Response from the Law Gazette

Following my last blog post, I was contacted by Rupert Collins-White from the Law Gazette in response to the issues I raised. I have to say that I am very grateful to Rupert for getting in touch, I hadn't imagined that my readership was that wide, but here is his response.

Because I've led on the Gazette's online and social media fronts, I believe in being 'straight' with the audience, so that's what I'll try to be below.

First, let's get this "the Gazette's looking thin" thing out of the way. The Gazette is run on a commercial publishing basis – in other words, we make money for the Law Society and we actively reduce the cost of the PC fee. We don't get subsidised. Like a lot of lawyers we kind of have to 'eat what we kill'. Obviously this year's been tough. Because we're run like any other
commercial business-to-business paper, lots of Gazette revenue comes from recruitment advertising. So, when there's a recession, and no one's hiring, there are no recruitment ads. So we make less money. We, like any other paper, operate on a ratio basis for the amount of editorial in the paper compared to the amount of advertising – otherwise the mag's costs would spiral as the number of ads came down. That's why the Gazette is thin – because it's run like a business, and business is tough right now. So, in a very real way, the Gazette 'feels' the redundancies and lack of openings in the market acutely.

Second, I take on board all the points of content you bring up – eg what the Gazette's been covering and what it allegedly hasn't – but I'd like to mount a small defence. The Gazette has a hugely broad church to speak to. Lots of people haven't been made redundant. We've got to write for law firms in the corporate sense and individuals, and a crazily broad swathe of people at that. I do need to think about what to write for people who run law firms to help them avoid making people redundant. I can't let the Gazette write about the woes of redundant solicitors all the time or all the people with other kinds of serious issues will stop reading, because it's not them. These are basic tenets of publishing. It doesn’t mean your issues aren’t serious, or that we’re not alive to them – we are.

Third, this also doesn't mean we're not writing, or don't want to write about the problems that beset those of the membership who are having hard times. Jonathan's 'diary' is something I've actively encouraged (he would have stopped after the first) because I know it's useful to the readership. Whenever there are law reports on employment issues in law firms, those are the first on the list. We covered across several pages earlier in the year the 'pastoral care' options available to solicitors (http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/features/pastoral-care-support-out-there-tough-economic-times). I always make sure our regional issues (where we cover geographic areas of the country) cover both the good and bad news in those areas. And our news team's always covering employment issues in the profession. I really don't think we've been ignoring this, though of course we could always do more.

Fourth, PII is a huge issue this year both in terms of firms and individuals. I think to badge this as 'missing the problems facing their individual subscribers' is plain incorrect, especially for sole practitioners. I don't think outsourcing/offshoring is missing the point either – it's an area that may well impact employment.

Lastly, the profession is experiencing the recession, like any other business sector, and I will continue to try to cover it as much as I can, but writing about these very important issues, to me, must be done from the 'broader perspective' (because of our readership size) – so, for example: making firms more efficient means being able to stay in business… this affects employment – inefficient firms are more likely to make lay-offs; talking about how to deal with rising PII bills is imho to talk about cost issues within law firms – which affects employment, because some PII bills can only be paid with not hiring two people, or making lay-offs.

We run 48 issues a year plus a growing web presence – and there are way more than 48 types of law work, let alone the other issues that pertain to the profession. We have to cover all of this – so we can't spend more than a few weeks per year addressing things like redundancy in the paper directly. This doesn't mean, to me, we're not addressing it.

I'm actually really heartened that you belong to the LinkedIn group and read our blogs. To me this means that our future goals of doing more than the Gazette can do in print through online will work, and we'll able to address issues like redundancy more often. However, I'd prefer to spend next year writing about recovery, and I'm sure you'd wish that too.

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Rupert Collins-White
Features and commissioning editor
Law Society Gazette

I'll keep it brief but I willl respond. I understand the commercial position of the Gazette, the purpose of my Gazette looking thin comment was to highlight that the downturn had obviously hit the paper (I've re-read my blog piece and have seen the grammatical errors which I must have missed whilst typing mid rant, plus the PII comment didn't belong there, I know it is a big issue - particularly in the light of the Gazette's recent exposure of alledged discrimination) and I didn't need my law studies to guess that all those missing pages were the recruitment pages.

I have no qualms about a balanced Gazette, but just as "most solicitors haven't been made redundant", most solicitors aren't partners and principals. We don't need to hear about the woes of the unemployed (that gets boring), but imo, there is a distinct lack of recognition of the problems facing individual solicitors (at all levels PQE) but a huge emphasis on those challenges facing firms. Yes, those managing partners and partners will find it useful to read about how to become more cost efficient, which ultimately, will lead to job savings, but again, my perception is that they take up a disproportionate amount of Gazette space.

The underlying point in my ranting and raving (although I don't think I was that bad!) was that the Law Society and SRA have known since mid August that I was going to be an unemployed newly qualified solicitor. So far, the only personal communication that I have had from them, is a letter inviting me to a conference in November "Future-proof your law firm for a globalised world: new approaches, new challenges" (£280+VAT), a letter and booking form for the admissions ceremony (a month after I'd already dealt with my place online - good to see where our money goes), and a form inviting me to renew my practising certificate. I'm newly qualified and newly unemployed. Theres a lot I don't know and a lot I don't know I need to know. Where is the Law Society and SRA when its not about paying fees and subscriptions?