Some of them look like senior men in good coats and expensive shirts, reaching for the bill.

The man I am going to call Frank was, at first glance, respectable in the way the legal profession understands the word. Well-connected. Expensively upholstered. Used to being listened to. The sort of man whose biography made other people slightly straighten themselves in his presence.

He had the air of someone who belonged in important rooms. Or, more accurately, someone who had spent so long being allowed into important rooms that he had begun to mistake access for character.

I was young then. Fresh out of university, eager, shy, and keen in the way that embarrasses me slightly now. I had not yet learned that some professional environments do not simply reward ambition. They feed on it.

After a couple of months at the firm, I relaxed enough to start going on the social nights out. At the time, the format did not seem especially strange. Drinks. Dinner. More drinks. A nightclub if people had survived dinner with the required enthusiasm. Then excuses, disappearances, and taxis home.

It felt adult.

It felt collegiate.

It felt normal.

That is one of the more humiliating words in retrospect: normal.

Frank presided over these evenings with the loose benevolence of a man who understood the usefulness of being generous. Glasses were topped up. Cigarettes appeared. Tabs vanished. He was, on paper, a generous host.

Not everyone came on these nights out. The older, quieter people — the ones dismissed as boring, by which they meant responsible — tended not to feature. Most of those invited were junior. Some were barely out of adolescence. But when you are young, proximity to power can feel like compliment rather than selection.

People who had been at the firm longer than me sometimes mentioned, lightly but not lightly, that Frank had a habit of “taking a shine” to people.

I heard the phrase and failed to receive the warning.

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The most successful lawyers are not always the best lawyers. Often, they are the best-placed lawyers. The best-connected. The most commercially useful. The most fluent in the language of confidence, reassurance and billable momentum.

This comes as a surprise, because almost everything before practice teaches you to expect something else.

At school and university, you are ranked by how well you understand things. You are tested, graded, sorted and filtered. Your future prospects are made to depend, with brutal apparent fairness, on whether you can absorb complexity and reproduce it under pressure.

Then you apply for training contracts, and the same logic seems to continue. Grades matter. Institutions matter. The right answers matter. The entire gateway into the profession is built around the idea that law is difficult, standards are high, and only the capable will be allowed through.

Then you get inside.

And, slowly or suddenly, depending on your luck, the mythology begins to come apart.

You start to notice that some of the people held up as models of success are not necessarily the people with the deepest understanding of the law. Some are brilliant. Some genuinely are as good as their reputations suggest. But others are something else entirely: commercially valuable, internally protected, externally impressive, and technically much less certain than their status would imply.

At first, you tell yourself you must be missing something.

Surely they know more than they appear to know. Surely there is a level of mastery you are too junior to recognise. Surely the confidence is evidence of competence.

Then, eventually, you realise that sometimes the confidence is the competence. Or at least the thing being rewarded in its place.

There are lawyers who can build a client relationship from nothing. Lawyers who can make nervous people feel safe. Lawyers who can sit in a room full of money and speak its dialect fluently. They can generate work, retain clients, smooth panic, sell certainty and keep the machine fed.

These are not small skills. In commercial practice, they matter enormously.

But they are not the same as legal excellence.

The awkward truth is that firms often behave as though they are.

A lawyer who generates substantial revenue can acquire a peculiar institutional immunity. Their weaknesses become “known issues”. Their gaps become “style”. Their procedural chaos becomes something for other people to manage. Their technical thinness becomes survivable because the numbers are good, the clients are loyal, or the workstream is too valuable to disturb.

The same failings that would ruin a junior lawyer can become, in the right person, part of the furniture.

Everyone knows. Everyone smiles. Everyone works around it.

This is one of the first adult lessons of law firm life: competence matters, but not in isolation. It matters until it conflicts with revenue. It matters until the person lacking it is too profitable, too useful, too embedded, or too politically inconvenient to challenge.

