I recently read a very interesting article comparing how aviation and healthcare respond to and learn from mistakes. This is very relevant to the NHS, and might lead them to understand how they should investigate mistakes in the future.

With all that’s been going on in the legal sector this year, it would be easy to conclude that our profession is doomed and that the value of what we’ve spent our working lives creating is evaporating faster than mulled wine at a Christmas market. And that in true festive tradition, we are witnessing the killing of the goose that laid one of the golden eggs of British economy – a legal system much envied and much copied throughout the world.

Is Lord Chancellor Michael Gove out of favour? Two of the most significant announcements within his portfolio – the decision on small claims and whiplash, and a review of regulation of legal services – have been hijacked by George Osborne and, in the case of regulation, Sajid Javid, as part of the Autumn Statement, only a few months after Mr Gove had told the justice select committee that he himself was considering such a review.

The recent hacking of phone and broadband provider TalkTalk has raised plenty of questions among lawyers about how safe the internet really is. Is our information, stored in distant silicon towers, really protected? Has the penny dropped on IT security? Shouldn’t we be more guarded in our acceptance of new technology and systems?

It was probably inevitable that clinical negligence cases would become the next battle ground in the post LASPO world. After all, the amounts of money involved in compensating victims of negligence and their legal representatives are huge – £1.2bn in 2013/14. According to the National Health Service Litigation Authority, some £250m of this was paid out in legal costs, £175m of which going to claimant lawyers. So, surely the need to reform is self-evident? Or is it?