Tag Archive for 'Trainee solicitors & pupil barristers'

The Bar as a career

Published on 26 December 2009 in legal profession and the Bar. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

Geeklawyer was drinking with young LP : a delightful young student doing the GDL, or BPL, or MFI, or whatever they are calling the law conversion course this year. Of course she was interesting for any number of reasons: female, pretty, 22 and posh. Her large brain and inclination to dispense incisive opinions were not enough to put Geeklawyer off her, even though it is as desirable for a woman to have an opinion as it is for her to have a penis (not at all).

No, the abiding impression was that for all the uncertainties of the Bar it’s aspirants remain as buoyant and optimistic as ever. We grizzled old hacks look in awe at youth. We see a calling (it’s a ‘Calling’ not some mere bourgeois profession like soliciting) suffering under a leadership apparently determined to  fix it in Aspic: who ignore the rivalries and encroachments of solicitors, at the junior end of the legal world, on the one hand, and a deeply corrupt abusive government determined to undermine fair trials and independent legal representation for those they persecute, on the other.

Young LP  was well aware of this. She was also well aware of the horror stories of hundreds of applications per pupillage, with each applicant having an Oxbridge double first. Such war stories will become her stock-in-trade when she starts on the BVC and becomes immersed in the whole bloody process. Of course she is an impressive high achiever: past president of her University Union, Good degree (albeit only Eng Lit) and winner of GL’s heart. Lofty achievements indeed. But as she is well aware her peers and competitors will also have  similarly good CVs despite which she remains undaunted.

Ms LP was equally undaunted even by the realities of new entrants to the Bar: last minute instructions for a hearing 100 miles away requiring overnighter preparation and for a fee that barely buys a starBucks.

Geeklawyer pointed out there were two fast routes to poverty at the Bar: Government funded family law and crime; Miss LP’s career preferences. Daunted and deterred? Not even a little, both admirable and worrying. Miss LP’s response was that she had heard that these stories and prophecies of the Bar’s doom went back 30 or 40 years. True, but Geeklawyer remains of the view that recent trends are accelerating the decline of the Bar in its traditional form. Miss LP says “Meh, Twas ever thus, tell it to the hand” .

Her final response was: “What I really need, therefore, to sustain me is a rich husband”. And she caressed GL’s hand and fluttered her long dreamy eyelashes. There is ambition and over–ambition: madam is hot, but is she that hot?

Baby Barista — the witness statement

Published on 16 July 2009 in books. 4 Comments Tags: , , .

Sometimes fiction is stranger than the truth. The truth is rarely visible in fictional accounts of the Bar, from Rumpole, This Life and onwards. We barristers are the subject of malice spite and envy from the failed barristers in the Cabinet right down to the Solicitor-Inadequates at the junior end of the profession, all of whom peddle their spite to any takers. At a time when the Bar Council is desperately attempting, and failing, to counter this black propaganda, BabyBarista enters the fray with his Machiavellian flailing, undoing all attempts at the rehabilitation of our image. Excellent.

BabyBarista is a fictional pupil at a fictional chambers and who blogs at The Times. The Art of War is the autobiography of his pupillage. BabyB is not a sympathetic character; like Geeklawyer he is scheming manipulative amoral disloyal calculating and backstabbing, but none of these virtues offset his essential badness. His only salvation comes from the fact that his rival pupils, competing against him for the single prized tenancy, are even more loathsome: ThirdSix and TopFirst are variously smug superior snobbish calculating and pretentious. Fine and necessary qualities in a barrister but not conducive to a spirit of camaraderie:

TopFirst telephoned me over the weekend. He said he wanted to talk about pupillage.

‘Look BabyB, we’re all in competition for tenancy, but let’s be realistic about this. Worrier and BusyBody are both now dead in the water and it’s developed into a straight fight between you and me.’

‘OK.’ No prizes for that one Mr Brainbox.

‘Well look, I’ve been thinking. You ever heard of the prisoner’s dilemma?’

‘[…] Yea, shows that cooperation’s often better than fighting.’

[…]

‘You’re suggesting a truce. Fine by me,’ I lied.

‘Exactly so. Fight and we may both die. Cooperate and there’s at least a small chance that maybe we’ll convince them to take us both on.’

‘Makes sense,’ I lied again. ‘You can count on me.’ […]

… there will be no cooperation.

