What next for legal journalism?

Perhaps the hardest part of the Black Letter Communications ‘In Conversation’ event last month for both me and the Law Society Gazette’s John Hyde was being asked to say something nice about each other.

It’s not that we don’t respect what the other does (at least I think he does) but as reporters who cover similar beats, there is naturally a bit of professional rivalry. But in large part, we were in agreement as we debated the legal market and the state of legal journalism. You can watch an edited version of our discussion here.

We went in pretty hard on the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) in the wake of the Axiom Ince report and the tense press conference we attended in the wake of it. The SRA only holds one face-to-face press conference a year, at its annual compliance conference (the rest, which follow board meetings, are online), and last year’s happened to come the week after the Legal Services Board’s highly critical report.

I went first by asking if chair Anna Bradley and chief executive Paul Philip would apologise to the profession (John suggested I went in two-footed with this, but I thought two-footed would have been to ask if they were going to resign). Either way, they had clearly decided not to do either and stuck doggedly to that line. John had a good go too but to similar, minimal effect.

We – and indeed Kerry, chairing our discussion – continue to believe the SRA got this wrong because it showed a lack of humility, and antagonised the profession, both of which are unhelpful.

John and I agreed that the ongoing LSB review of the SRA’s role in the collapse of SSB Law poses even greater danger. There would appear to have been red flags flying and the SRA had been in to inspect the firm about a year earlier, so another critical report could be extremely damaging.

SSB also has a higher public profile than Axiom Ince, with several MPs making noise in Parliament on behalf of affected constituents.

John talked about how he had heard from barristers complaining that SSB had not paid them and, when he put this to the SRA, it just told him it was investigating. “You think there was enough there to step in at that point, because money was going missing,” he said.

This led to a question from the floor about investigative journalism, or rather the lack of it. The reality is that national newspapers’ diminishing resources have led to legal correspondents – outside of The Times, FT and Guardian at least – disappearing.

And the trade press similarly struggles. One of my main regrets running Legal Futures is not having the capacity to properly investigate what happened with the Axiom Legal Financing Fund (the similarity of name is a weird coincidence). This was a massive Ponzi scheme that saw investors lose more than £100m, the solicitor who created it go to jail and various solicitors who were caught up in it struck off.

I had people talking to me about how the SRA could possibly have identified what was happening far earlier, and I was even given a paper trail to start following, but ultimately simply did not have the time.

John went on to talk about his experience as one of just a few journalists covering the Post Office inquiry – and credit to the Gazette for committing to letting him do so, especially given that solicitors have not come out of it well – and how the day after the ITV drama screened, the room was suddenly flooded with national newspaper reporters who had previously ignored it.

He recounted how one asked him if it was the first day of the inquiry. “I said, no, it’s been two years.”

The frustration is, as John said, that there is actually no shortage of public appetite for legal stories, which from prorogation to the Post Office have been on the front pages so much in recent years, “so if you had someone there with the expertise, wouldn’t it just be so much better for the newspaper?” he asked.

We talked about some of our worst journalism experiences – for John, interviewing the cricketer Monty Panesar, who did not want to be interviewed; for me, interviewing a justice minister only to find afterwards that my tape recorder had broken – and some of the odd things law firms do. John recounted writing a story about a law firm losing £18m, only for it to complain that the figure related to the whole group; the firm itself had lost ‘only’ £13m.

“And I slightly flippantly said, well if you want us to write a second story clarifying that, we will. And they said, ‘Yes, that’d be very useful, thank you’. I thought that was the most incredible PR – they managed to take a bonfire and chuck petrol on the top of it.”

We talked about good and bad legal PR – a good PR person can be invaluable but too many are just little more than administrators who don’t understand what journalists want – and whether we were using AI (I don’t but have just started experimenting with it, John uses it to draft SEO-friendly headlines).

We finished on how we see our worlds changing over the next five years. I am looking to move away from churning out daily news stories that frankly, in the era of cut-and-paste journalism, you can read on several websites and instead focus on fewer but deeper and more insightful stories. John talked about how he had been influenced by Naomi Klein’s book, No Logo, on the importance of developing a personal brand and that this is what he is trying to do.

Which led us finally to say something nice about each other, because John said that this is what I have managed to achieve with Legal Futures.

So what did I say about him? Well, that I like it when he goes on holiday, because it makes my life easier not having to worry what he’s up to. And that’s as good as he’s going to get.