On 1 September 2025, I reached a milestone of 25 years qualified. So, 27 years of being a solicitor and 25 years practising employment law post-qualification. To make you laugh we were the first year in which trainees were given a computer of their own. The year before four people had to share one: can you imagine suggesting that to anyone now?
Having grown up in the days of ordering company information from Companies House on microfiche (obtain a cheque, send a letter by post, wait for the fiche to come in a little cardboard envelope, load it into a machine the size of a filing cabinet, scroll through very difficult to read data) whereas now it’s a two second search on an app, I thought it might be interesting to reflect on what has changed over that time and what I’d like to see us promote.
The biggest changes are of course the technology: email and the internet was an infant and we treated email very much like a formal letter whereas now people stream consciousness at you like they are tweeting.
We live in an age where you can buy something from Amazon in the morning and have it delivered by afternoon. This comes with a pressure to think and act very fast (I remember the days where we could acknowledge receipt of a letter with a letter saying we’d received it and would respond, buying us at least 7 days time).
The greatest piece of advice I’d give anyone is to not get caught up in the frenzy. Unless you are up against a court deadline, building in a pause is helpful: it can give everyone the time to reflect and think differently. It can be easy to cave in to the clamour coming ‘at’ you to feel like you need to react immediately. When you do that oftentimes you’ll react with an emotional response… pausing enables you to give a more measured and thought through approach. At the very least breathe deeply before you respond. Not reacting is often a valid response as much as reacting is: you don’t have to buy into deadlines set arbitrarily.
The internet has upskilled the recipients of anything we send; they have a much better knowledge of anything we are communicating about and will challenge us accordingly; we’ve had to up our game. This is a good thing; we have to do better.
Attention spans are smaller. I used to have a twenty page redundancy document. I can’t imagine sending that document to anyone now. That’s probably a good thing. My client can read that information on the internet. We can focus on adding value.
This technology has made it all to easy to not communicate or to communicate badly. I remember the days when lawyers would routinely call each other, explain who they were acting for and have a ‘how are we going to sort this one out?’ call. Now all too often I am imploring my opposition to speak to me but it is easier to hide behind email. Conversations enable you to get a better understanding of where someone is coming from: that is as important in litigation as in life.
The same goes of managers too: the more they actually speak to people the better chance they have of addressing issues early doors before they fester. Have meetings, look each other in the whites of their eyes. It is harder for someone to maintain a complaint if they are feeling heard and listened to. It is harder to be angry if you are meeting with the human involved. So when someone sends an email and you gauge things might be getting tense, call a meeting, face to face if you can, Teams if you really have to, rather than respond with another email. Promote phone calls and meetings instead of email. If things are challenging like performance needs to be managed: have the conversation don’t hide behind digital processes. In fact that would be my parting shot: HAVE THE CONVERSATION! Apply it to everything.
I’m retiring so this will be my last blog. It will be interesting for someone to write another one in another 27 years, telling us how AI has changed the world for the good and for the worse. I’ll leave that to you.
Anna Denton-Jones
Refreshing Law