After that, competence becomes negotiable.

Firms will often say that technical excellence is “a given”. This is a useful phrase, because it means the thing most central to the profession can be treated as an assumption rather than tested as a fact.

I have seen plenty of metrics for hours, recovery, utilisation, billing, write-offs, client wins, matter values, cross-selling, leverage and profitability. I have seen far fewer serious attempts to ask, plainly and institutionally, whether the people doing the work actually know what they are doing.

“Knowing what the hell you are doing” rarely appears as a performance metric.

Which is strange, given the branding.

Law firms present themselves as temples of expertise. They sell judgement, precision, rigour, trust. They speak endlessly about values, excellence, integrity, community and culture. The websites glow with purpose. The recruitment brochures hum with moral vocabulary. The awards submissions describe a profession committed not merely to commerce, but to service.

And yet, inside the machine, one truth sits beneath almost everything else.

The engine is money.

This is not unique to law firms. Most commercial organisations exist to make money. No sensible person should be shocked by that.

But law still asks to be treated differently. It still borrows the language of profession, duty and public trust. It still recruits clever, anxious young people by telling them that excellence matters. It still polishes itself in the mirror of old ideals while operating, increasingly, like any other industry built around margin, growth and extraction.

That is the dissonance.

Not that law firms make money.

That they pretend money is not the organising principle.

There are, of course, excellent lawyers. There are lawyers who know their subjects cold. Lawyers with judgement, discipline, humility and technical depth. Lawyers who save clients from disasters they will never fully understand. Lawyers who carry entire practices quietly while louder people collect the mythology.

But there are also bluffers. More than outsiders would believe. More than juniors are initially able to recognise.

From the outside, it is almost impossible to tell the difference. The suits are the same. The language is the same. The offices are the same. The confidence is the same.

Inside, you learn to listen more carefully.

You learn who actually knows.

You learn who performs knowing.

And, most importantly, you learn which of those two categories the institution prefers.

The answer is not always flattering.

Law firms are meritocracies, in a sense. But not the sense you were sold.

They reward merit as defined by the machine: revenue, loyalty, usefulness, client control, internal politics, appetite for the grind, and the ability to convert human life into chargeable units without making anyone important uncomfortable.

Technical excellence may help.

Commercial value protects.

That is the lesson.

Welcome to the machine.

Every Monday, the team performs a small corporate liturgy called ‘the capacity call’. Each fee earner is invited to reduce the full mess of their professional life to one of three colours: green, amber or red. Green means feed me. Red means save me. Amber means something more interesting. Amber means there is still just enough blood in the body to be worth harvesting.

I said amber.

This was a tactical error.

No sooner had the word left my mouth than a senior colleague treated it not as a warning sign but as an opening. There was, apparently, a small matter I could pick up. It needed to complete by the end of the week. It should only take a couple of hours.

This is one of law’s most reliable phrases: only a couple of hours.

It is said most confidently at precisely the stage when no one yet knows how many parties are involved, how many lawyers are required, whether the commercial terms exist, or whether the client’s expectations have any meaningful relationship with time, money or physics. It is not an estimate. It is a spell. A small charm placed over someone else’s diary.

The fact that it was year-end did not appear to trouble the logic. Year-end is the period when nobody in a law firm has spare capacity, because every fee earner has been converted into a cross between a spreadsheet, a calculator and a swirling set of KPIs. Matters must be progressed far enough to bill. WIP must be explained. Clients must be persuaded that the number on the invoice is not, in fact, an act of personal violence. Finance must be appeased. Partners must be updated. The system must be fed.

The supposedly small matter, naturally, did not become a matter. It hovered briefly above the week like a weather warning, then dissolved. By that point, it had already served its purpose. It had reminded me that capacity is not a measurement. It is an invitation to have your personal agency removed because somebody else has over-promised.

The rest of the week belonged to the target.

