An Interview with Ted Loveday, Maitland Chambers

NB: Ted, when did you begin tenancy and what areas of law have you practised in since beginning tenancy?

TL: My tenancy at Maitland Chambers began in September 2017. The typical practice at my Chambers is often described as ‘commercial chan­cery’ which can be quite a confusing term.

If students are interested in anything which might broadly be described as ‘commercial chancery’, I think it’s important for them to drill down into exactly what areas of work appeal to them. For exam­ple, the expression ‘chancery’ can be associated with some other areas such as trusts, tax, probate and Court of Protection work, but I don’t have a particular interest in those areas.

NB: Did you always want to go to the commercial bar?

TL: No - in fact, I didn’t always want to go into law! I actually started out studying history at university. By the end of my degree, I had switched to studying law out of curiosity. I was good at it and enjoyed it, so I decided to have a go and see what it was like as a career. Eventually I got a pupillage at my current Chambers and I have had a great time, but it’s very much been a series of discoveries.

NB: Did you have to do the GDL [the Graduate Diploma in Law, or conversion course]?

TL: No, as I studied all the necessary modules in my degree.

NB: Can you give some examples of cases you are in right now?

TL: Of course! I do a mix of smaller cases on my own - where you might be in and out of court quite regularly - and larger, longer-running ones with other barristers.

NB: And while they are all arguing about who bears the losses, they are all spending more money to determine that question?

TL: Exactly. The dispute is over £2 or £3 million pounds which sounds like a lot - but by Commercial Court standards, it’s relatively small. It’s important for all of us to make sure that our clients are getting good value for money and not spending disproportionate amounts on it. At the moment we are in the middle of disclosure, which involves going through thousands and thousands of e-mails that the parties exchanged several years ago to make sure that the other side has access to the evi­dence they need. The e-mails have to be read by someone who is legally qualified and that’s a classic example of where you have got to be careful to keep the costs within reasonable bounds.

NB: You talked about the odd ten-minute cases where you are in and out? What sorts of things might they be?

TL: As I say, it’s good to have a mix of bigger and smaller cases. At my Chambers I would say the bread-and-butter hearings for unled juniors include smaller commercial cases, insolvency and property hearings.

Starting with insolvency, this can be a good source of advocacy practice because there are a lot more hearings than in typical com­mercial cases.

One of the odd things about insolvency for me is that it’s one of the very few areas where I get to wear a wig and gown - or at least it was before virtual hearings started. Traditionally, all applications to put companies into liquidation would be heard at the same time as part of a long list, perhaps 100 or more companies at once, during the same hearing once a week - described as the ‘companies winding up list’ or informally the ‘winders’. You would have several dozen junior barristers representing the various companies and their creditors, crowded into a single courtroom wearing their robes and finery, and each company would get about 30 seconds to explain why they shouldn’t be wound up. You get last-minute surprises and a lot of adjournments because the judge is often going to want to give everyone a second chance to pay, but ultimately it can be quite brutal too because it all happens so fast. It’s a good chance to get on your feet and get used to the sound of your own voice in court. This is important for commercial practitioners in particular, as opportunities for oral advocacy aren’t as common as they are at other parts of the Bar.

On the property side, a typical hearing at early stages might be a pos­session hearing. The tenant falls behind with rent or there is some other reason that the landlord wants to get rid of the tenant. You are either trying to obtain a possession order, or - if you’re on the tenant’s side - trying to buy more time or stay for as long as possible. Those can start with very straightforward, short hearings where there isn’t that much to be said on each side, but you’d be surprised by how often it raises com­plicated issues and of course it can be emotionally charged.

NB: Thank you, Ted. Can you tell me about the sorts of tasks that you have had to do in those sorts of cases?

TL: I do a lot of drafting and a lot of written work and a lot of written Advice. Obviously, that doesn’t mean to say there is no oral advocacy; there is plenty, but it is fair to say that I practise at a more paper-focused end of the Bar. I will very often be asked to draft pleadings, so all of the skills you build at Bar School in that area are helpful. Obviously, you do formal written Advices as well at all stages of cases, but I will often be asked to advise by e-mail - these days it’s not always a traditional, formal set of instructions saying, ‘Advice from Counsel’. You can advise in conference as well; that happens a lot.

