An Interview with Ciara Bartlam, Garden Court North Chambers

NB: When did your tenancy at Garden Court North begin, Ciara?

CB: October 2019.

NB: So at the date of our interview you have been in practice for about six months?

CB: Six months and coronavirus!

NB: Ha! Yes.

CB: I would describe myself as a legal aid barrister and I do mainly civil work. Housing law is about 50% of my practice. The vast majority of housing work for a very junior tenant is suspending warrants of evic­tion which is the very last stage before somebody is evicted. Generally speaking, if you are a tenant, your landlord always has to go to court to evict you but this is your last-ditch attempt to stop it. What usually happens is you get the papers maybe the day before the hearing. You might have five or ten minutes with your client and then you go in and you try to persuade the judge to let them stay. The vast majority of cases are rent arrears cases, and usually my clients are people on benefits and specifically on Universal Credit. When they get to this very final stage, they usually have a suspended order for possession against them which says as long as you pay the rent and, say, £3.70 towards the arrears every week, you will not be evicted. When they see me at court it’s generally because they have defaulted on that arrangement and usually the reason for the default is because of the way Universal Credit is paid, it’s out of sync with their rent payments. Usually, in these circumstances, you’re trying to persuade the court that they can afford the rent moving for­ward. There might be issues with their claim; there might be need for further information, usually it’s just a matter of not having been paid to date. So, you are doing whatever you can to persuade the judge who has an ‘extended discretion’. It’s very, very wide.

NB: Did you say that was about 50% of your work?

CB: Yes.

The experience in the first tier tribunal is quite different from the County Court. In the County Court if I am doing housing, we might have a trial and of course everything is on the balance of probabilities. In the world of asylum, the standard of proof is actually much lower: it’s ‘a reasonable degree of likelihood’. The reason for that is if you are fleeing your country, you are unlikely to be able to collect easily all the records or evidence that you need to prove your claim. The dispute on the evidence usually boils down to the credibility of your client. It tends to be much more focused on legal arguments and on expert evidence and country evidence. So that’s what I do in terms of immigration. I also do inquests, Court of Protection and welfare benefits because that ties in with everything, in my opinion.

NB: Inquests, I take it, is mainly representing families at inquests?

CB: Yes, so at Garden Court North, we do tend to take on publicly funded work and for that reason, we tend to represent bereaved families.

NB: And you said Court of Protection, what is involved there?

CB: Well, very junior work because the thing about the Court of Protection is that everybody who does it is usually pretty experienced. The sort of work that any junior barrister tends to do at the beginning of their practice is around deprivation of liberty, for example where some­body is in a care home and has a condition like dementia or Alzheimer’s and expresses a wish to leave the care home, and that can be in any number of different forms, whether verbal or otherwise. It is for the court to determine in those circumstances whether, firstly, the person has capacity to make a decision themselves, because if somebody has the capacity and autonomy to make a decision themselves to leave, then they can just do that. Secondly, if the person is found to lack capacity to make that specific decision, the court has to determine whether it is in their best interests to be deprived of their liberty in that care home. This encompasses a consideration of whether it is really the least restric­tive measure, because if you are depriving somebody of their liberty, of course, that is a huge intrusion on their rights and so it has to be the least restrictive way possible.

NB: That’s quite a range of work. Did you always want to do that sort of work or has it come as a surprise?

CB: No, it’s not really come as any surprise to me. I came to law by a sort of weird route. I actually have a housing background, but I read religion and theology at university and then I moved to Russia for three years. I came back and then I started working in housing, totally ran­domly. I worked as a homeless prevention officer for care leavers in par­ticular, but 16- to 25-year-olds generally. That is actually where my interest comes from.

NB: I wondered if you could just give me, maybe, two examples of the sorts of cases that you are instructed in right now?

CB: One of the cases that I am instructed in is an inquest into the death of somebody who died in 2016/2017.