As the financial year approached its final moments, the inbox began to develop a pulse. Emails arrived from increasingly senior parts of the firm, each one asking, in its own polished way, whether there were any more bills to raise. The tone was urgent but ceremonial. No one quite screamed. The grammar remained intact. But behind every sentence sat the same animal fact: more money, please.

At one point, the numbers being circulated suggested the firm was going to miss even its revised target by an amount large enough to acquire its own gravitational field. By the end, of course, the target had been exceeded. This is another year-end tradition. First, the institution behaves as though it is standing at the edge of a cliff. Then, somehow, the cliff turns out to have been an accounting category.

The panic was not pointless, though. Panic rarely is. Panic is one of the ways professional services firms extract liquidity from exhausted people. It creates a temporary moral weather in which every outstanding bill becomes a test of loyalty, every write-off becomes a small betrayal, and every fee earner is invited to prove their commitment by producing revenue at speed.

The machine does not need to shout. It has email.

Somewhere in the middle of this, I was also trying to free myself from a client who could not accept that lawyers charge for emails and calls, yet still wanted more of both. He works in a field that also sells expertise, attention and judgement, but appeared genuinely startled to encounter the commercial pricing of those things when practised by someone else.

I resisted the temptation to explain that lawyers have been charging for time and words for longer than any of us have been pretending to enjoy LinkedIn.

There was a more useful lesson underneath the irritation. The profession trains clients to believe in relationship until the moment relationship appears on an invoice. We sell availability, then act surprised when availability becomes entitlement.

Boundaries are expensive in a system that rewards responsiveness.

At the office, the building had the strange charge it gets before annual pay and bonus decisions are made. People were performing the versions of themselves the appraisal system rewards. Paralegals radiated usefulness. Juniors practised certainty. Support staff became briefly quite helpful. Senior people moved through the space with the calm of those whose anxiety is delivered through other people.

None of this is really a criticism of individuals. That would be too easy, and too flattering to the institution. Most people were simply responding to the incentives placed in front of them. Put training contracts, pay rises, promotion and approval behind glass, and people will tap the glass. Some will tap delicately. Some will use both hands. The glass is still the point.

Other departments began emitting matters that had been overlooked until year-end exposed them. There is no urgency quite like the urgency of someone else’s delay. A file can sit undisturbed for months, quietly gathering institutional dust, and then suddenly appear in your inbox wearing the expression of a burning orphanage.

This, too, is part of the choreography. The neglected thing becomes urgent only when it becomes billable, embarrassing, or both.

By late Friday afternoon, my own billing queries arrived. Not early enough to be useful. Not late enough to be irrelevant. Just perfectly positioned in the almost-too-late zone, where the sender can say the point has been raised and the recipient can enjoy a small private collapse.

The week also brought news of a promotion. A colleague had been made partner. I will not pretend to be neutral about this. There are people in professional life whose presence turns the nervous system into an unread email. But the more interesting point is not personal dislike. It is institutional speech.

Promotions tell the floor what the firm means, not what it says. Values statements are cheap. Partnership decisions are expensive. When a firm describes itself as kind, humane and committed to doing the right thing, then rewards a style experienced by many as cold, condescending and fluent in internal power, the contradiction does not need commentary. It has already stood up and introduced itself.

No one sensible expects partners to be saints. That would be childish. But people do notice what rises. They notice whether the institution rewards generosity or hardness, judgement or compliance, client relationships or proximity to power. They notice the gap between the slogan and the succession plan.

As the week drew to a close, I thought about the professional life I had constructed with such care and such poor foresight.

Capacity was a colour. Panic was a management tool. Billing was moral weather. Kindness was a brand asset. Promotion was the firm speaking in its clearest voice.

It was not a bad week by the machine’s standards.

It was a very good week.

The machine had closed the year.

They tend to describe it as “a social media platform for professional networking”, which is one of those phrases that collapses if you look at it for more than three seconds. Social media is supposed to be social. Professional networking is largely a commercial ritual performed under fluorescent lighting by people pretending not to want anything.

