We trust our health to the physician; our fortune and sometimes our life and reputation to the lawyer and attorney. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776
Every March you find ten points. One in ethics, one in practice management, one in professional skills, one in substantive law, and six from wherever you can get them. Half of the ten can come from recordings played at your own desk. You write them on your own record and keep it in case the Law Society asks to see it. The record shows the hours you sat in a room.
A pilot flying for an airline goes into a simulator twice a year. A check captain sits behind the pilot with a folder and a list of failures to hand out. An engine fails just past the speed where the take off has to continue. Then a fire. Instruments out. Weather on the approach down to the minimum. The session runs for hours and the check captain writes down what the pilot does with all of it. Fail, and the pilot comes off the line that afternoon and stays off it until the session is flown again and passed. The check captain is another pilot from the same airline, trained and approved to run the check, and flying the line the rest of the month. Once a year an examiner also sits on the flight deck of an ordinary service, with passengers aboard, and watches the whole trip from take off to gate. The airline pays for the simulator and for the examiner’s day.
Most of what is on that list was written after a crash. In October 1935 the Army Air Corps took a new Boeing bomber up at Wright Field in Ohio. The officer at the controls ran the flight testing section. The aircraft took off with the gust lock engaged, which is the clamp that holds the control surfaces still while it is parked. It climbed a few hundred feet, stalled, came down and burned. The design was sound. A newspaper reported that it was too much aeroplane for one man to fly. The Army gave the contract to a simpler machine from another maker and kept a handful of the Boeings for testing. The pilots who flew those wrote out the things to be done before take off and put them on a card. That aeroplane became the B17 and flew through the war. Every airline flight since has started with two people reading a list out loud.
Ask what the ten points actually test.
Ethics, trust accounting, costs disclosure, conflicts. Those subjects fill the compulsory part of the list because they are what puts a practitioner in front of the regulator. The list answers the complaints the profession gets, and it answers them well. Then there is the work you are paid for. Whether to run the point or drop it. Whether the offer on the table is the one to take. What to say to a client on Friday when they have already decided and they are wrong. You make those on your own, in your office, in minutes. The last person who watched you work and wrote down a view of it signed off your supervised practice, two years after you were admitted.
Medicine changed its rule. Since 2023 a doctor registered in Australia has to do fifty hours a year, and at least half of those hours go on reviewing their own performance and measuring what happened to their patients. Sitting in a lecture theatre covers a quarter of it at most. Every doctor belongs to a body that holds the record and answers to the regulator for it. A surgeon who wants the fifty hours signed off has to produce their own complication rates and sit with someone who reads them.
The pilot is in the aeroplane. The check captain running the test will be in one on Thursday, and the two of them want the same thing out of the afternoon. The client pays for a bad call in a law firm. They take the settlement, or spend three years in a proceeding that should have been left alone, or sell the business for less than it was worth. They pay the bill on the way through. By the time the cost of the decision is clear the file is closed and you are on other matters.
So the profession asks for the thing it can count. Ten hours, on a form.
Smith trusted the lawyer with his money, his reputation and sometimes his life. The lawyer signs their own form in March.