An Interview with Sophia Dzwig, 3 Verulam Buildings

NB: When did you start your tenancy, Sophia?

SD: I started tenancy in October 2018 having done pupillage there in 2017/2018.

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

SD: Broadly commercial law, which is any dispute really involving a business.

NB: Are they typically contractual disputes?

SD: They can be, there is often a contractual element to them. In fair­ness the work that I do in my own smaller, unled cases, tends to have some kind of contractual or tortious basis but it’s a lot of misrepresenta­tion, some of it alleged to be fraudulent.

NB: Is this the sort of work that you always wanted to do?

SD: I wasn’t somebody who always wanted to be a lawyer. My mum is a lawyer, but I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I started thinking about it properly at university when I was doing a non-law degree and had a third year out. I was doing a four-year degree and did some work in a law firm. I also did a lot of mini-pupillages and really enjoyed those, so I signed myself up for the GDL conversion course and then a Bar Course, and then pupillage, and here we are!

When I came to Chambers, I didn’t think civil fraud would be what I ended up doing. Chambers traditionally has a reputation for being a

DOI: 10.4324/9781003111597-9 very, very strong banking and finance set, but actually its work is much, much broader than that. Really most of the banking and finance work I’ve done is my own smaller cases.

NB: It’s interesting to hear that you did a non-law degree. I went to a careers fair at a big school a few weeks ago. It surprised me how many people didn’t know that you don’t have to do a law degree.

SD: I spent my third year in Italy, and there you have to study law at undergraduate level otherwise you cannot be a lawyer, but I’m eternally grateful that we don’t because I got to do what I really enjoyed at uni­versity and I would never have chosen law.

NB: I know we are digressing a bit. I did the first year of the German law degree in my third year at university and just as you describe for Italy, you have to do a substantial number of years at university.

SD: Then it is the same that you can go straight into the judiciary?

NB: Yes, you can. It’s a career choice.

SD: But then they probably think having magistrates deciding cases without legal training is completely mad!

NB: Can I ask you, how would you describe the splits in the types of work that you do at the moment?

SD: All the work that I do is commercial work but that really does cover a huge range of disputes so, that could be a contractual claim just between two businesses, a banking claim, an insurance claim. I have been doing a lot recently in insurance which is where my practice has gone. That is not even very normal in Chambers. I am doing a dispute over some stolen artwork.

NB: What are banking cases about?

SD: My very first hearing as a second six pupil was somebody who had received a cheque that wasn’t meant for them, and the bank was trying to get it back. A case I’m doing at the moment is a multi-million-pound private banking dispute where somebody was forced to sell a portfolio of assets due to the market crashing last spring, and they say if the bank had done what they wanted several years before, that wouldn’t have been the case and so they are claiming damages. Banking covers a whole range of cases. You might class banking cases as civil fraud with a financial aspect because of the nature of the underlying fraud. I have been involved in a case for the last three years where the Danish tax authority says that securities trading was a fraud on the tax authority, but they are not suing in tax law, they are suing in civil fraud.

NB: Can you give some examples of the types of cases that you are instructed in right now? I guess we have just touched on one which is the artwork case?

SD: That’s actually a case unled; I am doing it by myself. I am advising an auction house which sold some items which turned out later to have been stolen. I’m advising them. I mentioned the Danish tax authority case. I am doing a case about the portfolio of securities that were sold when the market crashed last spring. I’m doing a couple of arbitrations. One arbitration is based in Hong Kong; an insurance one about whether again some circular trading is covered under a policy.

NB: When you saying you are doing an arbitration, what does that mean?

SD: Arbitration is a private dispute resolution mechanism. These are parties that are based in Singapore and China. They have decided to arbitrate which means they are not going through the courts. In this case, they are going through the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre (HKIAC) which supplies them with a set of procedural rules to follow, as you would in court, and they have chosen a panel of three Hong Kong and English judges. We have Hong Kong solicitors and counsel who are all in England. I am doing another arbitration, this one based all in England which is an unfair prejudice petition under the Companies Act, wealthy shareholders who have fallen out with each other. They own a company together and the claimant is saying that the acts of the others are unfair to him and that he should be either bought out, or should be able to buy them out, of the company. Those are exam­ples of just some of the cases I am doing at the moment.

NB: Am I right I thinking that when you enter into an arbitration such as you have described, you are bound by the arbitration ruling so it’s a bit like a court?

SD: Yes, you are bound, and often there isn’t an avenue of appeal which I think is something a lot of people don’t realise.