Also, from a legal aid perspective, it’s really important because at this stage, we do not have any funding. The majority of work that I’ve been doing on this case is pro bono (i.e. I won’t get paid necessarily) because inquests are out of scope for legal aid. You need ‘exceptional case funding’ or ECF in order to obtain public funding for advocacy at hearings. You don’t get that in all inquest cases and it’s slightly easier to get it if the coroner rules that Article 2 is engaged, but it’s by no means a certainty. There are some Article 2 inquests that don’t ever get ECF.

NB: Is it possible, for instance, that in any given inquest, you might do quite a lot of work and end up not being paid?

CB: Yes. It’s also the same for welfare benefits cases. It’s the same for the majority of disrepair claims in housing. There are a number of sig­nificant areas that are out of scope for legal aid that people don’t know about. So whilst I say that 50% of my practice is housing, it’s also prob­ably true to say that about 40% to 50% of my practice is also unpaid or at risk.

NB: Some people might wonder why on earth you do it then?

CB: I come from a background of privilege and I have been really fortu­nate in my life to have a family that really cares about me. It’s not totally functional all the time but I have had an easy life. I have met people along the way in my life who haven’t had that and it’s not their fault. It’s the system and the society that they are born into and for me, that seems like a really overwhelming injustice. I was always taught, when I was a child, to do whatever good you can with whatever skills you have, so for me it would be a waste if I didn’t do this. There is no point in me being in law just to earn some money; that would be a waste of my skill. It would be a waste of my soul, to be honest.

NB: Can I ask you about this. Twitter was alive in the summer about a Home Office tweet that seemed to point a finger of suspicion at what they called ‘activist lawyers’. I don’t quite know what it means but I know that it wasn’t meant in a complimentary way. Would you describe yourself as an ‘activist lawyer’?

CB: I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as an ‘activist lawyer’ in the same way that I wouldn’t describe myself as a female lawyer. I think you’re either a lawyer or you’re not. But I would certainly describe myself as somebody within the group of people who are usually called ‘activist lawyers’, if I can put it that way. To be honest, the thing is for legal aid lawyers and for anybody who is invested in trying to challenge the system and trying to get important outcomes for ordinary people, is that you are never going to be liked. It is like battering your head against a brick wall which is why I think that it is really important for young legal aid lawyers and barristers to know that there is an alliance of like­minded people around you. Somebody said in a webinar the other day that for her, the most important advice that you can ever give to some­body who is an aspiring lawyer is to find your tribe and that’s a really vital part of sustaining yourself in this profession.

NB: I would like to ask you about your case load at the moment. My planned question is, what has your case load been like and how did it compare with your second six? But, of course, we have had coronavirus.

CB: Before coronavirus I had cases that had stayed with me for a while. I had started to develop relationships with instructing solicitors and things were starting to go in a direction that was more interesting for me. I was doing crime in my second six but, whilst I would have loved to have done crime, I felt like a fish out of water. Now, with coronavirus, it’s very different. As I said about the stay in possession proceedings, of course, I am not doing very much housing.

I am doing some injunction work which falls within housing, specifi­cally anti-social behaviour injunctions. What we have found with the stay on possession proceedings is that landlords were trying all sorts of different ways to evict people by the back door. One of the ways you can do that is by getting an anti-social behaviour injunction against some­one and then they breach it, which gives a mandatory ground of pos­session, or you get an anti-social behaviour injunction which includes a term that would exclude them from the property. As you can imagine, we have also seen an increase in homeless applications. There was some respite in that regard because we had an ‘everyone in’ instruction early on during the coronavirus pandemic from Luke Hall who is an MP. It meant that all rough sleepers would have to be accommodated. In prin­ciple, that should mean that there is no work to do in homelessness, but actually local authorities weren’t accommodating people appropriately or into suitable accommodation.

In terms of the rest of my practice, I would say that during corona­virus my practice has been completely decimated. I don’t have a full diary at all. I have been lucky to be in court maybe once or twice a week throughout which is not nearly as much as I would have been had it not happened. I have been very fortunate because I have been junior to a more senior member of Chambers in a welfare benefits case and that has earned me some money. Without that, I would be in dire straits to be honest. I am not entitled to the self-employed scheme because I became self-employed in 2018/2019.

