As we put the full write-up of the British Legal Awards to bed for the final issue of 2012, it seems an apt moment to reflect on the achievements of the legal profession in what proved yet another challenging year. And they are considerable. Law is a startling success story for British business, contributing over £20bn to the domestic economy annually and in the region of £3bn in exports – a figure that has nearly tripled against a decade ago.
And this a material underestimate, since such official figures focus on private practice and fail to capture the huge expansion of in-house legal departments over the past 20 years. Well over 250,000 are employed in the law and directly-related fields in the UK.