NB: Do people undergo arbitration not just for finality but also because it’s cheaper than going to court?

SD: It's not necessarily cheaper or quicker than court. It is, however, private. So in the case of these shareholders who have fallen out, if it were known that there was a huge dispute going on, and if it weren't behind closed doors, that could affect the price of the business. So that's an example where privacy is very, very important to them. For all sorts of reasons, parties might not want their dirty laundry aired in court and arbitration is very appealing for that reason.

NB: What sort of tasks have you had to do in your cases and arbitra­tions? You will remember Bar School of course, and the learned skills of advising, drafting and advocacy. Do you deploy those skills?

SD: Some of what I learnt during my time at Bar School has been par­ticularly useful. In particular, having a good grounding in the Civil Procedure Rules [CPR]; that's really important and gives you an advan­tage. Coming to the Bar straight from Bar School where you have been learning CPR does help because you know your way around the rules. Likewise, I found for the kind of smaller banking cases that I do where I go to the County Courts, or much smaller cases in the High Court by myself, I do a lot of summary judgment applications which are a main­stay of civil advocacy in Bar School. That is work where a dispute is said to have no real prospect of success one way or the other, and the claim­ant or defendant can ask for the dispute to be resolved without trial. I have done a lot of those.

NB: What about drafting specifically? Some advocates I have spoken to of course draft particulars of claim an awful lot. Is that something that you do?

SD: We don't have to do it all that often because quite a lot of the dis­putes we do are very long-running. You are not doing them week in, week out, because that's not the timeline of your cases. That said, I have been drafting a pleading in the unfair prejudice petition that I talked about. It was an arbitration defence which is a little bit different. It is more or less in the same style as a court pleading in this case save for the fact that it was hundreds of pages - too long to be allowed in court. Likewise, I did an amended defence, again with a leader, earlier this summer and I have a small case of my own as well which I pleaded over the summer. When I say small, it's about a loan for £290,000 which in finance terms is small. It’s something I do, but you can go for months without doing one. It’s actually something that pupils want to have more experience of because it’s not the easiest skill.

NB: What about opinion writing?

SD: I do a lot of advising. It doesn’t always take the style of a formal opinion. It’s more or less always written advice. I don’t give very much oral advice myself. If you have a conference over the phone or Zoom or Teams these days, it’s quite often a Silk advising for my cases. So I may have done the background research and some background drafting but actually advising in conference tends to fall to somebody more senior. A lot of my work is legal research which involves writing a note or an Advice which either informs your Silk’s Advice in conference, or it becomes an e-mail to the solicitors. If you’re on an on-going case, there is a lot more ad hoc advice. You are sometimes asked to advise on issues rather than the merits of a whole dispute. But then twice earlier this summer I have done formal opinions with a leader on insurance disputes so, again, it’s mixed.

NB: What sorts of people or organisations have largely been your cli­ents - apart from millionaires?

SD: Because of the cost of High Court proceedings, a lot of my clients are either very wealthy individuals or companies.

NB: What has your case load been like in tenancy and how did that compare with your second six?

SD: I was on my feet in my second six which is unusual in a commercial set but 3VB, because it has that traditional finance banking practice, has a lot of these small cases where you go along for a bank and you do a very small summary judgment application. That can be your bread and butter. I was not in court every day; that’s just not how a commer­cial practice works. I think I did four to six hearings in my second six months, each lasting maybe an hour, and that’s a decent number for a commercial set.

NB: It never ceases to surprise me how practice in different areas varies so much. It’s very different than, say, a criminal pupillage, where you would be in court every morning and afternoon probably.

SD: In my second six I also did work for my supervisors. We have four supervisors in Chambers doing pupillage which is quite normal for a civil set. I had my last two supervisors for the first half and second half of my second six. In the first half I was predominantly doing work for my supervisor although I did a few small appearances by myself. They continued to assess me and at the end of that seat was my tenancy deci­sion. After that I was predominantly doing my own work. I had a case representing an oligarch, there was me and two Silks. I didn’t really do much work at all for my fourth seat supervisor although they were an invaluable ‘backstop and common-sense check’ and a source of advice. I was still sitting physically in their room in Chambers which is how a pupillage works. You are still quite protected in that sense. Your work­load typically goes up as a tenant.

NB: We have already touched on the percentage of time that you spend in court or other tribunals or hearings. How much time do you spend working at your desk?

