Davis: winning hearts & minds

Promoting the UK legal market abroad and ‘making diversity mainstream’ will continue as priorities for the Law Society in 2020, its president has said.

In an interview with NLJ this week Law Society president Simon Davis says he is not surprised the big US firms and legal arms of the Big Four accountants want their slice of the UK market with legal services revenue increasing by 6% year-on-year to £35.5bn in 2018, according to a recent CityUK report. 

With 200 foreign law firms and thousands of international lawyers, Davis says England ‘must come pretty close to being the most competitive legal centre in the world’, and describes this as ‘a welcome reality’. The focus must be on ‘increasing the size of the cake’ rather than denigrating the opposition, he adds.

Davis points out that, post-Brexit, English law will still be ‘respected under various treaties’, judges will still be ‘highly competent and impartial’ and solicitors will still ‘regard their day job as keeping clients out of court. ‘None of that is going to change. If anything, the possibility of Brexit has been a good spur to make sure what we offer is more broadly broadcast’

Davis, a Clifford Chance partner and former president of the London Solicitors Litigation Association, is keen to promote diversity and inclusion (D&I). He believes the way forward is to bring issues together and treat them as ‘part of one package and not as separate strands’ to make diversity mainstream rather than push it to the margins. 

He says: ‘The society and other organisations rightly generate policies and guidance but what matters most of all is having the right culture in the workplace—one of warmth and emotional connection.’

He has campaigned on legal aid issues throughout his presidency and will continue to do so. Practitioners fear the long-awaited post-implementation review of LASPO (the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012) may be left on the backburner amid continuing political turmoil. However, Davis predicts whoever forms the next government will put more resources into the justice system.