Technical excellence is a given..

.. which, conveniently, means nobody has to check.

Law firms are not meritocracies in the ordinary sense of the word.

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.