If you think only the pupils are oily rats then the barristers are just older more experienced versions: TheBoss — BabyB’s first pupilmaster. An unscrupulous, spineless coward, “You’re up to your neck in this, you realise,’ he told me. ‘If I go down I’m taking you with me.’”; OldSmoothie — a Peter Bowles character; TheVamp a cock hunting old slapper;  TheBusker and OldRuin are, among others, old hack tenants in chambers who round out the sorry cast. This is one sorry improbable and deeply doomed set; no doubt soon to merge with Peckham Chambers and then vanish.

The Art of War is a hilarious parody of the profession and an engaging reprise of all the old cliches about us barristers. To those of us on the inside it was clearly this and no more: some of the scenarios were deeply implausible and the behaviour of the characters way beyond credibility, although it was this that rendered the humour. Geeklawyer worries a little, and somewhat hypocritically given his own blogging and Twittering behaviour, about whether this will be seen as pure humour by the public or if  they will really imagine that judges and barristers will stitch them up just to get a round of golf in on a Friday? One really really hopes not.

The Art of War was a side-splitting read that Geeklawyer couldn’t put down: it gets his A+ recommendation. Open a new browser tab now and order it from Amazon immediately.

Tim Kevan, the recently outed ex-anonymous barrister behind BabyB, deserves a pat on the back for a great first novel. Geeklawyer hopes the second will arrive soon.

The Barristers — episode three

Published on 30 November 2008 in the Bar. 23 Comments Tags: , , .

Episode three makes Geeklawyer wish there were more than just four episodes to this series. The obsession with students abated somewhat in this episode and we actually got to see real barristers at play.

In some ways that wasn’t an altogether good thing. This weeks episode was partly focused on the changing face of the criminal bar. An hour program couldn’t hope to scratch the surface of what and why — the policy driven changes, so instead it just showed the differing lives of two criminal barristers on either sides of the widening chasm of criminal work at the Bar. On one side was Annie Evans who had taken her 30 pieces of silver to work in-house for the CPS and on the other was Dickie Bond (first seen in episode one).

Poor Dickie — probably the most charismatic of the barristers so far, since they didn’t follow Geeklawyer, is seen to bemoan his drop in income now that the CPS are redirecting their money to their newly acquired in-house barristers. His rather delightful children are seen frolicking at the bench of a Northern magistrates court on an Open Day. They were pretending to be magistrates and passing extreme sentences on the accused despite no understanding of the law and no coherent prosecution evidence. So, then, an uncannily accurate representation of real magistrate court life.

The CPS chief prosecutor in the Midlands, one David Blundell, was quoted on the changes as saying that the Bar needed to work in a competitive environment. His view was that it would have to get used to being “cheaper and quicker” The one adjective he conspicuously and tellingly failed to use was ‘better’. Geeklawyer feels that this was more than a mere accidental verbal slip and shoddy advocacy by a CPS lawyer (Who’d have thought that?). Rather, he thought it an unconscious expression of the values behind the in-house barristers of the CPS and their employers in the government: get everything done quickly and cheaply — quality work would be nice, but above all else make it cheap and fast.

Two nicely counterpointed scenes illustrated the difference between these diverging prosecuting colleagues: one was an encounter between independent barrister Dickie Bond in the robing room and the other was Annie Evans in a conference with her police colleagues.

In the robing room there was a full-on passive aggressive row between the mediocre defense barrister and our Dickie:

Defense Barrister: “are these additional evidence?” (Deep mocking bow by Dickie: i.e. ‘yes’)

Defense Barrister: “This no doubt assists me in what I need to do”

Dickie (to camera): “I anticipate a guilty plea change”.

Defense Barrister (overhearing discourse to camera): “you hope!”

Dickie (over shoulder): “because he’s stuffed”

Defense Barrister (whiney & defeated): “… reason why we are where we are is a tardy Crown … Can’t spend time discussing this nonsense — I need lunch” (Geeklawyer wondered whether criminal barristers ate lunch, surely they are too poor? Perhaps they scrape around in the bins behind the court?)

Dickie: “your client won’t think nonsense”

Defense Barrister: “my client needs [social lurve]’

To most this would sound an astonishingly tame dialogue, but for the robing room it was practically a knife fight, and most intriguing telly. The one thing you can say of the Criminal Bar is that while they may not be gentlemen at least they are not gentle men.

