Lawyers are used to being the butt of a million jokes, but one refusing to take the persecution any more is Peter Kurer, the former in-house counsel at UBS. He was named this month as the surprise successor to Marcel Ospel as chairman of the Swiss banking group — to the consternation of some UBS shareholders.

He announced yesterday that the shareholder campaign against him was “discriminatory” against lawyers. “People should judge me on actions and not concepts,” he said, denying that his lack of management experience was an impediment to running an organisation of 85,000 people.

It was to no avail. Hours later Olivant, the boutique investment house pushing for Mr Kurer’s head, made a brutal new broadside. It not only attacked him as an “insider” partly responsible for the bank’s predicament — credit crunch losses of $37 billion and counting, but it also said that because of his narrow career history as a lawyer, he was not up to the job.

“Mr Kurer has no banking, strategic, credit or market-risk experience — all skills that are of critical importance given the situation in which UBS finds itself.”

Olivant, which owns 0.8 per cent of UBS, added: “Nor has Mr Kurer led any public company in the capacity of chairman, chief executive, chief financial officer or equivalent. We can see no rational reason for the supervisory board to recommend his nomination other than to exclude an outsider.”

The investment house is led by Luqman Arnold, a former UBS senior executive, who originally hired Mr Kurer before falling out with Mr Ospel. He went on to head Abbey National and recently mounted an abortive rescue bid for Northern Rock.

Mr Arnold blasted the UBS board for failing even to approach alternative candidates with real line management experience. He went as far as naming suitable prospects — Josef Ackermann, who runs Deutsche Bank; Hans-Joerg Rudloff, chairman of Barclays Capital; and Markus Granziol, another former UBS executive, who chairs Eurex.

In America, where litigation is more central to business life, lawyers often make it to the top of the mainstream corporate tree. Jeffrey Kindler at Pfizer, Frank Blake at Home Depot, Dick Parsons at Time Warner and Hank Greenberg at AIG all started out as lawyers. Citigroup was run by another lawyer, Charles Prince, until recently.

In the UK, chief executives with legal backgrounds are rare. Tom Glocer at Reuters, a former mergers and acquisitions lawyer, is an exception. Past experience has not always been happy. British Airways nosedived in the 1990s when Robert Ayling, a former civil service lawyer who had helped to privatise the airline, was in the pilot’s seat.

In plc boardrooms lawyers remain rare. Only 19 solicitors are non-executive directors of FTSE 100 companies. Two prominent lawyers are Sir Victor Blank, formerly the youngest partner at Clifford Chance, who chairs Lloyds TSB and Trinity Mirror, and Sir Adrian Montague, who chairs Friends Provident and British Energy.

“Lawyers are not really on our radar screen,” said Peter Waine, of Hanson Green, a headhunter which specialises in finding non-executive directors. “They rarely have listed company experience. They tend to have existed on the periphery, not in the guts of companies. They have not been in the inner sanctum and it really does show.”

Favoured candidates

Josef Ackermann

Deutsche Bank’s chief executive is credited as the architect of its current structure. He joined from Credit Suisse in 1996 and became chief executive in 2002 when Rolf Breuer left. Under his leadership, Deutsche has moved from retail and commercial banking to focus on securities trading, asset-management and underwriting. Pre-tax income has almost tripled since then.

He has been in the spotlight recently for asking regulators to allow banks to fix the credit crunch themselves, as the chairman of the Institute of International Finance.

Hans-Joerg Rudloff

He started out at American broker Kidder Peabody before moving on to Credit Suisse, where he became chief executive, leaving in 1994 after a power struggle. He is chairman of Barclays Capital and on the boards of an array of companies including state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft and Swiss pharma giant Novartis. He is known for his expertise in Eastern and Central European markets and was one of the pioneers of the eurobond market in the 1980s. At 67 he is the oldest of Luqman Arnold’ s favoured candidates.

Markus Granziol

The former colleague of Mr Arnold at UBS Warburg clearly impressed the Olivant boss when they worked together. They both left UBS after a boardroom bust-up in 2001. At that time, Mr Arnold was chairman and Mr Granziol was head of investment banking. They were on the losing side of a dispute with Marcel Ospel, who has just quit as chairman of UBS, over a bailout of ailing SwissAir. Mr Granziol is chairman of Eurex, the trading platform for European bonds. He is the youngest of the three men favoured by Mr Arnold.

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