NB: What percentage of your time would you say you spend in courts or other tribunals and how much time working at your desk?

CB: Pre -coronavirus, I think it would probably be about 50/50 but that is based on a seven-day week. I would be in court three or four times a week and then I would just be working all the way round.

NB: You worked weekends a lot?

CB: Yes I did, but I don’t know if I necessarily needed to. My Chambers is really supportive so if I want a ‘papers’ day, I get a papers day. I think it’s very difficult, particularly with me doing different areas of law, to feel competent in them without working a seven-day week, or a six-day week. I do take rest periods but there is so much to know, and it’s not just about the substance of the law, it’s also all the procedure and everything. Say, for example, you are representing a bereaved family at an inquest. I have got a case which is a natural causes death in custody. What that means is, where Article 2 would ordinarily be engaged because he is in the detention of the state, it’s actually not in this case because there is no suggestion necessarily that the state contributed in any way to the death. But we still have the prison involved and the barrister that I’m against is 15 to 20 years’ call and the only reason the family have me is because they have got no funding. If they had funding, they would have a much more experienced barrister but that’s the reality of legal aid cuts. For a week-long inquest, I had to prep solidly for about a week.

NB: A good example then of how a junior barrister can get very good experience, very quickly.

CB: Exactly. It is, yes. But that’s really a silver lining to a very dark cloud.

NB: What sort of courts or other tribunals do you attend, and do you wear your wig and gown?

CB: My wig doesn’t even fit properly to be honest! In civil proceedings we do wear wigs and gowns for trials so, say, for example, if I do a disrepair trial in the County Court and we go to trial then I will wear my wig and gown. In tribunals you don’t wear wigs and gowns ever. I don’t know whether there is necessarily a written rule on that, but it just never happens.

NB: What’s a disrepair trial?

CB: For me, it is usually for clients in social housing but it can be any tenancy. A landlord has obligations to keep in repair the structure and exterior of a property and when they don’t do that, you can go to court. The problem is, again, this is out of scope for legal aid unless there is a risk to the health and safety of the occupant. The vast majority of social housing, it should be said, is in a state of disrepair, but the vast majority of tenants can’t pursue it in court because there is no legal aid. That’s where I step in. The trial is the ‘trial of facts’, so it’s whether there exists disrepair, whether the landlord has been notified of it by the tenant, and whether they have had a reasonable period to complete the repairs and have failed to do so to a satisfactory standard. It’s like any other trial, I suppose, in principle. I wear a wig and gown for committal proceed­ings, so when somebody has breached an injunction, because the court can commit them to prison and it’s very serious. We do wear wigs and gowns for that and the standard, actually, in those proceedings is the criminal standard of proof.

NB: Is it easy to say what part of your practice you find the most inter­esting and also at the other end of the scale, what areas some people may find less exciting?

CB: I think people will find welfare benefits really not very exciting at all. The reason why I do it is because it’s so important and because eve­rybody should have, in my opinion, a subsistence level of benefit which is adequate to meet their daily living expenses. Unfortunately, as far as I see it, the state doesn’t provide that currently and where people are sanctioned or refused benefits, all of that has to be challenged, in my view. The most interesting thing for me is inquest work - but I don’t want that to sound like it detracts from the gravity of those proceedings for the families involved.

NB: I don’t think it takes anything away from the importance and grav­ity of the situation. It explains why lawyers get interested in areas of law. Often it’s that drive, academically, that leads us on to explore those areas and helps us make such an important impact in the way that it’s clear you do, Ciara.

