Inside the Magic Circle Corporate lawyers control the UK

Of all Britain’s strange, sick national fetishes, there is surely none worse than the fetish for the “rule of law”. Houses unbuilt, sex pests un-deported, inconveniently truthful stories about oligarchs unpublished — the choking stasis that afflicts us always seems to be traced back to shibari-like knots of legislation tightened into place with quasi-sexual glee. Why, in a country where verbal ambiguity is an internationally recognised tic, do we follow rules, even other people’s rules, with such clenched-arse literalism? All the histrionics about leaving the European Convention of Human Rights distract from the fact that many countries simply ignore its judgements. Since 1975, the UK has ranked sixth out of 46 states for compliance, ahead of France, Germany and Italy.

Breakneck, a well-reviewed new book by Dan Wang, makes the case that China is catching up with America because the former is run by can-do engineers, and the latter by don’t-do lawyers. But if America’s lawyer problem is bad, ours is worse. Not worse because our lawyers are more powerful — America’s codified constitution and litigation addiction suggests the opposite — but because our lawyers simply weigh heavier in the makeup of our elite. The US has Silicon Valley, a colossal military-industrial complex and various other fearsome power centres that fight for control of the national steering wheel. In the UK, what is there outside of the City-adjacent, high-end service sector, of which corporate law is a dominant constituency? A few bioscience labs in the south-east, barred from expansion by bat-shagging Lib Dem councillors.

Corporate law, consulting and finance, the troika of City professions that Britain has bet the house on since Thatcher, are pitilessly effective at sucking up our elite graduate class. It’s the third and sometimes the second, closely identified with hyper-capitalist greed and PowerPoint-tweaking bullshit artistry, which get most of the attention. But corporate law might be the most symptomatic of a service-geared economy that’s totally dependent on the global financial tides for business — reactive rather than weather-making. “A bank is ultimately more real economy than a law firm,” says Jack*, an Oxbridge humanities graduate who works at Slaughter and May, one of the five “Magic Circle” companies which constitute the pinnacle of British corporate law. Banks have money, with which to do stuff. Corporate law firms are hired to help banks (and other businesses) do their stuff, whether it’s mergers, acquisitions, due diligence or whatever else. “We’re facilitators rather than actual doers.”

Jack, who’s around 30, is one of many humanities grads to have gone into corporate law recently. That’s another thing about the profession. Consulting and finance tend to attract those wanting to make a lot of money. But as mounting property and day-to-day living costs push formerly middle-class jobs like teaching into the precariat, corporate law has emerged as the profession of choice for clever, well-educated sorts who don’t have a particular facility with numbers or passion for business but would still like a salary that allows them the comfortable life they expected growing up. “When I was at uni,” says Adam*, another Oxbridge humanities graduate around 30, “there was a lot of quite confusing talk about finding a passion, that I listened to and got quite engaged with for a couple of years. And then I started to think a bit more practically about it.” He ended up at the London office of an American corporate law firm.

If corporate law does make the news, it’s for its salaries, particularly among junior employees. Pay for a newly qualified solicitor who’s finished their “training contract” — professional exams plus a two-year work traineeship — has hit as high as £180,000 in the London offices of American firms, among them the very Dickensian-sounding Davis Polk & Wardell and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Magic Circle firms have been forced to compete as much as they can, to the tune of about £150,000. It’s a big bump on the £100,000 salaries on offer around the turn of the decade, and only emphasises the appeal of corporate law for smart graduates with a lot of options “who basically want a guaranteed way of making money quickly”, says Jack.

What are those firms like inside their crystalline, glass-plated offices? Slaughter and May is, Jack says, still “very, very hierarchical”. The partners have their own dining room and are “very aloof” from the associates, even junior partners who’ve just been promoted from associate themselves. “They almost view it as a World War One officer class.” It’s not totally Oxbridgey — there’s loads of Aussie lawyers for instance, lured over to London by salaries so much higher than those at home that they more than make up for the general UK-Australia wage gap. But the humanities training to develop opinions on subjects you’re relatively new to — the kind of essay-crisis bluffing that Boris Johnson was notorious for — is still welcome, says Jack. “Law firm partners always complain that they want trainees to take a view.”