SD: It is mostly working at my desk. I have a hearing on 15 October 2021 by myself but my last proper appearance in court by myself was in January 2020 because of adjournments during Covid. I have had a lot of hearings where I’m led. I had a very busy stint in JanuaryZFebruary last year where I was in court on the same case, I think it was ten to twelve times in three weeks doing injunctions which is where you go along and you ask the court to urgently stop somebody else or make somebody else do something.

Then I was in this very big Danish tax authority case where we had a case management conference almost every month for the whole year. It was due for a four- to six-week preliminary issue earlier this autumn and a four-term trial in 2023Z2024. it needed a lot of case management, so I was in court every month last year on that case and early this year for those hearings, and subsequent to that, actually it’s all been paper­work since March. We had a four-day preliminary issue trial in March and consequentials in April which are follow-ons from a major hearing where you decide what happens with costs and orders and that kind of thing.

I have been doing a lot of paperwork. It’s always a balancing exercise but I never wanted to be in court every day because I like to have time to prepare things properly.

NB: What parts of your practice do you find most interesting and what areas might some people find less exciting?

SD: I can imagine that an area, or part of my practice, that people might find difficult is the amount of paperwork. There is a lot of reading which can be quite dry, wading through lots of bundles or now PDF bundles, sitting at a desk all day. You are not always at court with that kind of adrenalin. Your cases can last a very, very long time. We didn’t get to trial on that Danish case and it’s a case I started in my first week of tenancy three years ago. There are always sub-issues, disputes, different stages of proceedings that you are going through but if you want a daily or weekly churn, you are not going to have that.

NB: It must be quite tricky being involved in a case that goes on for so long because you have always got to kind of keep it in your mind to keep track of things and keep it at a level for so long?

SD: It can get to a point where you feel you can almost only do that case. For example, with a case management hearing every month you have skeleton arguments to prepare and in a commercial setting, a skel­eton is not something you put together overnight, especially not when there are several of you in the counsel team. If you are the most junior, you are the one that does the first draft and then it has to go through counsel before it even goes to the solicitors, before it goes to the client - potentially several times over - before it goes to the court. So these things take time. People want it finessed because they are paying a lot of money for it. That potentially is something that people might find less exciting. Not being on your feet as much. If you want to be Rumpole, if you want to do jury speeches, if you want to do lot of witness examina­tion as a junior, it’s probably not the right area.

NB: What is the best bit for you?

SD: In some ways it’s one of the best and one of the hardest things, you are constantly learning which is something that I wanted from this job. That was really important to me as I didn’t want to be bored. You never get to a point where you have done the same dispute a thousand times, you know it back to front, you know the law, you know the facts. This area is just too broad for that. For me, that means there is a lot of learning every day - whether it’s a new area of law or a new type of business or a new type of share trading, whatever it is that you are trying to get your mind around. There is a real challenge there which is really hard but it keeps you going. I have met some people who became judges because they got bored of their narrow practice area and bored of seeing the same dispute over and over. In my Chambers that is not an issue.

NB: Did Bar School prepare you for what your practice is now becom­ing? Quite helpful? Would that be what you are saying?

SD: I do think it’s important and helpful, and you have to have that grounding. I wanted to go into this area of the law because I wanted time to prepare my work, I didn’t want to be in court every day. I wanted to be doing written work a lot of the time and that is the case. I think it would have surprised me that my work is not the set pieces of the kind you asked about, such as drafting particulars of claim or drafting a formal opinion or doing trials very regularly. It is the spaces in between in a case where you have received a witness statement and so you need to delve into that area of the law a bit more than you thought about before, or you are deal­ing with a procedural point. I wouldn’t really have thought there were as many procedural points as there are that could possibly come up! Also, Bar School cannot prepare you for being led; firstly, because all the leaders are different and, secondly, there is just no format in Bar School for that!

NB: Were there any subject areas maybe at university or Bar School that you were glad you took?

SD: I did the GDL, so I did the core foundational modules and not much more really. To turn the question on its head a little bit, if I had my time again on the GDL, I would have thought a bit more about what I was learning because I was learning by rote for the GDL, using those very helpful coloured ULaw study guides. That was great, and I did learn the foundational law. But that does not really prepare you for the very steep learning curve in pupillage - being asked to think critically about the law and to do my own legal research. I never had to do that at Bar School or on the GDL really. That made pupillage harder, compared to if I had had a degree or masters or PhD in law. Legal research and thinking critically are really important.

NB: What are the most difficult changes that you have had to get used to in making that switch from study to practice?

