During the past year or two, much has been written and spoken about the challenges facing lawyers who seek to pursue a career outside law, particularly those who seek a role on the board of a company. A recent letter to the editor of the Financial Times, written by a Birmingham lawyer in response to an article on how City lawyers could be more welcome on boards, was bold enough to state that City solicitors are simply not ‘businessmen’, and that the same could not be said of solicitors outside the City. I could hear the pencils being sharpened in reply, not as swords, but in written riposte to this inflammatory charge.

But if the Birmingham lawyer is right, the picture he painted in his letter is not always so for City solicitors. It is true that there are many lawyers who maintain close, high-level strategic relationships with boards of companies they represent; but there are many more who operate in a transactional relationship at an increasing distance from the day-to-day commercial interactions of their clients. This serves to encourage others to place the lawyer in an ever-more limiting box. The end result can be that when a lawyer reaches retirement from the partnership at an age that leaves them with many years of productive work ahead, they can find it hard to carve out a new path for themselves. They have to fight valiantly against the perceptions of headhunters, and others, about the value a lawyer can offer beyond legal practice.

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