Suggestions
Chris Hargreaves
A Lawyer who Does Law Firm Marketing
Chris Hargreaves is a senior lawyer and Special Counsel at Batch Mewing Lawyers, a firm specializing in construction law.12 With over 15 years of experience in dispute resolution, Chris provides practical, commercial, and business-driven advice to clients.2
Role and Responsibilities
At Batch Mewing Lawyers, Chris's primary responsibilities include:
- Offering supervision and mentoring to the team
- Focusing on litigation, insolvency, and securities matters
- Supporting lawyers and clients with strong technical knowledge
- Simplifying complex tasks and issues
Chris is known for his ability to consider clients' broader interests in any legal matter, drawing from his extensive commercial experience and perspective as a business owner himself.1
Expertise and Approach
Chris is recognized for:
- Providing practical and commercial advice
- Offering business-driven solutions
- Simplifying complex legal issues
- Considering clients' broader interests beyond just legal matters
Additional Activities
Outside his core legal work, Chris is also:
- An author and experienced public speaker
- A regular presenter of seminars
- A publisher of articles, updates, and videos
His focus in these activities is on providing valuable, approachable, and user-friendly information about legal issues.1
Chris Hargreaves has expressed interest in workplace bullying matters, rights of women and children, and social policy.3 He also created a website called "Tips for Lawyers" to help professionals enhance their legal skills and knowledge.4
Highlights
So here's how I think Practical Legal Training could help prospective young lawyers be more ready for the realities of legal practice:
Toss objective marking criteria in the bin, and conduct PLT subjectively.
Neither your bosses, your clients, other parties or even the Court are going to apply an entirely objective standard to your work - it will be subjective to a large degree. And given all the practice with objective criteria during law school, it's only fair to give young people the experience of the alternative.
In a bad mood? Lots of red pen.
Think it's too long even though you didn't specify a word count? Stop reading at page one and send it back to be more succinct.
Spot an error and want it to be a "teachable moment"? Just put a post it on saying "fix this" and see what happens.
Instead of spelling out the assessment objectives, just hand someone a bundle of paper with the words "action this" written on it.
Got a well written advice that someone obviously spent a lot of time on? Don't read it - just call them at 4:55pm and ask them questions that are already answered in the written document.
This might sound cruel on one level, but I'd suggest it's more likely to prepare young lawyers for the somewhat capricious nature of legal practice.
The fact that Microsoft itself can't actually manage to flag fake Microsoft "critical updates recall" as spam is a source of great amusement to me.