CB: Thanks, Nigel. Part of the reason why inquest law interests me is because it’s an inquisitorial environment. I think you actually get closer to justice. Often justice is not just an outcome, it’s a process. The thing about inquests that I like is the ability to engage with somebody on what is a very personal level, I think, and to guide them through a process which is otherwise really daunting. Of course, there’s a lot at stake. We are talking about answers to a family’s questions about how their loved one has died. We can be talking about closure. It’s by no means easy but I feel like it’s an area in which I have something to offer. I think that’s why I enjoy it. It’s raw, it really is. What you see in inquest work is all the ways in which all the consequences of state failure are thrown into very sharp focus, and out of that you have the ability to make signifi­cant change for many people. There is a wider impact of inquest work that I really love and that is often the most important thing for families as well: they will often say that the individual answers that they need are not necessarily the most important thing. The reason they pursue it so fearlessly and so graciously and so incredibly so much of the time is because they only hope that nobody else’s family member ever suffers in the same way. I think that’s the really incredible thing about inquests that makes it a special area of law.

NB: Can I ask you about the case that you mentioned you are being led in at the moment by a senior member? What sort of work does that involve you doing in that role as junior counsel?

CB: Anything he wants me to, basically! We have a couple of cases ongoing. One is about how many days there are in a year which sounds ridiculous, but the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions got it wrong, and we are now having an argument about that in court. What I have done in that case is drafting submissions and research. I also was responsible for all of the court bundles, liaising with the other side, liaising with solicitors and generally just doing all of the admin­istrative tasks. My experience of it is maybe something different than what it’s like usually because my senior is actually on paternity leave so that’s part of the reason we have a second junior counsel because he is actually a junior counsel himself. So he’s an incredibly supportive individual but he’s not able to dedicate as much time to doing all the stuff around expert evidence, so that’s kind of a lot of the stuff that I have been doing - contacting experts, working out what they might say on the issue and whether we need to have their evidence and then feeding that back.

NB: When you talked about putting together bundles, what do you mean?

CB: For a judicial review, the court will usually have a core bundle which has the letter of claim, the statement of facts and grounds, the response, all of those sorts of things. That will all be in there. It’s my job then to put that all into a proper format, and during the coronavirus pandemic, all emphasis has been on bundles, so there are now certain ways that we have to do it. It has to be hyperlinked, the contents have to be bookmarked, so I do all of that. There is a core bundle and then there’s the authorities bundle which is of course all the case law.

NB: It’s funny how time marches on because I remember when I was very junior barrister, even a law student in the holidays helping out places, putting together bundles meant you’d have a huge table and you would create piles of paper, about 15 or 20 bundles all the same!

CB: Yes. IT skills are absolutely essential, and Adobe is my best friend. It’s actually changed my life. I know that there are cheaper subscriptions out there but the fact is you can do everything you ever wanted to do with it. I actually get a little bit of joy out of bundles. It’s like going to therapy, or gardening, it’s got that therapeutic sort of quality to it. It’s monotonous and mindless but at the end of it, you have something really beautiful!

NB: Has your time in practice so far matched or differed from expecta­tions that you had when you were on the Bar course?

CB: I would say that it is worlds away from the Bar course, it’s just so different because on the Bar course you do civil, which is personal injury mainly, and you do crime - and none of my practice is that. You don’t learn about tribunals on the Bar course, you don’t learn about legal aid on the Bar course. You would be lucky to get an elective mod­ule on immigration law, let alone legal aid and areas that are covered by legal aid and those that aren’t. So my practice is dramatically different. Don’t get me wrong, I actually think that the Bar course is really useful in terms of teaching you how to do things right.

What the Bar course doesn’t teach you, and it’s something that you can only learn with time, is how to create your own style and to do things in a way that is persuasive, as opposed to just going through the motions of ‘we know this works’; if we put the facts here and the law here and we explain the issues, and that all works. I find, for example, immigration is very different from this because immigration is all about the law but in some of my areas of practice, it’s all about the facts. So actually what I learnt at the Bar course, only takes me so far, I’d say.

NB: I suppose the Bar course prepares you to reach that minimum threshold that you need to be at in order to begin practising. We all start at the very junior end with very junior work, and it’s through build­ing things up and gaining confidence and experience that you progress upwards - but practice is all about learning new things, isn’t it?

