Do lawyers have something important to learn from meerkats? Is their behaviour similar to that of the naked vole rat? That question might sound like the preamble to a bar joke. But not so, if Hugh Crisp, a veteran English lawyer is to be believed.
For the first 30 years of his career, Crisp worked as a senior City of London lawyer, rising to the hallowed position of managing partner of the esteemed Freshfields law firm. But these days, Crisp has moved into a new career, teaching business, law and management skills at the Said Business School in Oxford. And that has prompted him to take an unusual track: these days he is brainstorming with zoologists at Oxford university, to analyse the secrets of what makes a 21st-century global law firm work. In particular, Crisp is convinced that the behaviour of naked vole rats, meerkats or even bees can shed a great deal of light on corporate life.
While 21st-century students tend to presume that modern economic life (like the animal kingdom) is driven by an individualistic survival instinct and profit motive, Crisp thinks this assumption is wrong. Instead, as he explained to me last week, law firms only work if there is an intense collaboration and group spirit. He adds that this spirit is widely found in the animal kingdom too, particularly among creatures such as the meerkat. Armed with a copy of a book called An Introduction to Behavioral Ecology, this is the message he is trying to teach to business and law students.