Lawyers, profession and truth
If you think that artificial intelligence is the innovation that will forever change the sector, you are wrong. Everything has already happened. It was communication that has revolutionized the profession
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When I was asked what the transformative event for the legal profession in the last thirty years had been, I had no doubts and I answered: communication. Not to turn water to my own mill (which I live from legal communication, indeed from information on the sector), but because the more I think about it, the more I realize that without the communicative turning point, the market for legal services as we observe and interpret it today would not exist. I realize that it is legitimate to ask (even with a certain tone of controversy) whether, after all, it was communication that gave life to the legal services market or whether the latter stimulated a new branch of specialization in the varied universe of information? We are at the egg and the chicken, you might say. After all, the market has always been there. Whenever a transaction takes place between a buyer and a seller of a good or service, we can say that there is a market.
But this has not always been peaceful in terms of legal services.
There are sales that escape the most traditional classifications of economic science, if only because they involve the most delicate sphere of everyone’s life with deep ethical implications. Which one? Health, obviously. This, as we know, can be declined into two subcategories: physical, the first, and social, the second, by convention because after all there is a remedy for everything. Maybe.
Physical health is taken care of by doctors. The second, on the other hand, is dealt with by the specialists of the legal professions, the jurists and, first and foremost, the lawyers who, it is good to remember, are not only agents of justice, but also agents of socio-economic development. Good lawyers mean good business, good interactions, good contracts. Lawyers are the remediators par excellence, for that matter. The fact that these, when they need to explain the importance of their function and the relevance of their specializations, make ample use of health metaphors, I think is just a coincidence. Even if, actually…
I won’t deal with the white coats, as the title of this article suggests. I wouldn’t know where to start, after all. Although I can say one thing about it: the sector in which they “operate” moves an annual expenditure of over 10 trillion dollars (OECD data): well over 10% of global GDP. Has healthcare become a business? Yes, it has become a business. With good blessing of Hippocrates, Apollo the doctor, Asclepius, Hygieia and Panacea, that is, all the deities to whom the famous Oath of the Kos physician was dedicated.
On the armies in uniforms, on the other hand, I can leave my two cents, if only because I spend a lot of time on the category and in some way I can claim to have made a fairly rounded opinion about it, although (I know) controversial.
Here too, I would start from a purely economic basic fact. The sector, worldwide, generates a turnover of 787 billion dollars, according to the latest estimates of the International Bar Association (IBA). Then, if we add to these the taxes paid on such services (191 billion) and the induced (637 billion) we can say that the legal industry moves, in total, a turnover of 1.6 thousand million dollars with its 20 million lawyers scattered all over the planet. NOTE: doing the sums, this means a per capita turnover of just over $39,000. In Italy it is about 40,000 euros a year, for many years… When we say that the whole world is a village. END OF NOTE.
Are you getting lost among the zeros? You are not alone. And it doesn’t matter. Because generally these figures are the result of estimates, processing of averages, specular equations aimed at providing an order of magnitude rather than measuring the finances of the category with Cartesian precision, which, as is easy to imagine, does not distribute such income equally among its adepts. Just to play a little with the numbers (we’ve done thirty, let’s do thirty-one) we can say that, if in the world there is a lawyer who earns 11 million dollars a year (trust me, there is and it’s not just one) there are another 282 who, at least in theory, struggle to put together lunch and dinner with the profession. But is this also true for Italy? I’d say yes.
Always because the world is a big small town where everyone knows everyone and in the end nothing new ever happens, just know that 16,000 Italian lawyers produce about half of the category’s income (which of lawyers, in the Bel Paese, counts more than 240,000, see issue 181 of MAG) and here too there are those who have lunch and dinner in starred kitchens every day, and there are those who make do with a toast and a half mineral water while waiting for better times. This is a fact.
But why this long premise? Because to talk about communication and lawyers as well as the impact the former has had on the destinies of the latter, we cannot talk about the legal profession as a whole and indistinct, but we must focus our attention only on one side of the prism. In particular, on that piece of professional population that seems to have made it or that at least seems to have better interpreted the spirit of the times by choosing the path that, in the end, turned out to be the most apt to enjoy a decent share of the contemporary legal business. The business law. Hordes of lawyers who have gone well beyond the artisanal dimension of the past and have decided to change their condition by giving rise to large organized structures. In English we call them law firms. Translated? Legal factories. Does it give you an idea? It does, I’d say. Defining certain behemoths, law firms, risks being reductive. The first, the largest in the world, Kirkland & Ellis, in 2023, with 3,500 professionals *world wide*, generated revenues of over 7 billion dollars. Do we agree that this is a real business? We agree.