One thing that you don’t really learn at Bar School is the more infor­mal aspect of being involved as part of a team on an on-going case. For example, it is very, very common indeed for civil and commercial bar­risters to be involved in drafting letters for your instructing solicitors to send to the other side - either writing them from scratch or commenting on a draft prepared by the solicitors. You have to get all the right con­tent in, make it short and persuasive. The primary goal is to persuade the other side to agree to something you are asking them to do, but if they don’t agree, the letter may end up in front of the judge so you will need draft all letters with a view to ultimately persuading the judge that your client’s position is reasonable. So you do a lot of drafting and re-drafting of letters. You might also be involved in witness statements and other documents - again, this isn’t something you do much at Bar School, but you are often brought in to help on them, regardless of the size of the case.

NB: From a criminal lawyer’s perspective, when you think about a bar­rister drafting witness statements, you think ‘that sounds so wrong!’ but of course, it isn’t at all in particular areas of law.

TL: Yes! Actually, you are taught in Bar School that there are important ethical rules about when you should and shouldn’t draft witness state­ments. Those rules are still important because you have to maintain your independence. If you’re drafting a statement for a witness whose credibility is going to be an issue, you do need to stop and think about it - because you don’t want to get pulled into being part of that debate personally. Having said this, with civil witness statements, it is much rarer for the witness’s honesty to be called into question and so solici­tors are often keener to get counsel involved in helping with them. The main reason for this is that solicitors generally appreciate your role as part of the team and will frequently want to have you involved in help­ing with them to make sure the evidence is as helpful and persuasive as possible. After all, you are going to be the person who has to argue the case at trial so it’s important for you to be happy with the materi­als you’re working with. I should add that it may still be the case that a witness’s credibility is an issue - especially in fraud or hotly contested commercial cases. In those cases, you need to be especially circumspect about your role in the drafting of evidence, but you may still be involved in some capacity. Often, the junior/senior relationship helps smooth that over - the junior might get a little more stuck into the preparation of evidence because ultimately it is going to be the silk who is doing the cross-examining at trial.

NB: There must be a lot of negotiation as well with your opponents, I guess?

TL: Yes.

NB: Sometimes it’s really hard work isn’t it, to make your client under­stand the severity of the risk that he or she might be proposing to you, and you have really got to calm things down sometimes and say, look, here’s the reality of it, your choice, but here are the risks.

TL: Exactly. It happens a lot.

NB: We have talked about the winding-up lists that you might do, but what other sort of advocacy might someone in the first couple of years maybe in your field expect to do?

TL: I have done my share of applications of different sorts in the County Court; might be half a day, might be a day: summary judgment, setting aside default judgment, setting aside orders of various different kinds, civil procedure skirmishes of different types. I have done small claims trials, fast track and multi-track trials. There are also insolvency appli­cations of various kinds, as well as property cases in the County Court or the High Court. Then at the other end of the scale a commercial or chancery junior will have plenty of opportunities to act as part of a larger team in bigger cases often in the High Court - although you don’t have the same level of responsibility, the cases can be much more interesting, and you get to work with some really talented people. It’s good to get a balance of both.

NB: Is mediation something that you get involved with?

TL: Yes. I love taking part in mediations. The role of a barrister at a mediation is slightly odd as it’s not clearly defined. In theory, you are there to give the legal perspective, to advise on the overall strategy, and

to be a sounding-board if the client asks, ‘what’s the risk if I don’t accept this offer?’, or ‘how much do you think my claim is worth?’ You are very much there to get everyone to see the strength of your case.