The contradiction was there from the start.

In-person networking is already a form of theatre. People arrive with name badges, fixed smiles, and the dead-eyed optimism of hostages. They have been trained to ask questions which sound human but are really due diligence. What do you do? Where are you based? Who do you act for? Are you useful? Can you introduce me to someone useful? Would my firm approve of this conversation?

Nobody says it like that, obviously. That would be inelegant. Instead, everyone smiles, drinks warm white wine from a glass apparently designed for a dentist’s waiting room, and performs “interest in the person”.

The person is rarely the point.

The point is proximity. The point is opportunity. The point is a polite assessment of whether this interaction might one day be billable, reputationally useful, politically helpful, or at least capable of being mentioned in a business development update.

LinkedIn did not invent this. It simply removed the room.

Once the performance was moved online, something remarkable happened. The awkwardness disappeared, but so did the shame. The smile became permanent. The elevator pitch became a post. The humblebrag became a genre. The applause became measurable.

And so we now have the professional platform in its mature form: a place where adults with mortgages, practising certificates, and allegedly serious jobs gather to congratulate one another on having attended events, changed jobs, taken photographs near windows, overcome adversity, learned lessons, embraced journeys, failed upwards, reflected deeply, and been “humbled” by outcomes they have spent months trying to engineer.

There is the “I’m thrilled to announce” post.

There is the “I never thought someone like me would get here” post.

There is the “what a week” post.

There is the “leadership is about listening” post, usually written by someone who has spent the last decade converting other people’s evenings into margin.

There is the grief-to-growth post, where private pain is fed carefully through the engagement machine and emerges, somehow, as a lesson in resilience, authenticity, or personal brand.

There is the hot take, in which someone either announces the blindingly obvious as though delivering it from Mount Sinai, or says something faintly deranged in the hope that strangers will argue beneath it.

And then there are the experts.

LinkedIn is full of experts. Recruitment experts. Branding experts. Leadership experts. Thought leaders. Wellbeing experts. Culture experts. Experts in visibility. Experts in authenticity. Experts in LinkedIn itself, which is perhaps the final stage of professional collapse: becoming an authority on the platform on which you became an authority.

The legal profession, naturally, has adapted.

We now have the Legal LinkedInfluencer: a creature produced by the collision of insecurity, ambition, marketing budgets, and the algorithm. They are not assessed by the quality of their thinking, which would be old-fashioned and dangerously difficult to measure. They are assessed by frequency, volume, engagement, reach, impressions, reactions, and whatever other dashboard language has been imported from the wider attention economy.

The posts themselves are often almost impressively empty.

A photograph of a laptop beside a coffee.

A walk into the office.

A picture of a seminar room.

A reflection on “showing up”.

A reminder to “be kind”.

A throwback to a time before the writer’s personality had been absorbed into content strategy.

Occasionally there will be Lego. Nobody knows why.

Beneath all of this comes the ritual applause. Same-firm colleagues appear instantly, like meerkats of institutional loyalty. “So proud of you.” “Incredible.” “Well deserved.” “Couldn’t agree more.” “Important post.” “Powerful words.” Half the time you can feel the internal politics humming under the emojis.

This is not friendship. It is reputational maintenance with heart icons.

The client-facing version is even more exquisite. Someone posts a vague observation about the market, and a small crowd gathers to admire it. The comments are never quite comments. They are tiny offerings. Little professional sacrifices laid at the altar of future instruction.

“Great insight.”

“Really interesting perspective.”

“Couldn’t agree more.”

“Important point for the sector.”

Translation: please remember I exist.

The legal profession is supposed to prize judgment, restraint, precision, independence, seriousness. Yet somehow it has persuaded itself that serious people must now maintain a public feed of choreographed enthusiasm. They must be visible. They must be positive. They must be “authentic”, but only in the approved format. They must show personality, but not too much. They must tell stories, but only stories which resolve into brand-safe lessons. They must be human, but not inconveniently so.

