An Interview with Danielle Manson, Garden Court Chambers

NB: When did you begin tenancy, Danielle?

DM: Right at the start of lockdown 2019 I had my tenancy interview by video, then I found out the following week.

NB: Which areas of law have you practised in since beginning tenancy?

DM: Criminal defence, but I’m hoping in the future to possibly look at actions against the police and maybe inquests, but at the minute it is crime.

NB: Did you always want to do this?

DM: In all fairness I probably fell into law being a barrister by mistake - what I mean is that I didn’t have a dream when I was 10 or 11 years old that I wanted to be a lawyer. There were things that happened in my personal life that led me to where I am today. When I was 10 my mum was raising me as a single parent because my dad was already in prison and she was arrested and charged with quite a serious criminal offence. She spent about six weeks in custody until she was granted bail. She was a woman of good character, an English teacher. The experience I had of being ripped apart from my mother had a profound impact on me.

I wasn’t involved in the trial, my mum wouldn’t let me go to court, but obviously I heard a lot about it. It was quite a big case, and she was acquitted. I had positive associations with the lawyers and her legal team and the people that represented her, and so I suppose that was embed­ded in me from a young age. I think that probably informed my decision to study law at university, and then when I did get there, because of the experience of my mum, I volunteered on the Innocence Project which is where law students look at cases of people who are maintaining their innocence after conviction. It resonated with me because I thought,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003111597-7 well, that could have been our family. If my mum hadn’t been acquitted, we possibly would have been campaigning for an appeal and trying to get her out of prison.

I did my law degree, and when you’re at university, a lot of ‘Magic Circle’ law firms come to talk about vacation schemes and the corpo­rate side of things, and that was always very much at the forefront of my mind, but it never really sparked my interest. When I graduated, I went travelling and when I got back from South America I thought I really need to make a decision about what I’m going to do with this law degree that I’ve got. I hadn’t done a mini-pupillage; I hadn’t done any marshalling with judges. I was looking for opportunities and I was looking for the mini-pupillages and I looked at the website of Doughty Street Chambers and they had a vacancy for a junior clerk’s position. I had just got back from Peru about three days before and I remember just thinking I’ll give it a go, and I made an application, got an interview and was offered the job, and so I had to move from Nottingham down to London and start this sort of entry level position in a Chambers.

That was really when I decided that actually this is something that I want to do, and it’s when I got the self-belief that I could do it because up until then I sort of knew what the job was but not in a huge amount of detail, so I worked for a year as a junior clerk, photocopying and carrying boxes, et cetera. I was about 25 by that point. I did the Bar course after that and then I worked as a paralegal for a little bit and then started pupillage.

NB: Wow, that’s quite a story.

DM: It’s a funny world, the way things come together. A really quite traumatic experience can shape and form an individual and give them the insight into what needs to be done. What happened to my mum is something that I sometimes talk about with my clients if I’m struggling to generate a rapport with them or if they think that I don’t understand what it’s like.

NB: One of the skills I’m teaching at the moment is the skill of how to conduct a conference and how to speak to people let alone how to advise them the content of it but the skills of actually developing a rap­port to get the information you need in order to help them.

DM: I hear some horror stories actually from peers who tell me that they had a conference with a client, and the client was throwing a chair around or got very angry. I’m not saying I do the job better, but I’ve never been in that position and I often think in this job you need to find a way to manage people, to gain their trust, to manage their expectations; you need to find a way to break through. I’ve represented clients with severe mental health problems and those who were going through withdrawal from heroin. They’ve all appreciated that I’m on their side and that I want to secure the best outcome for them. I do think it helps if I men­tion sometimes what I’ve been through and show them that I’m not ‘the other’, that I’m not part of the institution. I’m just an ordinary girl that’s doing a job on their behalf.

NB: It’s impressive that somebody from that background can makes it as well as you have done, but in a way it shouldn’t be impressive - it should be much easier for people to do that, but it isn’t.

DM: I think that’s right. Ultimately part of the problem, the biggest problem, is the financial side of it. I got the Lord Denning scholarship from Lincoln’s Inn. They handed me £15,000, and I still wasn’t able to afford to do the Bar course full time without having to work. There are probably some people that start and then drop off part way through because they can’t manage it. There is a second point. Let’s be hon­est, this is a profession that’s shrouded in mystique, you know. Unless you know a barrister or your family has been through the criminal jus­tice system, for example, or the family courts or something, then you wouldn’t necessarily have come across this world at all. When young people are looking at possible job opportunities they’ve got all of that together with the fact that it is an unknown. If you sit down with school kids and you say to them or you can be a barrister - you’ve got to go to university which costs £10,000 a year for the fees and then your liv­ing costs on top of it and you then got to do a one-year course, this, you know, about 20 grand now - students are just going to say thanks but no thanks, I’ll do the training contract with a city solicitors’ firm because they pay for everything for me upfront.