The wretched Annie Evans was held up as the vanguard of the Bar in-house at the CPS. Dear God, what a miserable image it was. We were told she is a barrister of some 24 years call. For all that, in a scene in the court, she seemed anxious to paint herself as some David against the Goliaths of the Criminal Bar: a weak, poor little state prosecutor against the overpowering wealth of lawyers for the defense. No doubt this angle would play well with David Blunkett, Jacqui Smith or any of the other authoritarian loons of Neo-Labour seeking to undermine the defences of the accused. One has to wonder what Ms Evans had spent her quarter of a century of working-life doing if combating such opponents was such a new and daunting experience. The reason became all too apparent later: she was a drongo.

The voice over told us Ms Evans earnings had dropped sharply since joining CPS but the benefits such as holiday pay & better briefings by ‘client’ justified it: yes, not at all defensive, we all believe you, really. And the fact that she was 50% cheaper meant she was determined, positively absolutely determined, to show justice was not compromised. Apparently this merely involved talking to victims in a Ruth Kelly style Basso Profundo voice and assuring them that all would be well. Superior advocacy and impartial case management didn’t get a mention. Of course, as the saying goes: “If you pay peanuts you get a monkey”. One can only hope Ms Annie Evans doesn’t throw shit through the bars too.

The down side of course, on the small matter of justice, was that while the Independent Bar was, mostly, treated with respect by prosecutors, their professionalism and skills at litigation management treated as unquestionable, the lot of the CPS Prosecution Monkey is very much a less happy one. We were treated to the sight of a ‘client’ conference where Annie was being second guessed and instructed in how to do her job by some toe-rag copper who asked questions such as: “Can you give us an idea of how you will use CCTV in cross examination? How much detail on CCTV  […]”, Do you intend to do X with all defendants? How do you intend to use the schedule?”. Frankly, Geeklawyer utterly cringed with embarrassment at her public humiliation. Any independent barrister would have slapped the filth down with a curt “Thank you for your advocacy advice but I believe that you know how to catch criminals better than I and I know how to prosecute them better than you.” Annie obviously appreciated how bad this made her look. Her response to camera, when the dominant copper was nicely and safely out of earshot, was:

“At the Independent Bar the filth let you get on with the job. I could have been more abrupt and told the officer that the examination of witnesses in court was my business, but I don’t want to run it in such a dictatorial style, I want to be as co-operative as possible, but it has got in the way a bit, especially today”

Bully for you Annie “The Doormat” Evans, what a credit you are to the Bar. Still, best to do as you are told by your owners: I suppose when the filth want to withhold evidence from the defense you will also be as anxious to be co-operative and non-dictatorial?

Most astonishing was Ms Evans joy and breaking down, tears for fuck sake, on being rung by her owners from court to tell her that there had been a guilty plea. This was appallingly unprofessional: her job is one of disinterested prosecution rather than personal involvement. Without knowing Ms Evans Geeklawyer is, based on the film, of the view that she represents the typical in-house CPS lawyer: bottom of the barrel scrapings who failed at the Independent Bar and then have to eke out the best living that third-eleven candidates can in a hyper-competitive profession.

We also got to see the lot of the charming pupil Kakoly Pande as she approached tenancy: this next great hurdle to the profession has not got much attention from the program makers, in their inexorable quest to follow Bar students. Kakoly was shown in rather Dickensian digs, so limited was her pupillage income it was all she could afford, while still being expected to turn up at distant and apparently randomly changing Inner London magistrates courts on weird days. Of course, having had a pupillage, the lot of a 3rd six pupil is, while still tough, not so tough as for a pupillage candidate. Despite that it was heartwarming to see Kakoly finally get a tenancy.

Which leaves us to wonder what will happen in the final episode? Hopefully Cat will get a deserved pupillage. We discover that Annie goes off on a sponsored secondment to Canada. According to her Inn, this is to see how another Common Law jurisdiction works and to tell them how our profession works: though as someone without any legal experience beyond applying unsuccessfully for pupillages one had to wonder if this wasn’t a shade speculative. Still, she will at least be able to post flames on this blog review from Canada if she wishes. Someone in Canada is, Geeklawyer just wonders who?

The Barristers — episode two

Published on 23 November 2008 in the Bar. 16 Comments Tags: , , , .

This was, again, very enjoyable. Geeklawyer remains of the view that the series’ obsession with pretty young photogenic students like ‘Cat’ distort what might be a rather more informative documentary. Yes of course in terms of audience ratings this is needed, but is this a documentary or ‘reality’ tv?

Anna was seen to continue with her academic struggles and to have to undergo the traditional voluntary fingernail-pulling that is the pupillage interview. The interviewers at one chambers did not come across well: when asked one question, Anna responded with a mild imitation voice to add colour to her point — I’d not have done it but it hardly seemed a career killing criticism. The unnamed  interviewer (Bernard Richmond perhaps? the camera-work does not allow one to be clear) responds with “in that voice, do they?” Which shows how tenuous the gap between success and failure and how pathetic the rationales for rejection often are.

