Introduction

In March 2020 I received an urgent telephone call from a judge at one of the Crown Courts that I had been attending regularly as a barrister for 20 years. One of my prosecution cases was listed before him later that day for me to offer no evidence.

But this is not a book about Covid-19. Nor is it about just the crimi­nal bar. The idea for it first came to me in early 2018 during a conver­sation with the psychologist Dr Dominic Willmott with whom I had been collaborating in a major jury research project into rape myths. In a Huddersfield coffee shop, we came to be discussing how I had started out in the law, and out of the blue I asked myself what was it like start­ing out at the Bar today? I knew what it had been like to start out at the Bar in criminal law 25 years previously, but that was hardly a guide for the 2020s! Equally, I had absolutely no idea what it is like for a new barrister starting out in Chambers in employment, or commercial, or family, or public, or any one of the other many fields of law that exist beyond a Bar training course. What sorts of cases do you do as a new practitioner? Who are your clients typically? What tasks come your way; in a real sense, what do you actually do? What are the great­est challenges? How much work is there? What might new barristers expect to earn across all the different practice areas? And I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be a good idea to interview new barristers in differ­ent fields of law, and then gather the interviews in one book.

This is that book.

I did not know when I started out on the project for this book that just six months later I would be teaching trainee barristers on the Bar Practice Course (BPC) at the University of Law’s Manchester campus, that we would soon be running those BPC classes at the University of Liverpool’s School of Law and Social Justice, and that I would become the Programme Lead for both cities. Strange how life works out. The same month when Covid hit the courts, I got together with Routledge Publishing and set about interviewing junior barristers within their first two or three years of practice at the independent Bar so that I could gather their experiences of practice. I am careful to say ‘the independent Bar’ so that you under­stand we are dealing with barristers who work out of one or more of the hundreds of barristers’ Chambers across England and Wales. This book is for you if you are considering a career at the independent Bar.

The route that students take to the independent Bar has not changed very much over the years, although there is change visible on the hori­zon as new routes are proposed for students to become barristers. The best source of information about such changes will always be the web­site of the Bar Council of England and Wales at www. barcouncil. org.uk. Typically, you may go to Bar School and after graduation you will undertake 12 months’ training in Chambers called a pupillage, which is subject to a minimum income scheme. In your second six months you will have rights of audience and can take cases of your own in court, and then after pupillage you would then apply for a tenancy in your Chambers. In my day, a Chambers might have had any number of pupils, only a couple of whom would ultimately be taken on as tenants, but these days Chambers tend to take on pupils for whom they hold out the greatest tenancy hope.

Let us dispel some myths first. You don’t have to go to Bar School; there are plenty of barristers who qualified first as solicitors and later transferred across to Chambers.

I was interested to learn from the interviews that I conducted for this book that in its content, the Bar course had not changed very much since I studied it back in 1993. The Bar training courses offered to trainee bar­risters by my university and by other providers must continue to teach the knowledge areas of criminal and civil litigation and the various Bar skills deemed necessary by the regulator, the Bar Standards Board (BSB), although recently the BSB has permitted the providers a greater degree of latitude in how they structure their courses. Has anything surprised me from my interviews conducted more than 25 years after I studied for the Bar? Plenty. It has been interesting to speak to new barristers practising in areas of law outside the narrow confines of criminal and civil litigation taught on the Bar course and hear them reflect on the extent to which they use in practice their learning from the Bar course. Often, they don’t use their knowledge of criminal and civil litigation at all; their practice areas have their own rules and regulations. For many, therefore, the use­fulness of the knowledge part of the training lies in developing a close familiarity with rules-based thinking.

One thing that surprised me is that new barristers today seem to spe­cialise less narrowly than used to be the case. In their pupillage offer­ings, Chambers have always tried to offer a range of experience. The general common law pupillage has perhaps been the best example of that because pupils get a basic grounding in crime and civil cases. But what I mean when I say I have been surprised is that now even into tenancy, new barristers tend to maintain a wide scope of practice. This fits with the modern multi-disciplinary approach of many Chambers, allowing their barristers to take on a diverse, in the sense of varied, caseload.

Several times over, my interviewees were clear about what any Bar course cannot teach: how to balance and prioritise the many tasks that a growing case load continually generates. This is a real skill that cannot be learned other than in the job, although in a sense the Bar course does inadvertently ‘help’ students with this on account of the immense volume of work that it generates each week. The best students are those who have developed effective time management and prioritisation skills.