SD: Despite the fact that I am mainly sitting at my desk, the unpredict­able nature of practice is really hard. You might have your week planned out and then a client wants something done, or the court makes a deci­sion, or a case that you were told about a month ago that didn’t land at the time suddenly lands and you have to throw your schedule up in the air and deal with it. Things take longer than you think. Things fall out of your diary. I was somebody who planned my days quite rigidly as a student and you don’t have that control at the Bar, even in a predomi­nately Chambers-based practice.

NB: Exactly that point you have made comes up in practice area after practice area all the time, it’s that unpredictability of things.

SD: No client ever contemplates the fact that you have other cases on. They think that they are the only case you have, and a deadline is always urgent and I find it’s just a matter of strict prioritisation; ‘the crocodile nearest the boat’, as somebody said recently.

NB: Thinking about your work life and how that has developed and the work-life balance: when you are not in court, are you someone who works in Chambers or at home?

SD: The pandemic has changed things a lot, obviously. My Chambers didn’t close during the pandemic. There were members who did continue to go into Chambers, but I worked from home from March 2020 until May/June this year, and then I started to go back into Chambers a few days a week and really enjoyed it. I worked five days a week in Chambers apart from court before the pandemic and have my own room in Chambers. I do not have that working space at home, so I really enjoyed going back. I am now working three days a week in Chambers and a couple days a week at home, and I have yet to work out whether it is going to stay that way or whether I will go into Chambers more. It’s important to me to go into Chambers, I like my colleagues in Chambers and I make a point of going through the clerks room every day and mak­ing sure I have a good relationship with my clerks which is much harder over the phone. My clerks are all in one room and that room has a real buzz. I tell my junior team every day what’s going on in my cases, and they know I’m around and there and what’s going on and whether I’m stressed or whether I’m OK, and I find that to be helpful.

NB: You talked earlier about PDFs. Are you someone who is fully electronic?

SD: I am since the pandemic. I bought a big iPad and we all were told to get good PDF reading software. Don’t bother to get it as a student because your Chambers can probably get a better deal on it. I do everything paper­less now so I have a big iPad with a Bluetooth pencil so I can mark up my papers, I can highlight, and I think everybody is being forced to be much more techy. The Commercial Court issued last week said they now expect all bundles to be PDFs. The Commercial Court were used to car­ousels and stacks of bundles because every case has thousands of pages. It’s really no surprise that we have gone paperless now, but the courts are saying that PDF bundles are now what they require so I have my iPad, my desktop in Chambers, a second screen and my laptop at home.

NB: When you submit your electronic bundles to the court, at their end, is the court good at making sure that judges have access to it and are the judges OK with handling that type of document?

SD: The pandemic has meant that they have had to become better at it but actually the Commercial Court did have some systems for it before. The Commercial Court is part of the High Court in which I practise most commonly. It’s a specialist court for commercial disputes and it hears very high value and complex disputes generally. That kind of work has always involved lots of paper, even the smallest trial has tons of bun­dles. That meant that even before the pandemic some electronic systems were in place. There is a particular operating system called Magnum which the courts are all very familiar with and so most of the judges had some experience with using electronic document management systems, but it has now become standard. Since the pandemic only a few judges request hard copies.

NB: Is your practice sociable and collegiate or is it a lot of time working at your desk? From what you have been saying, mostly where you are working is at a desk at home.

SD: It’s normally on my own at a desk regardless. Everyone in my Chambers has their own room. So I am on my own, but I am working within a team, being led, albeit normally at the end of a phone or the end of an e-mail from my leader, and won’t be in constant contact with them. You have intense periods where you spend a lot of time with par­ticular members of Chambers, otherwise I get a coffee with a member of Chambers a few times a week and I try to keep my door open. We are not a Chambers that goes to the pub that regularly or has Chambers tea every day, but I like my colleagues in Chambers and people just come by your room and chat. One of my leaders who didn’t know whether

I would be in or not just opened my door and came in and chatted to me for ten minutes this afternoon. I grabbed a coffee with a few juniors this morning. I have coffee with a mentor in Chambers on Thursday. Being desk-based means that probably somebody else is around and if at

II o’clock I call round a few of my friends in Chambers and see if any­one wants to walk down to the coffee shop, probably there is somebody who will walk with me.

NB: Would you say you have typical hours of work? Are you quite regi­mented in separating that out or not? What works for you?

SD: If I go into Chambers, I am in Chambers by 8 o’clock and I will work until relatively early evening, 6∕7pm, something like that. I like to run home from Chambers and then I have dinner with my partner and then I normally do a few hours of work after that. I also work Sundays. I take my Saturdays off as a rule to preserve one day properly offline a week.

NB: There isn’t much travelling?