Catherine ‘Cat’ Pearsey was definitely a figure of huge sympathy. Having taken four years to get to the point of being called to the Bar the poor cow then suffers an entirely typical slew of mass rejections. She was nearly in tears on a number of occasions throughout the episode and even Geeklawyer’s normal proclivity to laugh at the distress of others was mostly ameliorated. Her unmerited failure was juxtaposed with the smug superiority & poorly based self-confidence of the dim slimey Ickbal who got a pupillage at some reasonable Northern set. Geeklawyer remains firmly of the hope she succeeds and that Ickbal fails to get a tenancy.

Paul Darling QC came across as a bit of a star, being almost improbably kind and helpful to benighted aspirants. He advised Cat she wasn’t good enough for certain chambers (“You’re going to have to be a little bit realistic, to be blunt, … the absolute stellar intellectual sets are looking for the absolute top first class degree… and you haven’t got one”) and how she could optimise her chances at others. This scene was probably not a “put up” job; the great thing about the Bar is that many senior members will indeed give up their time for free to help beginners. Geeklawyer can attest that when he was a pupil his pupil-master mentioned several times that it was a way of “paying back” the profession.

Geeklawyer is of the view that those with sufficient capability and determination can always get to the Bar: the ones who give up after a dozen rejection letter and become solicitors generally lack the resilience to failure to be suited to it. Cat must surely succeeds since she is capable, wants it badly and is dogged.

Geeklawyer did wonder why the program kept referring to pupils “getting jobs” at chambers. A pupillage is not a ‘Job’: it is training, or even a form of apprenticeship, and that word was improperly used in the program. The public very rarely understand that the Independent Bar is self employed, even when they are sharing chambers together: none of them has ‘a job’.

One of the terrors of the Bar finally appears: ‘The Clerk’. Here it was Mark Mansell head clerk at St Philips Chambers in Birmingham. The clerk is explained away as merely as a diary manager which is a short-falling of this episode. A truer explanation of the servile nature between a barrister’s clerk and the barrister would have been more exciting:

“Head Clerk: Mr [Geeklawyer] I understand your daughter is 16 today?

Geeklawyer: Yes Mr Clerk, sir.

Head Clerk: Excellent. Have her bathed, perfumed, dressed in suspenders and brought to me tomorrow. I wish to deflower her.

Geeklawyer: My family is blessed that you should choose to honour us so.

Head Clerk: Get out.

Geeklawyer: Yes Mr Clerk, sir.”

The program pieces with Birmingham family barristers Louise McCabe Alistair MacDonald were well done and showed pragmatic and unpretentious individuals with their feet on the ground. The difficult point for MacDonald was when his client finally admitted to unintentionally hurting his child, notwithstanding a prolonged denial. MacDonald’s justifications of his client sounded a bit thin and one could almost sense the audience saying “Yea but you knew all along didn’t you? So why play along. You barristers are always playing the system.” This is  standard criticism of all lawyers and it was one the program didn’t address, which was a shame and an opportunity lost since MacDonald would have had powerful responses to such populist jibes. MacDonald  asserted that the Bar was one of the last professions “where just plain hard work, wherever you come from, can get you were you want to go”. Which is, technically, bollocks.

So the program continues to develop well. The balance is wrong but it is engaging TV anyway.

BBC TV series “The Barristers” — Episode one

Published on 16 November 2008 in the Bar. 41 Comments Tags: , , , .

The UK blawgosphere has not, yet, set itself alight (Reductio ad Absurdum & CharonQC notwithstanding) with reflections on the BBC’s new series “The Barristers” revealing the hitherto unknown workings of Britain’s second oldest profession: the Bar.

The four part series has spent several years following both barristers, and aspirant barristers, around to see how the profession ticks and to unlock the glamour: “the weeping behind the wigs, the ire behind the injunctions, the fornication behind the feenote”. The Bar Council has co-operated with the BBC in making this documentary, though who was holding whom’s cock is not yet entirely clear. Certainly the BBC wanted a good documentary and the Bar Council wanted a bit of publicity that differed from the usual tabloid “Publicly Funded Barristers Drink Champagne From The Corpses Of Orphaned Children Horror” that is its norm. Since the Bar Council is an organisation that could fuck up any PR story: “Bar Council rescues Jews from Auschwitz: receives condemnation from International Jewish Congress for heavy handedness against the Nazis” it leaped at this opportunity.