NB: This surprised me, which perhaps shows how out of touch I was, but a couple of weeks after starting at the university here I saw that there was a notice board where they put up advertisements for pupil­lage so that students know to apply and there was one Chambers that was offering three chancery commercial pupillages at £65,000 a year. Now that’s a phenomenal sum of money to someone starting out as a practitioner in, say, crime. I mean, listen, I’ve no problem at all with people in chancery who are getting that figure, but it does bother me that capable people have a significant problem to even qualify as a bar­rister in terms of money and then - once qualified, if they get that far - they might go into crime where they can earn a reasonably low amount of money; sure, there is great job satisfaction but right there we see the recruitment and retention problem.

DM: Absolutely. One of the things that I’ve learnt in crime is that we’re never going to compete with commercial and chancery, like that’s the fact. You can make okay money in crime on the big cases if you get a junior brief, or if you get a case that lasts six weeks, you know you’ll get you’ll get decent money. But at the beginning you’re not going to see that work, and it takes a long time to get to that point. I’m the perfect example. I was a pupil for three years in the Magistrates Court earning £50 a day for three years. You push me right to the edge, I’m not actu­ally being paid a great deal and there are all the associated expenses that self-employed people have to deal with. In my case, for example, I pay for my train tickets in advance and, yes, I can claim it back from Chambers but it takes three, four months if I’m lucky to get that money back so then it becomes a cash flow thing because you’re constantly pay­ing out every single day to go here there and everywhere - Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle, Liverpool, I’ve been everywhere - so it’s really important that Chambers have in place the proper systems to support pupils and that they provide travel warrants or they reimburse pupils for travel the same day or the next day.

The nature of the criminal bar is that often you’re booking these train tickets at short notice so they are expensive, and it’s just not fair for pupils or very junior tenants to fork out for that when ultimately they don’t have any say or control over where they’re going to work. That was a real nightmare for me. I remember during pupillage at some points not even having money in my bank to sort myself lunch on a long day and having to use the Advantage Card points that I had from Boots to pay for lunch. The job we do is so important and you get huge job satisfaction from it. We want a diverse profession but then the condi­tions that you are sometimes forced to work within - all of this - are compounded by the fact that the government fails to invest in the court estate. As a defence advocate, you don’t have access to facilities at court. I could make myself a really lovely sandwich or some soup or something and take it with me but there’s no fridge, there’s no microwave. I end up going to Preston spending six pounds on a sandwich and a drink. If you were a clerk with the Crown Prosecution Service you would prob­ably have your own room at court with your own little plug-in kettle, perhaps even a separate kitchen. You go to some courts and they’re very well equipped. I was in a Magistrates Court for the first time last week, we’d done a really long trial and prosecution counsel was about to drop, we didn’t have time to get any lunch. The court clerk said to us and would you like me to get you a cup of tea and some biscuits. In the back these court staff and the magistrates have little individually wrapped packets of biscuits, I’m sure they’ve got boxes and boxes of them back there that you know staff and magistrates and CPS could get access to but not independent counsel. We aren’t allowed them, but on that day I was, which was brilliant.

NB: What do you think of the proposed change to opening hours where a courtroom hears two trials, one in the mornings and the second in the afternoons - so-called ‘extended operating hours’?

DM: There was a plan to have a pilot down in London and it was very much kicked to the kerb but now because of Covid it seems to have made a return.

NB: I agree. It doesn’t help at the minute that we’re speaking a couple of days after the prime minister gave a speech to conservative party conference saying that we - you, you Danielle - you are ‘hamstringing the criminal justice system’.

DM: This shows total lack of insight into what has actually been hap­pening over the last six months. This is a profession on its knees. We’ve had years and years and years of cuts, there is a retention crisis and we hit a global pandemic. Instead of holding us up and supporting us and acknowledging the invaluable work that we do, we kick it down. It’s not funny, but I don’t understand how the government can praise the actions of the police and say look at these police officers who are protectors and who do invaluable work, but at the same time criticise individuals who are part and parcel of the same system that the police work within. What do you think happens to the individuals they arrest? Where do you think they go after the police have done their heroic job and put themselves in harm’s way? Well, you’ve got the prosecutor who will try and keep the streets safe, by opposing bail for example, and then you’ve got the defence advocate who has to go down and sit in the cell with that same individual that the police officers arrested and who then ensures a fair trial, due process and that everything happens in accord­ance with the rule of law. Go away, Boris, go away.