NB: What sorts of cases have you had that have come before a mediator? TL: I have had contract cases, so effectively, civil, commercial-type cases where businesses fall out over money. A common area where mediations can be successful are company and partnership-type cases where busi­ness partners have fallen out; that’s exceptionally common and there are all kinds of court cases that that can lead to and involving different areas of law. Deep down, the human problem is the same: people who thought they trusted each other, but the relationship has broken down and now the only result is that they get their lawyers involved.

NB: You’re quite right. That goes across all fields of law because it is the root of many problems in family law isn’t it, as well, and also in crime? TL: Absolutely. When people start a big new project together, whether that is a business or buying a property or starting a family, they assume that they will always get on. They rarely stop and think, ‘what if it goes wrong?’ If they did, they could have spent a few hundred quid on draft­ing a proper agreement and avoided trouble down the line. But unless you’re a lawyer you usually don’t think like this. So it can be sad when effectively the shared asset, whatever it is, starts being frittered away on lawyers’ fees. In those cases, both sides’ lawyers are usually trying to persuade their clients to go to mediation, saying, ‘look, this is your chance to draw a line under it’.

NB: What sorts of people or organisations have largely been your clients?

TL: It is a mix of individuals and professionals of some sort - busi­nesses, charities, government bodies and other organisations. Disputes between two businesses or organisations will usually have some sort of personal side. But this is more common in disputes involving private individuals, especially where there is a real human issue at the heart of it. Those cases can be the most satisfying even if they’re not always the most prestigious.

NB: What’s your caseload been like and how has it compared with your second six or your first six?

TL: In terms of how my practice has developed since I started out, I’d say there have been three broad changes. First, there have been shifts in terms of areas of law, as I’ve picked up an interest in charity law and have spent a great deal of time on pro bono work in a range of areas which might be less typical for my set of Chambers. Second, I applied for a role as a judicial assistant working closely with judges - it has been a really interesting insight into how the system works, and hopefully will be something I can use to develop my practice in new directions. The third change, I would say, is that over time I’ve built up connections with solicitors who I enjoy working with, and this has led to more and more interesting cases through those personal relationships.

You mentioned a second six, but in fact it’s common at the com­mercial bar and the chancery bar to have no real distinction between the first and second six of pupillage. Certainly in my case, the whole of my 12 months’ pupillage was devoted to training and assessment, and I wasn’t sent out on my feet until the start of my tenancy. I can’t speak for every Chambers, but it is common in these areas for much of your efforts during pupillage to be focused on getting good at the paperwork side of things - that’s because paperwork is such an important aspect of the practice - although there are often workshops and courses to keep your oral advocacy skills sharp.

This means the start of your tenancy is very different from pupillage because you will be doing hearings for the first time - that’s obviously stimulating and challenging.

NB: It couldn’t be more opposite than a criminal or common law pupil­lage, I guess, could it?

TL: I had friends who were obviously doing crime and other areas of law and especially in my year group. In some ways we were both jeal­ous of each other! They were often stressed at having to appear in the Magistrates Court five or six days a week, being thrown in at the deep end with some really tough cases, and they wished they could have some of the more detailed tuition and support that I was getting back in Chambers. On the other hand, I was still sitting at a desk reading and typing away or shadowing people, rather than doing cases of my own - and it’s fair to say that sometimes I was really stir-crazy and wanted to get going myself.

NB: How much of your time is spent, would you say, in courts or tri­bunals and how much at your desk?

TL: I would say less than 20% in court, so about one day a week. That varies because some weeks there are no hearings at all, and other weeks you might be having hearings over several days or even the occasional bigger trial running over several weeks. There are all kinds of different sets in our area of commercial chancery, but the balance of work at my Chambers, because it involves insolvency and property work as well as commercial work, involves some more opportunities to have your own hearings as a junior. We’ve already discussed those, and that work actu­ally is quite good fun as a junior, and it does mean you get out there and get some advocacy experience on your own and in small hearings. I have several friends who are practicing in what might be described as ‘pure’ commercial sets of Chambers, which can be frustrating because the jun­iors do very little advocacy at all. They might be involved in several huge cases at once, but on each of them they will be the most junior person in a large team. So if you have an insolvency element or a property ele­ment to your Chambers, or some other area of practice, you are likely to get to do little more advocacy as the junior than if you do purely commercial work. I know that this is actually a long-term worry in our areas of the Bar, because there’s a concern that the younger generation may not be getting enough advocacy experience as they work their way up through the system.