Seen from there, the classic law firm (lawyer, secretary, two trainees and a ficus benjamin in the waiting room) seems to belong to another planet. Or at least to another era. In the last thirty years those large organizations have begun to spread all over the world, changing the way the profession is practiced.
In its time, the phenomenon also overwhelmed continental Europe, Italy included (the cradle of law), and was literally accelerated by communication which on the one hand served to make these organizations known to clients of all sizes and in every latitude, and on the other hand was fundamental in talking about this new way of carrying out legal activity to colleagues and potential new adepts: the workers (from no less than 180,000 euros a year) of the modern factories of the law.
Every rebirth starts from the recognition of the truth, Piero Calamandrei wrote, more or less, in 1921 in *Too Many Lawyers!*, and in this Darwinian process started by the multiplication of competition in the category and the spread of law firms around the world, the truth is that communicating (one’s uniqueness and one’s model) has become a necessary action to compete.
Between the mid-1990s and the first two decades of the 2000s, being on the market also became a matter of image.
The market. Europe. In the internal debate within the legal community invaded by international signs and new models of approach to the profession, the usefulness of the lawyer has found itself arm in arm with the figure of the useful lawyer who does not interpret his role as a mere “obligation of means”, but considers the commitment to the result a duty. Communication has worked on the narration of this “other approach”, efficiency-driven and performance-oriented, to the role of the professional. But since there is no revolution without upheavals and dissent of all kinds, even the advent of legal communication has caused its fair share of crisis. A crisis that has swept away the consciences of many, giving rise to doubts and dilemmas bordering on the existential. To communicate or not to communicate? This is the question that many have asked themselves, genuflected before the altar of ethics.
The legal profession has been reasoning about its role in ethical terms since the dawn of time. From Pliny the Younger with his dissertations on *advocati fides*, to the reflections on the qualities of the lawyer and the nature of his office, which began in the 19th century and, in fact, have never ended.
Speaking of oneself and for oneself (in the exclusive sense of one’s own interest, for the purpose of personal and self-serving promotion) has never been considered a good thing. In *Rules for Forming a Lawyer*, in 1827, the jurist Luigi Rubino collected and translated from French a series of writings (ancient and modern) reworked to illustrate the profession and bring it closer to new generations. In the fourth part of the work, entitled *On the Qualities of the Lawyer*, at point 10, Rubino writes: “The Lawyer must neither boast and praise himself, nor scold and humble himself for a ridiculous excess of modesty.” The complexity of the matter, I believe, is evident. To be seen but without being noticed. It seems like Totò. But it is definitely a more serious matter. Also because the knowledge of the sector, aimed at attracting talents of every seniority and degree, can only pass through its narration.
The first to intuit this clearly was an American lawyer, from Henry County (Indiana): James B. Martindale, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Among the merits that have brought him to History, James B. Martindale has that of being the first lawyer to grasp the importance of knowledge, understood as information on the sector. Because it is true that the lawyer’s job “is not a job that is taught, (but) is a job that is learned,” as the great criminal lawyer and expert in ethics, Ettore Randazzo, wrote in 2003, in his *The Lawyer and the Truth* (Sellerio), but it is also true that no university and no Master has ever taught his students how the professional microcosm in which they will practice that art learned “fighting against errors and injustices…in restless nights and in the tumults of their own anguish…wearing the robe and feeling imbued with its charm.” It was James B. Martindale who invented the first legal directory in the world, in 1868. A fundamental tool that in the libraries of the first Italian studios would have arrived more than a century later. A product that still exists today and has inspired various imitations. In the preface to the first edition of this directory, we read:
The object of the work is to furnish to Lawyers, Bankers, Wholesale Merchants, Manufacturers, Real Estate Agents, and all others who may have need of business correspondents away from home, the address of one reliable law firm, one reliable bank, and one reliable real estate agent in each city and town in the United States; also to give the laws of the several States on subjects of a commercial character that are of interest or importance to business men, or have a bearing on mercantile transactions and the collection of debts\…
Today, legal information is fed by *tsunami*-like waves of accredited, official, coordinated and source-controlled communication. The problem is no longer to know the sector. The biggest challenge that all the operators in this sector have to face is that of decrypting its representation, which is not always related to the truth.