I found among my interviewees a real awareness of the need to main­tain wellbeing, so often a word that has been used too readily without being properly thought through. The new barristers of today appreciate more than ever the need to maintain a healthy balance between work and home life. This doesn’t only mean having meaningful pastimes away from work, though that is in itself of very great importance. It also means being able to have an open dialogue with the clerks in Chambers so that you take on a level of work that fits your capacity and so that you can take ‘paper days’ out of court in order to catch up on your prep work. There is little point relentlessly taking on court work if the back of your mind is constantly worrying about the reading and preparation you need to do on your other cases. You need know that your clerks are understanding of this and view it positively. The barristers I interviewed had good experiences of their Chambers’ support for their wellbeing and career progression, which after all go hand in hand.

There has been much introspection over recent years as the Bar Council, and the profession has considered the lack of progress when it comes to race and sex. Nowhere have the racial disparities been set out more clearly than by a Bar Council Race Working Group, co-chaired by Barbara Mills QC and Simon Regis. In November 2021, the Working Group published a thorough report titled ‘Race at the Bar: A Snapshot’. A glance at just the executive summary reveals some breath-taking sta­tistics and compels further reading. Bar School graduates from ethnic minority backgrounds are less likely to obtain pupillage than their con­temporaries who are from white backgrounds.

Women earn on average less than men; Black men earn less than White men; and Black and Asian women earn less than Black and Asian men, and Black women earn the least.

When it comes to QC and judicial appointments, the report is just as plain that the legal profession has a long road to travel to equality.

One interviewee expresses her thoughts like this:

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.

and

I don’t want white, straight male barristers to fail. I don’t want their power; I just want my own power.

Another interviewee told me:

The Bar is not diverse. It’s not a meritocracy either. It’s a very old institution with very old, ingrained prejudices that is going to take a very long time to dislodge. I had a work experience student who said to me that she hadn’t seen many other people who looked like me on the profiles of Chambers’ websites - that had been my experience as well.

The interviews in this book were conducted before the Working Group report was published. The barristers who are interviewed speak for themselves, as you will read, though it seems to me that there is a plainly held view that the Bar needs to do more to make sure that it is properly representative of the society that it serves, and there is a real drive to make the profession as open as it can be to new entrants, wherever they come from. That commitment among the newest entrants provides the strongest hope that the Bar is changing. I detect a real seriousness at the Bar of today to bring about that change. The Working Group report therefore comes at both a critical and an opportune time. There are nearly two dozen recommendations aimed at Chambers, specialist Bar associations and other stakeholders for specific action to address access, retention, progression and Bar culture.

The costs of further education can be problematic, if not prohibitive, for many hopeful entrants to the profession. Danielle Manson, who has a most powerful story behind her route to the Bar, sees social mobility as being a serious challenge for today’s Bar, and she is right. Danielle puts it like this:

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 encouraging people not to self- eliminate is important.

My interviewees discussed with me the initiatives that they are engag­ing with, sometimes with their Chambers and sometimes more widely, to reach out and show our young people from all economic back­grounds that there is a career at the Bar. There is funding available, too. The university that I work for offers scholarships, as do the four Inns of Court. There are other initiatives. Individual Chambers, even some individual barristers, run their own work experience opportuni­ties, increasingly with expenses paid. My own Chambers at 9 St John Street in Manchester, for example, and in particular our Deputy Head of Chambers Jaime Hamilton QC, set out to make a real difference by spending time, effort and money to bring the Bar to as many people from as many backgrounds as possible. Search out opportunities like this on the internet; they are increasingly there to be found.

Sadly, I cannot tell you that there are no challenges and no obsta­cles in the path of students who would like to practise at the independ­ent Bar. You probably didn’t expect otherwise, anyway. Getting good results in examinations is just the start of the process and in itself guar­antees nothing. It is a long and uncertain road, and the fact that it has always been like that is only a little comfort. Being at the Bar is a very rewarding career for those of us who are fortunate to make it.

To the fabulous and impressive junior barristers who agreed to be interviewed for this book, my very great thanks; I am grateful to all of you for taking the time to discuss your careers and thereby helping the barristers of tomorrow make sound decisions about their studies today. I would ask the reader of this book to remain aware that with every passing day, these barristers’ careers will develop and change. The inter­views reflect the barristers’ careers at a point in time a couple of years or so after pupillage, the aim being to show what those early years are like across the various fields of practice.

To my very good friend and Deputy Head of Chambers, Jaime Hamilton QC, a well-known and longstanding barrister of the Northern Circuit, I thank you for contributing your words of experience to this book. Jaime does a tremendous amount to help students gain a foot­hold, I have already discussed that above. I also would like to thank Julie Burns. Julie and I met when we worked together at a previous Chambers. Julie is an experienced legal secretary with a keen eye for detail, and I could not have asked for anyone better to transcribe the interviews.

The legal work out there at the Bar is wide and varied, and if this book introduces you to what life is like as a junior barrister in different areas of practice then it will have achieved its purpose.

Nigel Booth Programme and Student Experience Lead for the Bar Practice Course University of Law, Manchester and Liverpool Campuses

Spring 2022