Guide to the legal profession
Those vanity-published annual guides to the profession are untterly invaluable to the modern practitioner: they make excellent platforms for raising your monitor in the home office. They are sturdy, stable, give a good inch or so of clearance, and when used in groups, even competing products (like the “Legal 500” or any of the Chambers Global Practice Guides) are stackable, interoperable, and backwards-compatible.
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Office anthropology™
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A legal almanac scores over the traditional ream of A4 printer paper in one key regard: durability. Because it has is no other practical use, you may safely stuff two or three of them under your screen indefinitely without fear of having to disassemble your workstation because you have an urgent job and the last sod to use the printer didn’t restock the paper supply in the cupboard.
Recent times have nonetheless been tough for legal almanac publishers. They have been hit by a triple cocktail of woe:
Critical theory got ... critical
In 2019, from nowhere, publishers were forced into bouts of panicked defensive virtue-signalling when their “rigorous selection methodology” — largely “recommending your buddies as a prank and then voting for each other” — was found to be doctrinally wanting by humourless critical legal theorists.[1]
The publishers’ response, though reasonable —“wait a minute? No-one actually reads these guides, do they? Doesn’t everyone just use them to prop up their monitors?” — fell on deaf ears.
But publishers are nothing if not resourceful: the new “Chambers Diversity & Inclusion” is an exclusive guide to the intersectionally-marginised global elite.[2]
Covid goes virtual
But the trouble didn’t stop with a couple of beanish snowflakes. The Covid pandemic prompted the legal almanac publishing industry to go digital, thereby making the same category error the critical theorists did, which was to assume that people want guides to the legal profession in order to actually read them.
But as a moment’s reflection should tell us, they do not. One looks up one’s own entry; if it is there, sends a photocopy to mum; if not, commends yet another quiet resentment to the eternal mental pool; and then swiftly puts the guide to any of its manifestly better uses: propping up monitors, open holding fire-stop doors, being dotted around the department between pot plants to make the place look learned, or just loafing around passively on filing cabinets. Legal guides can survive this way for years.
Now this being the case, an e-version of a legal almanac no good at all unless you print it out. But that will blow a ream of virgin A4 printer paper, and you are better just to use the ream as it is, in case you later need to raid it to print something out.
Printing is so 2019
But it becomes less likely by the day that you you will. Covid is a double crisis, because the working mediocritariat has discovered that it doesn’t need to print, so no-one does any more, and there are oodles of reams of A4 lying around the office, which make perfect monitor stands...
See also
References
- ↑ Or possibly practitioners, posing as humourless critical legal theorists, who were disappointed not to have been included.
- ↑ https://diversity.chambers.com/ “Diversity and inclusion is at the very heart of what we do and who we all are. We are all, in that regard, fundamentally the same, yet at the same time we screen our people to make sure D&I is a fundamental part of their, and therefore our, DNA.”