We read every week in the legal press about solicitors suffering in the current crisis: lay-offs, short-time and pay-cuts. There have been stories about trainees receiving the bad news by voicemail, and a US lawyer laying off his own wife. We also hear – our prime minister, Gordon Brown, is particularly keen to tell us – that this is a global recession, and that the UK is not alone in being hard hit. But how are lawyers faring in other jurisdictions which are also affected by recession? Are they doing better or worse than we are?

In the US, it is estimated that there have been 10,000 lay-offs from law firms just this year, roughly one-third lawyers and two-thirds other staff. The American Bar Association has a portal devoted to lawyers in the downturn, which includes links on stress management and hot recession topics that are emerging as a result of the crisis.

Ireland and Scotland report serious problems, too. The Law Society of Ireland has just taken on a career development adviser, as ‘a key resource for the Society’s members who are facing unemployment, adjustment to working arrangements, or transition to another jurisdiction or career choice’. Of course, our own Law Society has undertaken a range of activities to help solicitors through the downturn.

In my travels around the EU, I always ask these days how lawyers and law firms are faring. There have been some recent international meetings between lawyers from different jurisdictions to discuss the impact. It always appears to be lawyers in the common law jurisdictions who are worst hit, even though the recession has affected common law and civil law countries alike. Iceland, Latvia, Spain and Greece have been worse hit by the crisis, but their lawyers appear to be weathering it better than lawyers in the UK. Why?

It would need a three-year thesis to understand all the reasons, but here are some possible ones:

  • Solicitors in the UK and Ireland do conveyancing, and have been badly affected by the property slump – and, not surprisingly, we find that continental notaries are suffering similar pain (so some continental lawyers are badly affected, just not advocates);
  • Continental lawyers have not yet in general moved to the level of specialisation of some UK and US lawyers, particularly in the field of transactional work; they also retain a more traditional link to the court and court work, meaning that the financial and property collapse has had less impact on them;
  • Continental lawyers do not work traditionally in such large law firms, which are usually embodiments of the trends to transactional work and specialisation already mentioned; and
  • London was a financial services hub, and so was obviously going to suffer more in a crisis which hit financial services so hard.

It is probably too soon to tell whether these trends will last. Maybe all jurisdictions in time will be engulfed by the misfortune which has been inflicted on some of the common law jurisdictions. But if that does not happen, it may be instructive for proper research to be undertaken into the consequences of this recession on lawyers around the world,. This would help us in the common law world understand how it affected us, and so avoid some hardship in the future. Are our working structures the best?

Cheer up, though, at least you didn’t become an architect …

Jonathan Goldsmith is the Secretary General of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE), which represents over 700,000 European lawyers through its member bars and law societies.