NB: Can we discuss a little more the courts or tribunals that you do attend. Obviously it isn’t going to be the Crown Court, I bet you have never been in a Crown Court.

TL: I don’t think so, unfortunately, although I have been in the Magistrates’ Court a couple of times! Not for criminal cases, but there are a small number of civil cases which might find their way into the Magistrates’ Court - for example, applications by local councils to recover unpaid business rates.

The vast majority of my cases are either in the High Court or the County Court. County Court hearings generally have a value under £100,000 and they could be anywhere in the country. High Court hear­ings could involve anything really - there is huge variety. Most of my High Court work will be in the parts of the High Court known as the Business and Property Courts, which include the Commercial Court and the Insolvency and Companies Court. Appeals from the High Court may end up going to the Court of Appeal and ultimately the Supreme Court. I’ve also done work in the Administrative Court and various tribunals. Most hearings in these courts require business suits, so we don’t wear robes. The few hearings where I might use robes would be the winding-up petitions that we’ve talked about; most appeals; and contempt of court hearings.

Contempt of court usually arises in cases involving injunctions. It might be a fraud case, a contract case or a property case. Say the judge has made a freezing injunction where the defendant’s assets are frozen to stop them making off with their assets. If the claimant has evidence that the defendant has breached the injunction, they can make an appli­cation to commit them for contempt of court, that is, either to have the defendant fined or sent to prison because they disobeyed the court order. Because the liberty of the subject is at stake, these hearings require robes to send a message about the seriousness of the occasion. I have a con­tempt hearing coming up in Nottingham soon, so that will be a rare time when I need to pack up my wig and gown for a hearing outside London. Most of my robed hearings have been in London because that’s where most winding-up hearings take place.

NB: Why is it that most winding-up hearings are in London?

TL: The default is that the cases are heard in London because that’s where the biggest insolvency specialism is - both among the Bar and the judiciary - but the courts are very much trying to localise the hearings at the moment when they are tied to a particular region of the UK.

NB: What sorts of areas of your practice do you find the most interest­ing and which areas do some people maybe find less interesting?

TL: I enjoy working with clients - especially clients who are less famil­iar with the legal system - to try to understand their needs, to build up a relationship with them and to help them navigate the unfamiliar world of litigation. I like also the problem-solving aspect of my job. That’s something that you get a lot of in the sort of cases that I do. Obviously, in commercial litigation, you are in a practical world and you need to understand the practical needs of your clients, but at the same time you do get to grips with some knotty and quite abstract legal problems. I also really love being on my feet, I love the advocacy; but if you need to do that every day of the week, this the wrong area for you because it is more paper-based.

NB: That’s really interesting because the clinical negligence practitioner who I spoke to made a vital point: when you’re at Bar School, there is a tendency sometimes for a student to focus on ‘what area of law would I enjoy the most’; whereas she thought the better question to ask is, ‘looking at my skillset, what am I good at’. Subtle emphasis, but very important I think.

TL: I think you need to think about what skills you most enjoy using. What do you want your typical day to look like? Do you like the sound of going to Chambers and thinking about strategy and advising on the clients’ legal problems, or do you want to be going out to court and examining witnesses and speaking up for your clients? Perhaps you like both, but you need to think about what balance between them you want to get. When I speak to students and mini-pupils about this, generally I’ll tell them that the only way to find out what you like is by getting exposure to it - mini-pupillages, working as a paralegal and volunteer­ing are all good ways of testing things out.

NB: We talked about you being led and the sorts of tasks you have to do when you are led in bigger cases, but would it be useful just to talk about the sort of actual tasks that you have done to help your leader in different cases?