CB: Absolutely, every day. Learning to fail I think is also really impor­tant. On the Bar course you do everything in a really safe environment. There are failures in the sense of actually failing modules and stuff like that. When I was on the Bar course, there was a general feeling of need­ing to achieve everything and be super successful and everybody was ter­rified of making mistakes. What you learn as you go on is that, of course, we all have to take responsibility for our own competence but there is only so much that is actually within your control. There are some things that you just have to accept and you get on with things and you learn to deal with it. Sometimes a tribunal appeal isn’t going your way, even when you genuinely thought that it should be, and then you realise that you don’t have an appealable decision, which is the most horrible thing, but you learn to get on with that and you learn to survive it. There is so much about it which is so vitally important, but you have to remember also that it’s just a job because otherwise it can be all-consuming.

NB: I agree with that. I think often people can lose sight of the fact that inevitably there comes a point when you must hand the case over to someone else to take it further, whether that’s the judge who makes a decision, or the jury who makes the decision. That’s when it becomes their responsibility and not yours anymore.

CB: Yes, exactly.

NB: Were there any subject areas at university or Bar School that, as you were starting out in your career, you were glad that you took?

CB: I did the GDL so I did the seven modules over the space of a year and a short introduction to law. Actually, as a housing lawyer, I was pretty glad to have done contract, land law and public law. I think eve­rybody should learn more public law, not less - judicial review, constitu­tional principles, that sort of thing. It’s always really useful to know the ways in which the law can be used to challenge things strategically, and I think you only really get the greatest understanding of that by having some foundation in public law. On the Bar course, there were things that were transferable in the sense of skills such as drafting, advocacy, conference skills. I think I was taught very, very well but I wouldn’t say that there was any particular subject matter that I use on a daily basis now. It’s more about the skills.

NB: I want to ask about how your work life has developed and how you describe your work-life balance? When you are not in court for example, do you tend to work on your documents on your computer at Chambers or at home or both?

CB: Bit of both. I really like being in Chambers. I think Chambers across the country were moving towards remote working before the coronavirus pandemic anyway. I always loved being in Chambers and I think that it’s really important for Chambers to consider, moving forward, how we build that environment into remote working. There is nothing better than just having a casual conversation with somebody in Chambers about their work and you actually learn more from that. I can go to my supervisor or any number of members of Chambers. If I just text the housing WhatsApp group and say, ‘I need five minutes of somebody’s time’, there will be somebody available for me to ask my question. What I really liked about being in Chambers is that you just have discussions with people about their cases and it’s all those sorts of things that when you have a case of your own, it encompasses some of those issues. You kind of think, I know how to deal with that, or I know how to look for this issue. Sometimes, you just don’t know what you don’t know, but having those organic conversations with people is a real asset to learning; that’s the reason why I went into Chambers regularly.

In terms of work-life balance, I joke when I say I don’t have it. I chose not to have a huge amount of work-life balance because I really like my committee work with young legal aid lawyers. I like campaigning. I like getting involved. It’s really important to me and I can only feasibly do that outside of my practice otherwise I would just be skint. That said, you can’t sustain a legal aid practice without giving yourself respite and without building wellbeing into your routine. You can do it for a year, you can do it for two, but you can’t sustain that for 20 years at the Bar. Not in this climate and not with the way legal aid is going.

NB: If coronavirus weren’t here, you would probably spend more time in Chambers working?

CB: Yes, probably. For me, I really liked that distinction. I like to be able to come home and that being my space to chill, do whatever I like. In terms of people’s strategy around wellbeing, that’s part of my strategy to maintaining my wellbeing.

NB: Do you have your own desk and your own room in Chambers or is it hot-desking?

CB: We hot-desk in Chambers because we are fairly small. We have the floor of a building, and we have four barristers’ rooms, but we only have 32 members of Chambers. Everybody is remote working so we actually don’t need more space than we have. The people who are in there more regularly will obviously go to their desk because that’s a natural thing to do isn’t it? But I can sit wherever I want, and I just tend to take my supervisor’s desk. He doesn’t mind. I hope!

NB: I wanted to ask about how techy your practice areas are and to what extent you’re less paper-based and more digital but I think we have pretty much covered that. When did you last receive a brief in a ring binder?