Adam’s American firm, as per the national stereotype, is more meritocratic and even more demanding. You “get to do a bit more earlier”, he says, partly because there are “fewer bodies” to get the work done — a team might have six or seven people compared to eight at a Magic Circle firm. The extra effort is worth the extra money, he thinks, especially as “the differentials between a 10pm finish every night versus a midnight finish get a bit blurred” anyway. The sense of a distinct national culture is echoed by Ruth*, an American who works at the New York office of a Magic Circle firm and was recently seconded to their London headquarters. She chose a British firm precisely because “the work culture bleeds in from the mothership”. Holidays are more protected, and there’s less obligation to keep grinding in quiet periods.

But the grind is, in any highly paid firm, inescapable. Anyone who counts a lot of corporate lawyers as friends will have had the experience of mid-week plans with them being cancelled, late notice, via apologetic messages blaming work. I know someone who went back to work around midnight after we attended the same wedding. Some people never get used to it: Adam says about 20% of trainees at the most prestigious firms end up going elsewhere to take a big cut in both pay and workload. It’s a reminder that, though you might flatter yourselves that your salary reflects your intelligence, it’s mostly about you being permanently on call.

Both Jack and Adam, though, dispute the stereotype that this work is pure drudgery. There is “dirt work”, says Jack, especially for trainees: reviewing thousands upon thousands of documents that concern, say, a big corporate takeover, looking for potential red flags. It’s not that tricky, so there’s no kudos in getting it right — only a potential bollocking for having missed something, even if it’s 2am and your computer screen is flaying your eyeballs. But the proportion of these tasks in your overall workload starts at about 60% and only ever decreases as you get more senior, says Jack. In fact, he views law as the corporate pathway with “intellectual rigour, and that definitely tickles the ego. Law is filled with really smart people who crave intellectual stimulation.”

And neither are they especially worried about AI eating their Pret lunch. They use the technology to do basic research, but find it’s still too inaccurate to rely on without proper checks. Law firms don’t want to be feeding confidential info into AI systems anyway, which is perhaps why there doesn’t seem to be any immediate squeeze in hiring trainees quite yet. In the longer term, who really knows? AI evangelists would say that corporate law is exactly the kind of structured, fact-rich knowledge work that will be well automated sooner or later.

It certainly puts a faint crack into the profession’s reputation as the platonic ideal of a stable upper-middle-class career. But in the more immediate term, isn’t it the stability itself that’s the problem? Becoming a corporate lawyer “is the opposite of doing anything entrepreneurial”, says Jack. It’s for “very smart people who are fundamentally not risk takers”. The fact it holds such appeal contributes to Britain’s “massive growth problem”. When “the smartest people in the country go off to be fucking consultants and lawyers”, what hope do you have of founding companies and industries that actively shape the world rather than being dependent on globalisation cruising along as usual?

Reactive doesn’t necessarily mean constricting, thinks Jack, who says that though “excessive or incorrect legal frameworks are not helping the UK”, this is not a problem of bad lawyers but “a problem of bad laws” — and bad laws are the fault of politicians, who increasingly conceptualise law as an immovable obstacle rather than something that their mandate demands they shape and reshape. But maybe that conceptual blindness is, as Wang says of America’s politics, due to a legalism which ultimately flows from the profession’s popularity and prestige among our elite. If every politician’s son and daughter and partner and best friend is a lawyer, why wouldn’t they adopt a similar mindset?

And in our case, there is no Californian tech idyll on hand as an alternative. There is, simply, the City. Trump 2.0 coupled up with Silicon Valley in its anti-legalistic crusade. Britain’s populist troublemakers will have to fight on their own, because there’s no extra-government power centre that shares their sensibilities. (That’s if the Labour government of lawyers doesn’t pre-empt them, as Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has recently shown intimations of doing.) Good corporate lawyers, and good lawyers in general, might know how to wind their way around Britain’s legislative maze with consummate skill. But a non-legalistic kind of politics knows a more effective trick: that the best way around something is often through it. You don’t unpick the knot — you take a knife to it.

*Names have been changed

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