TL: Each leader has their own demands and their own ways of work­ing - unfortunately, when you become a QC, you don’t get trained in how to lead a junior, which is why there’s so much variety! When you get instructed to work alongside a leader, the first thing you should do is talk to your leader about how they work and what they expect of you. Some leaders are delegators, and they will expect you to prepare all the materials before they even touch the case, and they will then look over it briefly and hopefully approve what you’ve prepared for them. Others will want to be completely over the papers first, so they can prepare a document themselves, and they’ll just rely on you to fill in some gaps here and there, or to carry out specific bits of research. When it comes to hearings and cross-examination there will also be a range of differ­ent tasks you might be asked to do. It varies hugely between silks and between other people you are working with.

In general, your work when you are led will very often involve mak­ing the first draft of things and being on top of documents and tasks for them. You might be drafting grounds of appeal, skeleton arguments, perhaps doing witness statements. When you are instructed to give Advice, again, it varies hugely. You might get silks who want to take complete ownership of the Advice and do all the work themselves and they’re not comfortable with something where you have done the leg­work. Others will leave you to take a lot of the initiative. It’s fun getting a mix of different types of leaders. It is really fun when you have a silk who pays huge attention to detail and gets stuck in alongside you but, equally, it can be quite flattering if you prepare a long skeleton argu­ment and it gets signed off and adopted by somebody senior with very few changes.

NB: Ted, looking back, do you think that the sort of work you did at Bar School prepared you for what you have ended up doing in this first year or two?

TL: Some of it did, some of it didn’t. I found the training in drafting, oral and written advocacy really useful. I’ve also often drawn on what I learned during the alternative dispute resolution part of the Bar course - we did a mock mediation which was actually pretty realistic and has stood me in good stead for real ones. You might be surprised that I’m also glad to have studied criminal litigation. A lot of people think that by the time they get to Bar School, they know what they want to do and so it’s a waste of time, but I think it did create some collegiality - you know what other areas members of the Bar practise in. If you call your­self a barrister, you should have some general idea of how each part of the legal system works.

On the other hand, the civil litigation course was dreary because it basically involved large amounts of rote-learning of the civil procedure rules which you were expected to regurgitate in the exam word-for- word. And you would be marked down if you got the wording slightly wrong. Obviously you need to know the outline of how the rules work, but I’m not sure rote-learning the White Book is a sensible use of any­one’s time.

I found much of the Bar course useful, although of course I have some criticisms and it’s fair to say I learned far more during pupillage than I did during the Bar course.

NB: But maybe Bar School gave you a base from which you could make much better use of pupillage?

TL: Potentially - especially with the drafting and advocacy training which I mentioned. I know the contents of the course have changed a lot since I did it, and I can’t speak for the course as it stands today, so it might be that some of the rote-learning has gone.

NB: When you look back do you think, I’m glad I took certain subject options at university rather than something else?

TL: I am definitely glad I studied contract law properly in an academic setting, as it’s extremely useful for what I do on a day-to-day basis. Oddly, the lecturers would often apologise that the details about con­tract law won’t be useful in practice because it involves quite abstract questions such as whether a contract actually exists, or whether there has been consideration. It’s fair to say that these questions aren’t very important for most lawyers. For example, if you’re a conveyancing solicitor, there’s rarely ever going to be any doubt about whether a contract exists or not. But these sorts of questions do actually become important in commercial litigation. You get real controversy about issues like whether there is consideration or what test for remoteness you use. So paying attention in contract lectures definitely helped me at the Bar.

There were some optional subjects that I really enjoyed, even if they don’t directly apply in my practice today. I did a wonderful course called Law and Development in my final year which was all about the relation­ship between the legal system and economic development. For example, we studied a lot of efforts by the World Bank on how to improve the rule of law in developing countries. Does it work? It is sometimes colonial­ist? Are there problems with it? It gave a really interesting perspective on law around the world beyond the black letter stuff.