The infodemic is the disease of the early 21st century on a global level. We know too much and paradoxically end up knowing less and less. Meanwhile, the banks that once enclosed information on the sector in a high and inaccessible dam have broken and thousands of lawyers flood the web and social media with words and images not always necessary, not always of interest, not always authentic.
Speaking of this, I will never forget the scene. A few years ago, a lawyer who had long since passed the age of fifty and who had always boasted to me of never having succumbed to the vain temptation of media visibility, called me announcing the exception he was about to make to his rule of voluntary and conscious silence. “I’m sending you a really important news. I’ve followed the most interesting operation of the last ten years. A complex deal, full of legal implications that will set a precedent. It’s not that I’m interested in appearing. But this thing is too relevant not to give public notice.” I told him I would wait for it with trepidation. I also asked him if he wanted to start hinting at it, so that I could prepare and gather a bit of documentation in view of the writing of my article. “I’ll provide everything myself – he said sternly. Meanwhile, I’ll have my photo sent to you.” He kept his word. At least in part. A few minutes after our exchange, I received an email from his secretary that read: “*As agreed with lawyer P.B.*”. And nothing else. Just an attachment: 11.5 Megabytes. His photo. Just the face. An unrealistic close-up. A giant close-up of his hooked nose surmounting a complacent grimace on his mouth. Tortoiseshell glasses, the stern gaze of a Cicero and a freshly trimmed beard. That face remained silent staring at me for a few minutes. I thought the text with the press release concerning the historical operation would arrive shortly. Meanwhile, the minutes passed. Nothing happened. Nothing would happen. To this day I wonder what that news was. But the most important thing that that episode made me understand over the years has been the urgency to exist that at a certain point began to be felt even by those who had always made a point of honor of their “invisibility”.
The problem is that for a lawyer who naively sends only his effigy and then gets panic about saying, perhaps because he is not sure about what he can actually reveal or perhaps because in the end he has remained convinced that one is noticed more if one does not make oneself noticed, there are now thousands of others who without any filter and without any strategic reflection launch themselves into communication regardless of whether they have relevant things to share or not. Or rather, without worrying about understanding whether what they decide to want to tell can be of interest to others: the professional community or the market.
At the moment when communication has become representation, it has begun to move away again from the truth and this, albeit with a background noise close to deafening, risks causing a new silence in the sector.
What happens to communication in the legal sector is a mirror of the times. This is a contemporary evil. A disaster that Yuval Noah Harari describes well in his latest essay, *Nexus* (Bompiani), dedicated to information networks. The truth is laborious. Harari, in a recent interview with *Robinson* (la Repubblica), recalled that truth “is complex” and the problem is that we are increasingly used to simple things. Furthermore, he added, “truth is usually uncomfortable and people don’t like uncomfortable things. They prefer stories that make them feel good even if they’re not true” and in this regard he told the story that when movable type printing was invented, the most read book of the century was not a fundamental text like *De revolutionibus orbium coelestium* by Copernicus, but *Malleus Maleficarum* by one Heinrich Kramer: a manual for witch hunting full of legends and esotericism.
The representation, today, lingers more and more in a hagiographic narration. This is the abracadabra we have to deal with. And here it builds worlds and scenarios that day after day move a step further away from the factual reality of things.
It can happen to receive press releases from law firms that are not law firms, “news” about lawyers who are not lawyers, partners who are not partners, victories that are defeats, and tons of said and unsaid that raise a smoke beyond which it is increasingly difficult to understand what is really happening in the sector. So communication is filled with emperors convinced they are displaying magnificent Baroque robes, which in the end turn out to be sadly naked at the height of the media spotlight.
Containing this drift and preventing communication from moving too far away from information is the new challenge. The new silence to be broken. The puzzle to be solved to allow a category so fundamental for civil progress not to remain entangled in a marginal metaverse that it has built for itself, leaving to others, indeed to a few, the control of true knowledge and that of its own future.