SD: No, not really. I travel from where I live to Chambers and home again. Pre-pandemic, if you are going to the High Court that is a ten- minute walk down the road. If I was going to the County Courts, that could be anywhere. We are not regional in that sense because a lot of cases would be small banking cases, involving any client of the bank - it could be all over the country. I think the furthest I have had to go to is St Helens. I know people who have had to go to Cornwall or Wales but it’s not very common and your solicitors pay your travel.

NB: The Bar Council likes to talk about how important wellbeing is to the Bar. It wasn’t always like that. In 1994 wellbeing wasn’t a word advocates knew at all. You seem to have quite long work hours, but it must work for you?

SD: It is a hard-working profession, probably because you are self­employed and so there is often no back-up to cover for you. I think well­being is very personal and different people have to find different ways to make it work for them. That might mean different things at different times. So if you are having a week where you are, for a personal reason, very stressed, if you have good clerks, or if you have a diary that allows that, you might be able to take a bit of a back seat. That is not always going to be the case. I think the Bar is hard; you have got to find a way that works for you.

For me, I know it’s really important for me to cycle into Chambers and I like to run home a few times a week and I like to have dinner at home and I have to take my Saturdays off. I don’t sleep as much as I want to. I think of myself as incredibly lucky because I mostly choose the rhythm of my day; there are occasionally times where I get an after­noon off and I don’t have to be in work. My friends don’t have that. I have more flexibility, and I also take a lot of holiday compared to my employed friends (to make up for the weekends and late evenings). I think the Bar generally has a greatly enhanced sense of wellbeing, compared to what it did even a few years ago. I think the pandemic has heightened that. A lot of people have struggled and I do think there is a greater awareness but it definitely requires resilience and stamina even at the best of times.

NB: People that you know at the Bar, if you have friends maybe in other areas of law, do they take steps for wellbeing?

SD: Most people try in some way. Whether or not it’s working, I think we will see in 20 years’ time how those steps have worked out for my generation. A lot of people do leave the Bar, and I see that in my peers, not necessarily so much in my area of law which I think it’s a bit more predictable and much better remunerated.

NB: Very open question really on diversity, whether you have any expe­riences or observations about diversity at the Bar. We are keen to know people’s experiences of sex equality, race equality, social mobility and any other areas that might touch on the issue of diversity in general.

SD: There are many fewer women than men in my area of the Bar but I will firmly say that I have never felt at a disadvantage with clients or members of Chambers or my clerks or anybody, or felt that I had been treated differently as a woman. I noticed that there are a really strong crop of female commercial judges coming through, and they are brilliant and show what can be done. There are also issues with racial equality at the commercial bar which I know people are also working on. It is a good job and people should apply. I was, for the last two years, in charge of mini-pupillages in Chambers and you just want to see more applications coming through from really good candidates of all ethnicities, genders, whatever it might be. Chambers also runs men­toring schemes, as do the Inns, for people from less well-represented backgrounds.

NB: My next question is about income progression in the early years of practice in the areas that people like yourself work in.

SD: Pupillage awards are obviously published on most sets’ websites. In commercial law they are high, and then when you start taking your own work in pupillage as well as work for your supervisors, you can expect to be paid extra for those. Your hourly rate in commercial terms starts off very low and rapidly increases so there is quite a steep increase in your hourly rate in the first two, three years. Most of your work will be done on an hourly rate. You earn depending on how many hours you do. There are different cases that aren’t on an hourly rate or for example on a government rate. Or County Court work means more advocacy, but they pay less well than the led cases where you are doing hours and hours of paperwork at your desk. But there is a rapid income progression from what really starts as a very healthy pupillage award. It has surprised me how much the commercial bar pays. It is a very well remunerated profession.

NB: Do you have any thoughts about the future of the commercial bar?

SD: The commercial bar is doing very well. The Commercial Court has more work than ever, and commercial Chambers have more work for juniors than ever. You will not struggle for work in this area of the law, and commercial disputes are not going anywhere either. Sadly, reces­sions are part of a lot of business disputes. There was a surge, before I was in practice, after the recession in 2007/2008, and there is likely to be another one again. I am working on a case which is to do with the liquidation of a portfolio of assets in the pandemic. I have also done a business interruption insurance dispute but those two are the first I have done which have been directly Covid-related but there will be an upswing. Arbitration is an ever-growing area as well. More and more people choose to have their disputes heard privately. Everybody I know in Chambers does a mix of court work and arbitral work. It just seems that the cases get bigger and bigger.

NB: Thank you very much indeed, Sophia.

9