So the premise was clear: strip away the media cliches, the pomposity and the veneer of intellectual and social superiority and show the people behind the legend. A nice idea. Mind you Geeklawyer is well known for being a snob and a bit pompous, and was thus not entirely happy with the idea of being represented as a well educated plumber; albeit one with a vast IQ and an uncanny ability to know which fork to use when at a Royal Reception.

So then, how was it? The august legal commentator CharonQC has already excoriated it as the mindless and uninteresting perambulation of an institution best relegated to medieval England. Geeklawyer disagrees: a fly on the wall documentary with sympathetic characters and an oblique institution can make for good TV. So it was with Episode one. Well, OK, when one talks of ‘sympathetic’ Geeklawyer confuses that with ‘pathetic’. We had a broad selection of Ethnics, but just to prove that the profession wasn’t racist, because That Would Not Do. Then we had a huge number of Northerners from Leeds Salford and Hertfordshire, again to prove that this was not a Southern based profession.

What we did not have have was any Etonians, or God forbid, even Wykehamists since that would suggest the Bar remains an upper or upper-middle class game: and that would never do. And that would explain ‘Anne’, an Ethnic from the Caribbean, whose diction, judging by her mother’s presumably unwelcome appearance, had drifted from the patoise of Kingston (Jamaica rather than Surrey one would guess) to that of the recieved pronunciation of Chelsea. Heavens, it is almost as though she were putting on a posh accent to improve her chances of a pupillage. Has that ever happened before? No, Geeklawyer didn’t think so either.

The only white person was a bit of totty whose name Geeklawyer forgets: really it doesn’t matter because she was only there because she was pretty and had nice tits that the cameraman zoomed in on all the time: a bit like the pupillage committees she stripped off for, one imagines (what? they don’t make them do that anymore? pfff, for shame). Was it churlish to giggle at the rather dim Ibrahim (or Chander or Ickbal or whatever his name was) blundering through a moot with a pair of size 12 wellies in his mouth? Yes it was, but one did it anyway. It was rather sweet to hear the moot judge utter, and the recipients believe, the traditional commiseration to a moot loser:

“This was a particularly difficult moot on a fine point of law that many experienced practitioners would stumble over. You were better than most of them and it was a finely balanced decision because team A had a black guy and team B had a Jewish guy. Phew! On balance we decided for team C, the pair of pretty white chicks with great tits because, well, of that really, oh and because, Iqbal, you couldn’t have persuaded us a light switch was on even if you licked your fingers and stuck them in the cunting bulb socket.”

So, if there was anything slightly repellent in this series it was the students. There, Geeklawyer said it. He says sorry to his many student readers but you have to understand how bad you look to a) outsiders and b) insiders. Really. One feels sorry to say it but the sight of grasping unquenchable ambition and striving is utterly repellent. Why? hard to say. One supposes that they have to do this to get on in life.

Of course in order to add a bit of Big Brother drama and keep the viewers hooked it was necessary to amplify how hard it was to be a barrister: 500 Oxbridge double firsts for every chamber’s toilet cleaning job etc. Not wrong, obviously, but a bit cynical.

Lovely was the Inn Benchers ripping the living crap out of students at an ‘away day’ near Windsor Castle, where, by tradition, some of the Benchers get to try and shag pretty young wannabe’s. Oh hang on, Geeklawyer has received a threatening note from the Bar Council. “They attend for the noble and selfless purpose of advancing students skills.” Bencher Master John Leslie, whose motives are beyond question, is seen telling one student that he really doesn’t give a flying fuck what the student ‘thinks’ when he is making submissions to the court: and thereby impresses some basic rules on him about advocacy in the English courts. Geeklawyer remembers with vast vast fondness his mandatory ‘Instructions to Counsel’ course taken while a pupil, and this coloured his positive impression of the piece.

For those of us who are hacks at the English Bar the other, non-studenty, parts of the film were of much hilarity and interest. Without doubt the star of episode one was Richard ‘Dicky’ Bond. A criminal hack in some Northern set who does criminal law. Those of us doing civil law feel pity (OK, yes, and a little contempt) for our bretheren at the Criminal Bar who spend a whole day in court for £50 and who then go begging outside tube stations for enough money for the fare home and cup of soup. Dicky was without doubt the star of episode one (@infobunny, an infamously licentious law librarian, on Twitter has expressed the desire to have his children for god’s sake). All in all a terrific and engaging first episode.