This is the real genius of LinkedIn. It does not force anyone to be false. It simply creates an environment in which falseness is rewarded so consistently that sincerity starts to look commercially negligent.

Nobody wants to be the person who says the whole thing is nonsense. That would be negative. That would be cynical. That would suggest an insufficient commitment to business development. So everyone carries on. The firms carry on. The marketers carry on. The associates carry on. The partners carry on. ‘Thought leaders’ continue to follow. The same posts circulate, the same people applaud, the same phrases recur, and the platform becomes what every professional institution secretly loves: a hierarchy pretending to be a community.

Perhaps this is why LinkedIn irritates me so much.

Not because it is uniquely stupid. It is not. Plenty of things are stupid.

It irritates me because it is so revealing. It shows the profession in miniature: status dressed as virtue, ambition dressed as generosity, sales dressed as insight, self-promotion dressed as vulnerability, conformity dressed as courage.

It is not an escape from the machine.

It is the machine, with a comments section.

And yet, I have to admit something slightly unpleasant.

For all my irritation, I am grateful for it.

Because if the legal profession has decided to build a vast public farm of performative hogwash, watered daily by humblebrags, professional fawning, client-flattery, and algorithmic self-regard, then it would be almost rude not to harvest it.

The same system that rewards the nonsense may yet help expose it.

Thank you, LinkedInfluencers.

Welcome to the machine.

Steve had liked me initially – but that faded fast when the woman he was having an affair with (this was an open secret and openly acknowledged and discussed in the office, even by the managing partner) decided I ‘wasn’t her cup of tea’.

At one stage during my training contract, Steve wrote down on a piece of paper what I needed to achieve/demonstrate in order for me to be guaranteed an NQ job on qualification – I still have this piece of paper somewhere.

At the time, it really mattered to me that I be offered a job on qualification with that firm, as within its own little bubble you were made to feel as if you were bloody lucky to have a job at all, on the basis that no one else would probably have you.

When NQ jobs were announced for my qualification year, my meeting with Steve was scheduled and I felt quietly confident about how this was going to go, on the basis that I had achieved (and could clearly show I had achieved) each of the things Steve had written on that scrap of paper.

When we sat down in the meeting room, Steve looked at me and said (in his awkwardly self-conscious, yet confident, way) I wasn’t being offered an NQ position – at which point the bottom fell out of my world. I showed him the piece of paper – to which his response was to say “that’s not my writing”.

He asked me not to say anything to anyone and that my departure would be announced in due course. I went out for a walk at this point – and when I returned, it turned out Steve had quickly called everyone into a room and told them that I had decided to leave.

This wasn’t the first time Steve had lied to me or about me – at one point he and Petra (with whom he was having the affair) had concocted a story to try and get me sacked for gross misconduct, which was subsequently shown to be untrue.

Since that time, I have been unable to trust any promises made by ‘a boss’ and left with chronic anxiety.

Steve still practices and owns a single-office (yet supposedly ‘regional’) firm in the South of England.

The monsters are real.

A stranger calls, or messages, or slides into your LinkedIn inbox with the faintly conspiratorial energy of someone bringing news from the outside world. They ask whether you can talk. Usually, you cannot. You are sitting in an office, surroun…

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The client is sold competence at a price low enough to win the work. The partner protects the margin. The firm protects the spreadsheet. And somewhere, usually several floors below the conversation in which the fee was agreed, a junior lawyer is handed the file and told to make the economics come true.

Thi…

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Not everyone can be the partner. Not everyone can sit at the top of the department, issue decrees about best practice, and make personal preference sound like institutional law - but this doesn’t stop the Standards Adjutant, and every Sovereign requires attendants. Interpreters. Messengers. People who learn the ge…

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