Michael Frape, President of the Cambridgeshire Law Society
1871 and All That
A warm welcome to our sesquicentennial year!
A great deal has changed since 1871 and the year in which Cambridgeshire Law Society was founded. Queen Victoria was then monarch of the United Kingdom, Gladstone was Prime Minister and the sun never set on the British Empire, which at its height encompassed one quarter of the world’s land surface. In Europe, 1871 marked the creation of the Second Reich and the founding of modern Germany. Empires and Reichs, two words which have very different and wholly adverse connotations in 2021. All change in 150 years!
Many law firms have been founded since 1871, the vast majority prospering and some continuing to prosper to this day (but some sadly not). Nearly all have merged with other firms and continued on their journey (or been wound up and disappeared). Of the success stories, our largest member law firm, Mills & Reeve, is a proud example of the longevity of some of our member firms, being able to trace its roots back to 1789 (the year of the French Revolution!) when newly-qualified solicitor Christopher Pemberton, aged 24, went into practice on his own account in Cambridge. I would suggest that the success of Mills & Reeve and its long association with CLS are not entirely coincidental.
Despite the astonishing changes in the world and the legal profession over the last 150 years, Cambridgeshire Law Society has been a constant presence in our legal community. Why?
Whenever and wherever there are groups of people and individuals plying a common trade, there will always be a desire and, in reality, a basic human need for those groups and people to come together to share their experiences, increase their knowledge and, most importantly, increase their connections. It would, in my view, be inhuman not to.
Homo sapiens are very social animals. Collaboration is a fundamental part of our evolutionary success. Through group activity the individual obtains the support and protection by others that they could not hope to achieve on their own, thereby avoiding the grim realities of the Hobbesian ‘State of Nature’ where there is a ‘warre of every man against every man’. This wish to collaborate with others is replicated in the creation and success of local law societies like CLS and other collective bodies and associations.
Some may argue that their firm provides all they need in terms of mutual support, work and the means to develop their skills, experience and careers. To my mind, this shows a myopia and lack of imagination, which, although understandable, is surprising and a cause of sadness.
That is the ‘need’, but there are two sides to this equation. CLS has to fulfil the need, which is why we went through a re-branding process facilitated by Mobas in 2019. It was necessary for CLS to go through a ‘re-set’ in order to ensure that its proposition was attractive and relevant to the legal community in Cambridge and Cambridgeshire. The process was hugely positive and vital to our development as a local law society.
Provided that CLS continues to deliver on our mission, which is to ‘connect members and drive excellence throughout the legal community in Cambridgeshire’, we believe that CLS can look forward with a reasonable degree of confidence to the next 150 years.
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