The first day of September holds such significance in my life. Every year I reflect on a day back in 1988 when I first set foot in a solicitor’s office for my first day of properly paid work as an articled clerk.
It’s a day I remember in vivid detail and with absolute clarity. I was excited and hadn’t properly slept the night before. I had a new suit and my father had bought me a fountain pen and a briefcase – he was proud beyond words of his eldest child, who was entering such an esteemed profession.
That’s how it was in the 1980s – becoming a solicitor was regarded as entering one of the great professions.
The scene when I entered that office for the first time would baffle so many young lawyers. No computers – but there was a fax machine. I had never seen one before and I was fascinated by it.
Then there were the secretaries typing with the precision of a concert pianist – no delete or backspace key, no copy or paste, no spellcheck – just a sheet of carbon paper for copies and a bottle of correction fluid for mistakes.
Every solicitor looked experienced and appeared to know exactly what they were doing.
I was shown to my desk where there was a telephone and a handful of files all tied in pink ribbon and an expectation that I would know what to do .
And then you realise the truth – you’ve spent years studying and you finally understand the rule in Hepworth and Pickles, and then someone hands you a file with these words: “Have a look at that and draft a letter to the client, setting out what they should do”.
There was no Google, there was no case management system with precedent letters to refer to, no ‘knowledge hub’. I was simply expected to write a letter.
I sat at my desk, opened the file and stared at what appeared to be words written in a foreign language, hoping the chatter around me would act as inspiration.
Despite the pressure and the expectation that I should be able to recall all the required knowledge for said letter, a benefit of the time was that an immediate response was not needed. In that slower world, there were no emails and everyone really did clock off at five o’clock.
Clients wrote letters that sometimes took days to arrive, meaning there was a chance to reply in a measured way. Nobody emailed at 11pm and followed up at 9am asking if you’d had chance to consider their email. Clients called at lunchtime from the phone box outside their work place.
When you left the office at five o’clock, you left the office. The file stayed on the desk, it did not accompany you home on a device in your pocket.
Every time someone walked past my desk, I tried to look busy. Every time anyone asked me a question, I thought they were testing me.
By the end of the day, I was exhausted. But I had learnt something that I hadn’t been taught at in a lecture hall: I had entered a profession that mattered. Clients were going to trust me with some of the biggest moments in their lives.
I realised that being a solicitor was never really about textbooks – it was about people. That lesson has stayed with me for far longer than anything I had learned in the classroom.
Four decades later, the profession has changed beyond recognition. We have digital signatures, online portals, artificial intelligence, instant messaging and case management systems that generate documents in seconds without a moment’s thought from the solicitor.
But every September, somewhere in the country, a nervous trainee solicitor puts on a new suit and arrives at an office, quietly wondering whether everyone else knows what they’re doing.
Most of us make it up on day one… We just carry a briefcase to look convincing.
This column is written by a real high street conveyancer who wishes to remain anonymous. The views expressed are those of the author and not those of Today’s Conveyancer.
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