Guide to the legal profession

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An Annual Guide To The Legal Profession, is an excellent platform for sitting your computer monitor on: it is sturdy, stable, stiff, approximately two inches high, eminently stackable, and competing market products (like the “Legal 500” or any of the Chambers Global Practice Guides) are fully interoperable backwards-compatible in this i9mportant regard.

As VDU support, such a legal almanac scores over the traditional monitors stands such as a ream of A4 printer paper because there is no other obvious use for a Legal Practice Guide, meaning you can safely stuff two or three of them under your monitor without fear of having to suddenly disassemble your workstation because you have an urgent printing job and the last sod who used the copier didn't replenish the paper supply in the cupboard.

Recent times have nonetheless been tough for publishers of legal almanacs, hit by a triple cocktail of woe:

Critical theory gets ... critical

In 2019, from nowhere, they were forced into panicked defensive virtue-signalling when their “rigorous selection methodology” for inclusion (largely “recommending your buddies as a prank”) was found to be doctrinally wanting by humourless critical legal theorists and practitioners, posing as humourless critical theorists, who were simply disappointed not to have been included. The publishers’ response, though reasonable —“wait a minute? I don’t think anyone actually reads these guides, do they? Doesn’t everyone just use them to prop up their monitors?” — fell on deaf ears and we now have “Chambers Diversity & Inclusion” — an exclusive list of the intersectionally marginised elite.

Covid goes virtual

The Covid pandemic has presented further challenges: firstly, it prompted the move of much of the almanac publishing industry to digital, making the same category error the critical theorists did, which was to assume that people take guides to the legal profession because they want to read them. As described, this is not so. They get them to prop up monitors, hold fire-stop doors open, and sandwich between pot plants around the department to make the place look bookish. An e-version of a legal profession guide is no good for that, unless you print it out — in which case you are better just to use a ream of virgin A4 paper, as you could use that if need be if you otherwise run out.

Covid is a double crisis, too, since for Chambers and its ilk because no-one prints any more, so a ream of A4 is now a fairly safe bet