CB: I like to be electronic and I have tried really, really hard to build a paper-less practice mainly because of the climate crisis.

NB: Would you describe practising in your areas of law to be sociable and collegiate, or are you mostly you by yourself?

CB: It’s half and half, though you could say it’s me by myself in the sense that when I’m doing immigration and asylum work I tend to be against the Home Office and they don’t necessarily have lawyers at every case. The vast majority of times they will have somebody called a presenting officer who is a Home Office employee. I don’t have the same relationships with my opposition then, as I might do if I was against a barrister from another Chambers who I knew, but we do have a kind of collegiate environment in the sense that all representa­tives who appear for appellants in those tribunals are pretty tight, in immigration particularly.

Just to give you an indication as just how rubbish it is in immigration, for a full asylum hearing, you will mostly get a fixed fee for the final hearing. The fixed fee is £302, which sounds like a lot, but the reality is that you get a huge bundle of papers which is usually in the region of 500 to 1,000 pages. You have to write a skeleton argument because, if you don’t, woe betide you: the tribunal may well go against you and it will be your fault. You also have to travel regularly. When I was just coming into tenancy at the end of my second six, I would be going to North Shields so I would be travelling four hours or so to get there. By the time I have actually finished the case, I have probably done about 30 hours’ work and so I’m getting paid £10 per hour to do it which, if you think about how much you might get per hour in a commercial practice, is off the chart. And you still have to pay your Chambers’ expenses which is a certain percent of your earnings.

NB: Is there a lot of travelling in your work?

CB: It’s pretty common, certainly in an immigration practice. In hous­ing and other areas, probably the furthest I travel is a couple of hours. I do parole boards as well. I once ended up having to go to Haverigg. It took me four and a half hours to get there and some - it’s a nightmare by public transport! I try to use public transport wherever possible because again, it’s an environmental concern. I ended up driving to Haverigg because there was just no way that I could get there for 10 in the morn­ing with the best will in the world without having to stay overnight in the prison because there wasn’t anywhere else.

NB: What were your expectations before you started in the job about your hours of work and travelling?

CB: I was fortunate. I knew some people who had done either the Bar course the same year as me, or the year before, who were doing pupil­lage on Circuit so I already knew that the change was quite major, that there were going to be a lot of hours so I was well prepared for that.

NB: Wellbeing is something that the Bar Council have a big focus on isn’t it at the moment, but it wasn’t always so. I was called in October 1994 and wellbeing wasn’t on anyone’s agenda back then. How do you find that work-life balance in your fields of law, and is your experience the same as that of your contemporaries?

CB: I think my experience is definitely not the same as my contemporar­ies because my Chambers builds in wellbeing in the sense that we can have as many papers days as we want and we have control. Even as a pupil, I could still say I would like to have two days out of court a week if I needed it. I never felt a particular pressure to be at work all the time. I have a friend who does commercial law and his pupillage was very different. He had to be in court every day and then he had to do all of his papers around that. For me, that would have been far too much, I couldn’t have sustained it. I am very fortunate.

I would say it’s all well and good for the Bar to say that wellbeing is important and for people to recognise that it is important, but I think that there needs to be greater implementation of principles of equality and diversity. It is no minor thing because it affects things like allo­cation of work, fair access to work, all of these sorts of issues. If all Chambers, as should be the case, were compliant with their duties, I think that would have an extraordinary impact on people’s wellbeing and would enable us to have more progressive conversations about how we go further, for example by enabling barristers to truly work part­time and building that in as a normal way of working as opposed to something that is exceptionally offered by Chambers. I think that the conversation around all these issues is linked, and for me as a junior barrister it causes me no embarrassment to say that it’s tough. I don’t always feel adequately supported. This is not because people don’t have my best interests in mind, and it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to change the Bar as much as I do. It’s because the pressure doesn’t stop when you’re a junior barrister. It goes all the way through. The legal system is fighting fires all the time, and the coronavirus period is just one great illustration of that on a massive scale.

