It’s safe to assume that few lawyers have successfully charmed members of the opposite sex by lecturing them in excruciatingly boring detail about their job.
Yet this is the precise scenario which the European Commission has attempted to bring to life in a memorable new comic strip…
‘Competition in Europe: It’s your deal’ sees an official in the Commission’s Directorate General for Competition (DG Comp) — where posts are typically filled by young lawyers, often on secondment from City law firms — wow an attractive cartoonist who he meets at an airport with tales of legal life.
The pair’s exchange begins during the queue to check in to a flight to Brussels. After a cursory chat about the world of comics, the conversation rapidly turns to competition law, an area which the cartoonist finds herself absolutely captivated by.
Delighted by the enthusiasm shown by the cartoonist, the lawyer unleashes upon her wide-ranging reflections about his job, which he illustrates with a price-fixing case study. Finally, as the pair board their flight, the by-now-competition-law-mad cartoonist pledges to pen a comic strip about the lawyer’s job.
Be warned, the result is nine pages long — but, if you have time, it’s an amusing read.