In terms of advice to students, I would say, do the essential manda­tory courses that you have to do but otherwise, pick what takes your fancy. You might be spending a long time in your chosen area of prac­tice; you will have plenty of time to learn the legal detail, but this is your chance to really expand your horizons. I am a big advocate for doing options which some people might say are less ‘useful’ in the real world because now is the time to be intellectually curious.

NB: I completely agree with that. Can you tell me about the most dif­ficult changes you have had to get used to as you have made your way through the first couple of years of your tenancy?

TL: Managing your practice is something no-one ever trains you in. Although you will hopefully have support from your clerks, your pupil supervisors and your colleagues, it’s important to realise that ultimately you are responsible for what happens in your career. You might be encouraged to go in particular directions and, even if you’re not, it’s quite easy to get caught up in one case after another and start drifting without thinking about your direction. Where do you want to be going? What are your goals?

On a more mundane level, it’s crucial to manage your time properly, and an important part of this is learning how to say ‘no’. Hopefully you will have lots of people who want to instruct you, but you need to stop and think whether you can actually fit the case in. Some barristers never get their work-life balance quite right because they’re terrified to turn away instructions and they end up agreeing to everything. But my view is that ultimately you need to learn that you can’t work all the hours in the day and you need to decide what balance you want to strike. Nobody else is going to do this for you, so you need to take responsibility for it. NB: This brings us on to the work-life balance. First, when you are not in court and you are working at your computer, do you do it in Chambers or at home?

TL: Currently, I am working at home. Even before the lockdown, barris­ters with a more commercial or chancery practice had the opportunity to work from home more than most due to the relatively large proportion of your work that involves reading, writing and drafting. Many of my colleagues would spend some of their time working from home, espe­cially those with children or family commitments. If your work is not primarily court-based, there is a lot of flexibility, and this is definitely set to increase now that working from home has been normalised.

I think it’s still important to come into Chambers when you can, to make sure that you’re bonding with your colleagues and keeping some sort of collegiate atmosphere. Many sets of Chambers, including my own, try to encourage this by holding various social events. In bigger cases you get a lot more social contact because you will be working with a team of solicitors and often other barristers. But equally you do need to be happy working on your own sometimes, since there will always be cases where you’re essentially sitting with your papers or your PDFs and ploughing through them and producing a product at the end of that. NB: Do you have your own room in Chambers?

TL: Yes. Up until recently everyone in my Chambers had their own room. We have now, in the last year or so, adopted the policy of moving over towards sharing space sometimes - which is sensible if people are working from home a lot. There is no point in renting a building full of empty space, so we are increasingly sharing two people to a room.

NB: Does that work?

TL: Yes. Personally I am quite sociable, and I’d be glad to share a space. I know that views on this differ between barristers, though.

NB: How techy are the practice areas that you work in?

TL: Things have changed in recent years, but today pretty much eve­ryone can have a completely paperless practice most of the time if they want to.

NB: In crime we started off with the digital system. All the prosecution evidence is on a central system that judges, advocates and solicitors could all see. That’s made a magnificent difference. It’s been developed further into the ‘common platform’. I would like to be utterly paperless. If I can just take my MacBook to court, I’m happy. In your area of law, it’s pretty techy too?

TL: Yes, although pre-lockdown you would still have trials with walls and walls of bundles, with reams and reams of paper flying around. Even if everyone had a laptop in court, there would still be walls of bundles. I think you will still have barristers who will want to have their paper, if anything as a comfort blanket, but you can work without it if you want. I had a real-world physical hearing in the Midlands two or three weeks ago. It was liberating because, before lockdown, when I went out of London I’d be breaking my back with a wheelie case full of papers. You really feel it taking a physical toll when you get home in the evening. But this time, I just took a rucksack with a laptop and a charger. I was terrified the technology would fail on me, but it was a huge relief not to lug all those papers up and down the country. You have to get used to some other things - like I didn’t know where to hold the laptop when I was making submissions and I had to find the right place to perch it so that it could still be connected to the charger in court. But once you get over those teething problems, it’s great.

NB: So is the way you run your practice job less paper-based, and more digital?