It is possible for people from non-traditional backgrounds to over­come the financial hurdles. Firstly there are a number of organisations that really want to help. I’ve already mentioned Lincoln’s Inn who gave me a huge scholarship. The Kalisher Trust also supported me financially when I was given the opportunity to do an internship, and the internship would have otherwise been unpaid and I wouldn’t have been unable to do it. During the pandemic, the Barristers’ Benevolent Association has been a real lifeline. I like to tell people the names of organisations so that they understand that there are ways to overcome the disadvantage that you’re at. The fact that I had to work part-time while studying gave me something interesting to talk about during my interviews. It exposed me to different skills. I tried to tie my part-time work in with law or legal-related activities so for a while I was working as a mentor for an educational charity called Debate Mate. They go into state schools and teach the skill of debate in areas where there are high rates of child poverty. It’s all about creating a level playing field so that students that go to ordinary state schools are given the same skills as those that go to Eton and Harrow, the ones that we always see in the Chamber at the University of Oxford who are very accomplished debaters at very young age. I was able to do that alongside studying the Bar course. It was paid quite well and of course it was an incredible experience and actually was something that I talked about in my pupillage interviews. I was asked to give a presentation on a non-legal topic and I chose to talk about Debate Mate and all the incredible work they do. That was at the Chambers that went on to offer me pupillage.

The way that social mobility can be advanced in the profession is through doing things like this and talking about my journey so that hopefully other people read it and are inspired, or at least assured that not everyone is handed everything on a silver platter. With a little bit of hard work and with the support of some incredible organisations you can overcome that hurdle. Just by encouraging people not to self­eliminate is important. I do think that that’s a huge problem for social mobility because you get students who go to private school, some of the best schools in the world, who were told from year one that they are the future leaders, the future politicians, future businessmen, the future doctors, dentists, lawyers. In state schools we don’t have that same approach, and I think there are some really excellent candidates who lack that confidence when they get to that crucial crossroads: do I put myself in all this debt and do the Bar course or do I just do some­thing a bit a bit safer?

Part of the way we address social mobility is through being very vocal. You know there’s the hashtag IamTheBar that was trending on Twitter a little while ago that I hope people still search for. The Bar Council’s got an initiative where they have social mobility advocates and there are lots of books that have been written by people at the Bar who talk about having come from ordinary backgrounds and overcome what at times feel like insurmountable difficulties.

NB: We’re speaking just a couple of weeks after barrister Alexandra Wilson had that awful experience at a Magistrates Court, not the first time, but three times on the same day when just because she’s black she was mistaken for the defendant by professionals.

DM: Yes, and the public must hear that story and think to ourselves, is this really the sort of profession that I, a young black person, want to go into. Sometimes we don’t help ourselves. I think that it’s an example of a systemic problem. It all goes back to unconscious bias, this perception about people of colour, black people or XY&Z. I think there are two issues: black people are over-represented as defendants in the criminal justice system and black people are underrepresented when it comes to legal professionals.

NB: I saw a tweet the other day that the prosecutor, court clerk, dis­trict judge and defence counsel in a courtroom were all black women. How strange in a way that in this world that’s a remarkable thing and is counted as progress.

DM: I totally agree. I think that in legally aided work, representation is a lot better. The criminal and family sets are slightly better but still not where they need to be. The QC appointments are quite frankly embar­rassing, and the judiciary is even worse.

NB: Can you give me some examples of the types of cases you are instructed in right now, Danielle?

DM: I’ve had lots of drugs matters involving the quite new and inter­esting Section 45 of the Modern Slavery Act defence arguing that the defendants were involved in the supply of drugs because they’ve been exploited as part of the county lines gang operation. Some violence, too - Section 18 and Section 20. I’m keeping hold of my Youth Court prac­tice when cases involve a child or young person. I dabbled in firearms as well, so drugs, guns and violence basically.

NB: In those cases, what sorts of tasks have you had to do?

DM: In criminal defence, barristers often appear at the first appearances in the Magistrates Court which is usually where the most robust advice has to be given. Usually after the first appearance, the solicitor will take over and then go through the evidence with the client, but when you rock up on a Saturday when someone’s been arrested on a Friday night, you’re usually the first person they’ve seen, and you have to give them advice. The court is really cracking down ensuring that entering pleas at the first available opportunity. Often the responsibility is on your shoul­ders to make sure that if someone should be pleading guilty, they do it at the earliest opportunity so that they get the most amount of credit possible and the lowest sentence.

This has been a little bit more difficult during Covid because if you’re having conferences with clients either over the phone or over the video link, I find it a bit harder to generate that rapport and to gain their trust so that they listen to what you have to say. Often the most important thing that they will be thinking about is just getting out of that cell so they might want to enter a not guilty plea just because they don’t want to go to prison with Covid looming in the background, even though they should just try and make a bail application.

NB: Can I ask, have you found the waiting time for video link confer­ences to prison is excessive?

DM: Yes. I mean I’ve been relatively lucky, the majority of my clients are on bail or have been granted bail during Covid. But there are a few where you know the first available conference with the client has been after the trial date! It’s been quite difficult.

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