has cast blame on lawyers for being responsible for the economic ills which have befallen us, and so it is hard to see why we are such a priority. The UK government resists a financial transactions tax at all costs, but will it lift a finger regarding lawyers? I think you know the answer.

We are an easy target because we are not Too Big To Fail, and we do not threaten to take our business elsewhere. And so priorities and arguments are settled not on right and wrong, but on size and power, which does not make for a pretty sight.

In the bailed-out countries of the eurozone, the Troika (International Monetary Fund-European Commission-European Central Bank) is using the crisis to enforce changes to the legal profession for reasons of economic efficiency. On this basis, for instance, the commission, which has officials on the ground in bailed-out countries, is currently trying to glean information about how bar and law society subscriptions are set in various member states, to assist them with evaluating changes to Greek rules on this matter.

In Italy, which is not a bailed-out country, and is trying to avoid the Troika and its attentions, the new government is introducing alternative business structures by decree, without the ‘fitness-to-practise’ guarantee that exists in the UK.

There are three different studies currently taking place within the commission, with a fourth likely to start, all dealing essentially with the same topic, albeit from a different angle: the economic efficiency of the current professional practice rules of the legal profession. One is on whether our current lawyers’ directives still serve their purpose in the new economic order; another is on reserved activities; a third questions how an alternative business structure would fare in crossing borders; and the fourth will probably deal with how the legal system can contribute to economic growth. Is it any surprise that lawyers feel a little victimised, and wonder why there is so much attention on us when we were blameless for the economic troubles in which we now find ourselves?

There are various lessons to be drawn from the shape of the post-crash world. First, nothing radical has been done in relation to its key causes, out of fear of the responses of the guilty parties that are Too Big, and so there is no guarantee that matters will not keep getting worse, or that there will not be a repetition. But that is a lesson beyond our role as lawyers, and is for governments and policy-makers. We can just watch bemused, indeed shocked, from the sidelines.

However, the excessive displacement activity of governments and other competent authorities, afraid to tackle the root causes and so zealously busy with bossing innocent bystanders into becoming more and more economically efficient, teaches us (as it teaches many other groups in society) that being socially useful is not enough protection when things become desperate.

We see in nature - take a hedgehog or a skunk - how small animals protect themselves with some mechanism or other. It used to be that the legal profession had something similar. The large number of lawyer MPs, when added to the law lords being part of the House of Lords, acted in the past as a kind of covering of quills, seeing off attacks on the legal profession. (I refrain from commenting on whether that was fair and right, but I merely observe that it used to happen - just as it is difficult to say whether a hedgehog’s spines or skunk’s smell are fair and right.) This happens in other countries, too - for instance in the US where lawyers form a significant proportion of legislators, including the president himself, and where the lawyer lobby is, I believe, powerfully respected.

But this protective action stopped in the UK when two lawyers-in-chief, Margaret Thatcher, with the end of the conveyancing monopoly, and Tony Blair, with the passage of the Legal Services Act 2007, led the charge on perceived injustices in legal professional practices under the guise of greater economic efficiency. Now there appears to be no sufficiently large lobby in parliament ready to stand up against the idea that lawyers must keep becoming ever more efficient, even while those giant enterprises which brought us to economic ruin thumb a nose at the government. The government, humiliatingly for all of us, does nothing other than pretend that we, and other unprotected species like us, need to improve.

The lessons to be drawn from this post-crash scene are as ugly as the landscape itself. Forget right and wrong; forget historical causes and the proper conclusions to be drawn from them. This is a bully’s fight, where governments parade along some fake moral high ground of activism and target whoever has least protection. Only quills or stink will give us the proper defence.

Jonathan Goldsmith is secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents around a million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies. He blogs weekly for the Gazette on European affairs