A Rose by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet: The New Legal Pro-Occupations in the Construction Sector

Abstract

The occupational golden age of the legal profession is said to have come to an end. The eBay dispute resolution site resolves 60 m complaints a year. Changes in the law are making it easier for accounting practices, estate agents, building societies, banks and others to offer legal services on the side. Companies are cutting back their in-house legal departments or deciding they no longer want to maintain one.

We are therefore on the brink of a period of fundamental and irreversible change in the way that legal expertise is available both within organizations and in society. In the long-term future we will neither need nor want lawyers to think and work in the way they did in the twentieth century and earlier.

In response to these challenges, lawyers are trying to rethink the traditional ways of working, by making legal work more transparent and client-friendly, providing demonstrable value for money and delivering to firm performance indicators. Law firms have started charging clients the same for more work, or less for the same work, shedding staff or keeping the same number and paying (most of them) less.

But this will not be sufficient to halt the current decline. Lawyers must look beyond the traditional channels of providing professional services and appropriate opportunities in other fields, even if they are not immediate neighbors, by re-defining their professional requirements to include legal education and training.

One of the potential opportunities is offered by commercial contracting in construction, a sector almost entirely dominated by non-legal staff, standard forms of contracts and established processes and contractual boundaries. What if a contract administrator, contract manager or even a portfolio, program, or project manager, rather than being a construction professional with an appreciation of legal issues, happens to be a lawyer trained in basic construction matters? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

There are, however, fundamental issues preventing many lawyers from grasping the opportunity and venturing into traditionally non-legal roles in construction, namely the low public opinion of lawyers, professional peer pressure, personal expectations and—the last taboo in the twenty-first century—pay.

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” is a frequently referenced line from William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet (1597), in which Juliet argues that it does not matter that her lover Romeo is from the rival house of Montague, that is, that his name is “Montague.”