Short-cuts in training will suck the credibility out of British legal firms

Cocktails flowed at the annual RollonFriday party at The Ivy on Tuesday night. The legal website’s evening was enlivened by a rare broadcast of The Vampyr: A Soap Opera, about a Nineties businessman who is also a closet bloodsucker.

The mergers and acquisitions boom means many City law firms are enjoying a bumper year, but it is a different story among high-street practitioners, where legal aid cuts are predicted to force a new round of consolidation.

Yet the closest many lawyers will get to a nightmare this autumn is if the Solicitors Regulation Authority sinks its fangs into the time-honoured process of qualifying as a solicitor. The SRA is due to report back soon after consulting on a plan to deregulate training.

At the moment, almost all aspiring solicitors must complete a two-year training contract with a law firm or an in-house legal department before qualifying. The fear is that this period may be abolished.

It is a topic that has vexed the Law Society, which worries that the same skills cannot be picked up during a short trainee placement. Over the summer it warned that such a move would chip away at London’s reputation as a centre of legal excellence that is exported around the world. And it isn’t just London: the legal world contributes more than £30bn to the UK economy and supports 300,000 jobs. Some corners are not worth cutting.

In a recent Radio 2 interview, Rod Stewart cheerfully confessed he didn’t know how to check himself in for a flight because he had always had “his people” to do that sort of thing for him. His wife Penny Lancaster had grounded him more firmly in reality, as well as being a joy to shoe-shop with.

Rock stars are not dissimilar to chief executives. One minute you are the top of the charts, and the next you have to fend for yourself. I had lunch this week with a friend who is getting used to life after leaving the corner office.

Far fewer bosses have their own chauffeur these days so that is not a perk he misses. The lack of a personal assistant – and some chief executives have several to plan their itineraries many months in advance – is harder. He even made the lunch booking himself.

Struggling on without administrative support is do-able, if a little lonely. The real hardship he has found is going without the IT support common in every big organisation. My friend made numerous trips to the Apple Store in an attempt to transfer everything from his smartphone on to a non-company device. He saved his contacts list but lost emails and text message records.

Roll on his re-employment.

It was the week that big business counted the cost of George Osborne’s national living wage. And the conclusion, after all that counting and some wailing and gnashing of teeth, is that they can afford it. Still unclear, though, is what the overall impact of this policy will be on the size and shape of the UK workforce. That will not be known until long after the £7.20-an-hour wage – rising to £9 by 2020 – becomes a reality next April.

At Next, chief executive Lord Wolfson rallied to Mr Osborne’s cause – not surprising given that his wife Eleanor has been the Chancellor’s economic adviser. Aside from lambasting Labour’s bloated system of tax credits, he brandished statistics to show that higher pay can be soaked up by more efficiently run businesses. Next’s hourly rate for adult starters outside London has risen by 13 per cent in the past three years. Despite declining underlying sales, branch wages as a percentage of sales have barely moved. The company points to productivity improvements that include employing fewer staff on longer contracts.

That conclusion appears to diverge from Mr Osborne’s verdict when he delivered his July Budget – that minimum wage rises had a minimal impact on employment levels but led to fewer hours worked. But Lord Wolfson’s view was echoed by the CBI president Paul Drechsler, who forecast that companies would pay their workers the living wage – but employ a fifth to a tenth fewer.

The great success of the coalition government was to preside over a huge increase in the private sector workforce – comfortably offsetting the cuts inflicted in the public sector. It is imperative that this new deal for business of lower taxes and higher wages – and for workers, higher wages and less welfare – does not reverse that.

As well as the risk of stoking inflation, there is a distinction to be drawn between the limited number of jobs predicted to be lost because of the living wage and those that are never created in the first place. It’s worth considering, especially as technological advances threaten to gobble up swathes of low-skilled employment in the future.

Whitbread, whose coffee chain Costa Coffee has been a huge creator of new jobs, also pointed to productivity improvements and price rises to help it shoulder the added cost burden. This year, Costa plans to open around 220 new stores, net of closures. But it also has the installation of up to 800 net new Costa Express machines – typically found in petrol stations – in the pipeline. Advances in automation are not just something with the potential to reduce manpower on the factory floor.