TL: I am at the more digital end of the spectrum. I don’t like to accumu­late ring binders. The only exception is if I’ve been staring at a screen all day and need a fresh perspective on what I’ve been drafting, I’ll some­times print it out and mark it up in red ink. But even this is quite rare for me now, because I don’t have a printer at home!

NB: What would you say are your typical hours of work are?

TL: Probably around half nine to half six. I am not sure there are typical hours of work because on a busy day, it could be a lot more than that. But I like to try and keep boundaries between work and not work.

NB: From what you’ve said you probably don’t do that much travelling, do you?

TL: No, most of my work is in London. I might go outside London when I have cases in courts in different parts of the country, or sometimes to meet solicitors or attend mediations. Because travelling is not that com­mon, it’s quite fun - you get a change of scene and the chance to explore towns and cities in different parts of the country.

NB: Were your expectations about that accurate?

TL: I think they were. I knew what I was getting in for.

NB: How do you find the work-life balance in your fields of law? Is your experience the same as your contemporaries that you keep in touch with who might be in other areas of law?

TL: I think with civil work, if you’re a workaholic and you want to do lots of cases and probably if you’re very ambitious, you can end up working very long hours. Some people have the perception that if you want to impress clients and solicitors you need to work very long hours. You will certainly be working long hours if you are keen to take on a lot of big cases at once.

On the other hand, it is possible to learn to say ‘no’ to work and set your own expectations for what sort of balance you want. It depends on what your goals are. There will always be stressful cases and there will still be last-minute work that needs doing, but over the years I have become better at predicting what my workload is going to be like and working out what I can afford to take on.

Another important part of getting your work-life balance right is communicating with your colleagues effectively. You need to make it clear to your solicitors and leaders what sort of hours you work, when you are going to be on holiday and so on. Although litigation can be demanding, people will ultimately understand that you want to have a life outside work. The trick is talking to people openly about it and making sure that you’ve agreed a way of getting your work done in good time. Most sets of Chambers are very supportive of wel­fare and there are people you can talk to - there will be avenues for troubleshooting.

NB: Coming to the end now. Next question is about diversity at the Bar because we are keen to know about, insofar as people want to talk about them, any experiences of sex equality, race equality, social mobility and any other areas that you think might touch on the topic of diversity are. Just whether you have anything to say about it?

TL: It’s a difficult topic. It’s the number one problem facing the Bar. I’m not sure I’m much of an authority on these issues, but of course of course they deeply bother me, and I think most of my colleagues. As a set of Chambers, we make big efforts to recruit from diverse groups and we contribute to outreach and mentoring schemes, but obviously the Bar still has a long way to go.

NB: Is there anything you can say about income progression in the areas of law that you do, perhaps over the early years of practice so before your stage and beyond your stage?

TL: The problem is that this varies massively between individual bar­risters, even within the same areas of practice! I can only speak for myself, and I’m lucky to be practising in the area that I am because it is relatively financially stable. I think it’s fair to say that, although there may be cashflow issues in the first year or two, civil and commercial barristers end up with substantial earnings by most people’s standards. I think the Bar Council publishes statistics on this if students are inter­ested in finding average figures.

NB: That’s great. And we are finally onto the last question is just whether you have any thoughts about the future of the Bar in your areas?

TL: That’s a big question.

NB: Criminal practitioners have a lot to say to me about that, and even those who work in personal injury, too, because there are some changes on the horizon there, maybe in commercial, chancery, maybe not a lot has changed and not a lot will change?

TL: I don’t think that there is a fear that the commercial bar is dying or declining. When I was applying for pupillages, one of the common interview questions was whether we might be heading towards a fused profession, or a world where solicitors want to do it all themselves. Actually, it turns out that specialist courtroom advocates are still in demand and still will be in demand for a good while. Of course, we need to be alert to how things are developing - especially with the move towards virtual hearings and digitisation. But I think the civil bar will survive and do well, and if anything we have a responsibility for look­ing out for the rest of the Bar because there are certainly bigger threats facing our criminal and family law colleagues.