The $20 million lawyer: signifier of system failure (and potential superhero saviour?)

The headline in The Lawyer read, “The $20 million lawyers have arrived”. How would the headline be translated by an algorithm designed to express everything from a systems perspective, I wonder. “Big brains choose even more jam today - and no tomorrow”, perhaps?

This is not about taking cheap shots at fat cat lawyers. I am interested in what the phenomenon of lawyers being paid $20m a year tells us about what we, through our economy, value at this moment in history and what the wider implications of this are. I want to acknowledge how difficult it must be to contemplate change from within such a personally lucrative system, but also to identify why it may still be desirable and how it may come about.

The conditions for life on earth which we enjoy are unique over the 13+ billion years of the life of the universe and across its trillions of galaxies. For the last few decades (some) humans have been consuming the natural resources of the planet at a faster rate than it is able to replenish them[1]. The greenhouse gas emissions we continue to generate are setting climate breakdown in train and efforts to abate them give a new meaning to net zero as they achieve no meaningful overall reductions in the necessary timescales.

In other words, we are destroying the fragile conditions which support life on earth by creating extreme imbalances in our planetary ecosystem. We seem incapable of imagining (and so acting to avert) the consequences. The $20 million lawyer is both product of and contributor to those imbalances. The graphic above demonstrates the extent of the responsibility for emissions and inequalities of the system which City lawyers and their clients are integral to. If that sort of salary is a measure of success and something to be celebrated, we are still in the mindset which has been the cause and perpetuation of our existential crisis. Such salaries are unsustainable – both because they are a consequence of activities contributing to the collapse of the conditions for life and because that collapse will bring an abrupt end to the system which makes them possible.

Talk of collapse might seem melodramatic to those who are head down, putting in the hours to be in the frame for such salaries. However, I am yet to come across one lawyer able to explain how collapse will be avoided, given the complete lack of progress on reducing aggregate greenhouse gas emissions to date and the absence of political will and international co-operation necessary to change this. The likes of ESG, green finance initiatives and natural capital markets are tinkering with the existing system, when it needs to be replaced. Commitments around transition and adaptation are no longer adequate. We need transformation, radical adaptation and system change something which is being increasingly discussed openly, not just by progressives but some players in the mainstream too.

I acknowledge that shifting away from where we are is far from simple in practice. As we are thinking about systems, we must recognise the individuals involved are themselves operating in sub-systems: in terms of the client markets they work in, the legal profession, their own firms and they themselves can be regarded a system too. These have their own ‘logics’, with high degrees of overlap, and if there is so much money swilling around in those systems, it seems logical to claim your share of it.

What is rational and what is radical? The obvious answer within those sub-systems is it is rational to want to make more money and radical to suggest a better alternative may be an approach focused on sufficiency and redistribution. Through the lens of the planetary ecosystem, however, it is rational to do all we can to preserve those optimal conditions for life on earth, dialling down the levels of financial returns and pay awards expected from one small part of the system to help restore the wider system to better balance and health for universal benefit. The radical stance is to continue with practices we know will lead to self-termination.

Today’s City lawyers live in both systems, of course. I know from my own modest exposure to that world and from contact with others who operate in it that the numbers are so big and the work is so intense that it forms a reality all of its own. It thrives on adrenalin, testosterone and excess and prolonged exposure to it can be addictive. It is pretty inconceivable, from the inside, to imagine it being replaced – certainly voluntarily. And yet, that reality can - and will - be swept away by another, when financial stability is undermined by assets becoming uninsurable and uninvestible and geopolitical tensions erupt.

To be explicit about the connection between such stratospheric salaries and the self-terminating system:

Ø  the top 0.1% earners globally (roughly 5.3 million adults) are responsible for three times more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire poorest half of the world’s population (2.7 billion adults)

Ø  anyone paid over £500,000 is one of the top 0.1% earners in the UK, putting many lawyers already among those causing a hugely disproportionate volume of emissions

Ø  to reduce emissions in line with the Paris Agreement and to  eradicate poverty and address the Sustainable Development Goals requires a huge reduction in emissions from the wealthiest to create the opportunity to achieve both these aims. The volume of emissions in the graphic need to be pushed firmly down that funnel shape and, at the same time, significantly reduced. Stoking the system to give the richest even more to spend is incompatible with that and undermines any claims of authenticity in terms of Paris-aligned practice by its participants

I am not proposing the lawyers immersed in that system turn their backs on it. Stepping away, as an individual, or as a firm, simply allows others to take your place. I am suggesting that they might re-direct their energies and skills towards an outcome which is less of a moonshot (aiming at some distant and improbable goal, such as sustainable air fuels being available at scale before the global carbon budget is well and truly blown) and more of a soul shot. This is a more difficult quest, navigating complex responses, personal and collective, unearthing long neglected parts of our psyches, and working out how they might co-exist with qualities already present, to help steer us to the different, quintessential goal of a habitable planet.

There is a critical role for City lawyers to play in helping design and implement this system change. It goes beyond moving away from fossil fuels, to also rewiring our hyper-financialised economy, which both lies at the root of the crisis we are in and presents the biggest practical impediment to addressing it. In involves a shift from the purpose of money being to create more money regardless of the cost, to one where it is a critical tool for meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. By way of example, redesigning the system so that efforts to direct the trillions necessary to the developing world do not go into reverse as soon as interest changes in the US make investing there more lucrative. This is something surely not beyond a lawyer’s capabilities if they have clients and regulators instructing them to deliver it.

Some such clients already exist, for example those investors engaging in macro-stewardship activities and/or challenging the boards of their investees to recognise that it does not benefit some of their most significant members, who take a portfolio approach, for the company to externalise costs onto other parts of the economy, even if it inflates that company’s profits. Regulators and policy makers tend not to be pioneers on this sort of thing, not moving either until they are confident they have strong market support, or when confronted by disaster (think the financial crash and Covid). Labour though have openly talked of establishing an Office of the Impact Economy to explore ways of applying finance more effectively to achieve social and environmental ends, so this may just be the time the regulators too encourage new approaches – with market support - to head off disaster before it happens.

Young and aspiring lawyers know that a career as a corporate lawyer in the City currently offers the prospect of astonishing wealth, but at the cost of their complicity in creating a far less desirable world to inhabit. An alternative is imaginable where they earn, say, $2million rather than $20million but do so by co-creating an economy which offers a more hopeful future for them and their loved ones. This economy would have no use for those more fanciful salaries, having diffused our hyper-inflated property market and re-ordered priorities around healthier, more balanced, ecosystems, societies and working practices The lawyers would likely remain among the highest earners in our society: it would just be in an economy where less was needed or desirable.

Conversations around making such choices possible are the ones which need to be taking place. Instead of having to gamble that their exceptional wealth (if it survives the collapse) will leave them better placed to survive the dystopian future they have played a part in accelerating, lawyers could have the chance to be system change superheroes[2], helping to save humanity from itself. Choosing glory, not greed: capes optional.

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[1] the sort of behaviour that would turn away any prudent investor in any other context

[2] acknowledging the debt to Matt Gingell in using this analogy, which he made good use of years ago