An interesting Times online articlefeaturing the lack of commercial knowledge among the trainee lawyers at Freshfields. The lawyers there are of course practicing solely in commercial areas of practice and 15 questions were set out to test their commercial knowledge. The average score came back at 43%.I have taken a look at the questions and they aren’t that easy. No way I would have scored high on that quiz. Here in Malaysia, a lot of people practice in some form of commercial practice, but there may not be enough emphasis in pushing for lawyers to also maintain a broad base of business knowledge and being in tune to current events.

Quoting from the Times article:

An e-mail sent to the trainees later by an unnamed graduate recruitment officer called for an improvement in their general business knowledge and suggested that they would be tested again. “A person who claims to be a commercial lawyer but who doesn’t have much of a handle on what is going on in the commercial world isn’t, in the end, going to be fantastically credible to clients,” it said.