NB: On the topic of diversity and equality, are there any experiences or observations that you can share?

CB: My experience is sort of two-fold. On the one hand, I am female. I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that I have experienced discrimi­nation necessarily, but I am very aware of the fact that in order to be an effective advocate as a female you have to work twice as hard as your male contemporaries and that hasn’t changed at the Bar. I am keenly aware that at inquests I tend to be against somebody who is more senior than me and usually a white male. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but as a female I then have to really up my game. Often, what I am concerned about and what I always have in my mind is the fact that somebody might be ‘playing’ me or using the fact that I appear to be a young, female lawyer as some sort of advantage to them, and so that’s something that kind of goes with me wherever I go which is part of the reason why I work six days a week. Whilst I’d be cautious about saying I have personally experienced discrimination, there is this imbalance, and it exists and it’s real.

It’s complicated then by intersectionality isn’t it? My experience as a white female lawyer will be very different from other people at the Bar who may experience discrimination on the basis of two or more characteristics, for example skin colour and gender identity. I think we have to have an appreciation not just of general themes but this kind of intersectional analysis of diversity and discrimination.

I have a second side of me which is the side that I don’t bring to work so much which is the fact that I’m gay. The reason that I don’t bring it to work so much is because I spent quite a long period of time being very scared of what people might say if they knew and not just about what they might say but how they might treat me differently - or not say any­thing at all which I think is the worst thing. I have had a few bad experi­ences on mini pupillages where, for example, there was a barrister who was being ‘difficult’ (of course she was female, and that’s the only reason she was being called difficult to begin with) but one of the comments made about this barrister was ‘she’s always like that because she’s a clos­eted lesbian’. Nobody in the room knew that I was actually a closeted lesbian so they couldn’t have ever envisaged the impact that that state­ment would have on me, but that effectively put me, at the age of 28 or 29, back in the closet and I had been out of the closet for quite some time. It made me terrified of ever bringing it up in conversation and I think these are all things that the Bar has to address. It shouldn’t be a matter of me, or anybody else with a protected characteristic, coming to the Bar or coming into Chambers and having to say we have these concerns and having to provide evidence for those concerns. We shouldn’t have to be collecting data on issues that we already know exist. The reality is they exist. It would be helpful if the Bar and all Chambers could all just accept what we say about them and then we can move on as a profession. We can work together. I don’t want white, straight male barristers to fail. I don’t want their power; I just want my own power. I want to have a voice that is heard in this system, and I want to be able to talk about things that are potentially uncomfortable, not because I want to make other people uncomfortable but because the conversation needs to be had.

NB: Thank you, Ciara. Have you had any thoughts about the future of the Bar in the areas that you work in?

CB: The future looks pretty bleak, I’d say, for every publicly funded area of practice. I think we are going to have a real issue of retention over the coming years and we will see an exodus of people leaving the publicly funded Bar. I don’t yet know how the Ministry of Justice or the Lord Chancellor or the Bar as an institution itself is going to cope with that or even if it is going to be able to mitigate it to be honest. With that in mind, I’m fairly non-committal about the Bar. I didn’t come here to be a barrister, I came here because years ago, I ended up in court rep­resenting a client that I should never have had to represent. She should never have been in court, and it was horribly unjust. That was the trig­ger for me pursuing law. I’m a millennial at the end of the day; we are not totally committed to anything, and I can see great benefits to being a paralegal or to working in another field altogether. The reason why I’m here is because I think that there is still an appetite for change, and there are a lot of people that are doing really incredible work and I would like to be part of that and contribute to that if I can.

Postscript:

Since this interview, the Westminster Commission has now published its inquiry into the sustainability and recovery of the legal aid sector (October 2021) which shows the extent of the problems facing junior and aspiring practitioners.

In addition, the government has agreed to remove the means test where funding is available for inquests, which means that bereaved fam­ilies will not have to pay anything towards their legal costs in limited circumstances. There is still quite a way to go, however, to ensure that bereaved families have access to publicly funded legal representation wherever the state is represented.

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