Family/Divorce Barrister - Geoff Kelly

Careers in Law can be very different depending on the type you practice and the size of the firm you join. Solicitors tend to be the first port of call for legal matters whether personal or corporate and they liaise with clients to try and resolve their problems or provide a legal framework for something they want to achieve.

Barristers are called in by solicitors for their expertise in a particular area of the law or to argue a case in court. That said, the distinction between the two is narrowing slightly due to the increasing scope for solicitors to conduct their own litigation.

Like many of the professions, law offers a great deal of flexibility in terms of where you practice so you don’t have to be in the centre of a large city to have a successful career. You can practice in large firms servicing business, within the businesses themselves as an in-house lawyer or at a high street practice overseeing the matters of private individuals.

It’s worth bearing in mind that the type of firm and specialty of law you practice will have a huge impact on what your daily life is like. A private equity solicitor in a magic circle firm is going to be spending a lot more time in the office than a high street solicitor. Commercial barristers were one of the biggest shocks to us. We hadn’t quite grasped just how individual the job is and the huge hours it demands. A 6 day working week appears very standard.

Law is well known as a lucrative industry and many firms seem to have coped with the credit crunch well. As a guide, if you’re a solicitor in a top 50 city firm then on your first rotation expect a salary in the £35-40,000 range. Newly qualified's will be in the sixties and three year post qualified can be anywhere from £80-110K. Salaries in the smaller high-street firms are quite a bit lower. Barristers are self-employed so their income can vary hugely but the industry stars could give David Beckham a run for his money.

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Geoffrey Kelly and I’m a barrister and I practice from Pump Court Chambers which is the chambers of Jane Miller QC and Oba Nsugbe QC in the Temple. My main area of practice is the financial aspect of divorce so the cutting up the cake as it were between the husband and the wife following a divorce.

What attracted you to this career?

The main attraction I had to this career was the idea of independence and taking responsibility from the outset for the work which you were doing, because once you begin practicing as a barrister in your second six pupillage when you go to court you are responsible for what happens there. Whereas in other areas of the law you don’t have that responsibility necessarily from the outset, certainly my understanding of working in the larger city firms is that what you do at the very outset is a very large degree of photocopying and proof-reading which isn’t quite what I wanted to do when I started out in my career.

What's the difference between a solicitor and a barrister?

The solicitor generally speaking is the person who you would go and see with whatever legal problem you had at that time and it may not be a legal problem. It may just be that you wish to have a will drawn up, you wish to have some conveyancing done on the purchase of a property or it may be to do with a litigation dispute that you have which you need to deal with and the solicitor will take instructions from you and generally deal with the matter his or herself. A barrister is a referral profession. Generally speaking a client can’t contact a barrister directly although the rules have changed in regard of that recently but most instructions for barristers come via a solicitor, and a solicitor will only instruct a barrister if it is something which the solicitor can’t deal with his or herself, so you are being brought in to bring to bear your expertise on a certain area of law in order to assist the solicitor and assist the client in dealing with the problem which they have, and then of course in dealing with that problem it may well involve you going to court to represent the client to deal with that particular dispute which they have. We also provide written advice and so while it may not be a case which involves court work, it may well be something where the solicitor says “well, this is the problem, should we issues proceedings? Should we do anything about this, have we any grounds on which to proceed?” and then you as the barrister will take stock of all the information that you’ve been given and say “yes, or no and these are what I think the prospects of success are if you decide to issue proceedings”. The solicitor also has to deal with the clients on a daily basis and so you often have solicitors who get phone calls from particular clients, certainly in the area of work in which I deal with, every day complaining or concerned about certain aspect of the ancillary or divorce proceedings and the solicitor has to deal with them. Whereas we generally have no direct contact with the client save through the solicitor or through the court so we are to some extent shielded from that and that allows us to concentrate on just concentrating on practicing as a barrister. The other big difference and this depends on the sort of firm you work in as a solicitor is that you have a huge amount of administration that you have to deal with. There are time recordings that you have to deal with, you have legal aid standards which you have to keep to in order to retain your legal aid franchise, you have employment issues to deal with with regards to your staff, you have accounting issues to deal with with regards to the money which your clients have given you. Barristers don’t have to deal with that at all. All we do luckily is to do the work and when we’ve finished send it back to the client and then wait for a cheque, hopefully.

How did you decide between becoming a solicitor or a barrister?

I made that decision in the first year of university and the main distinction between a barrister and a solicitor is that the barrister performs the advocacy, the consultancy role for the difficult cases that the solicitor doesn’t want to do him or herself and that’s what really attracted me because being desk-bound to a certain extent and dealing with the client on a day-to-day basis, answering correspondence, dealing with court hearing dates wasn’t something that I really wanted to do.

What does your job involve?

There are really two roles a barrister performs: the first is to advise a client on receipt of instructions as to a particular aspect of the case in which they are involved in and the other aspect is to represent that client at court. In each case what you’re trying to do is to give the client some specific advice as to how you see that case going. In some cases you will get specific instructions to advise on area of settlement, whether or not a person should get £100,000, £500,000 or £1,000,000. In other cases you are being asked to advise more generally on what are the tactics that should be adopted within that case. Of course, when you’re at court what you’re trying to do is to resolve as far as possible all the aspects of litigation at minimum cost because if you don’t deal with everything in one go then you are perforce likely to have another court hearing date and incur more costs for the client.

What do you do on a typical day?

A typical day in fact starts the night before because if you’re in court on a Tuesday the only time you will have to prepare the case is probably on a Monday when you come back from court. And so generally what you find yourself doing is you come back from court at whatever time that is, 6 or 7 o’clock sometimes, you go home, have something to eat and then you’re working really from about 8 through to around 11 or 12 o’clock to prepare for the next day. The next day, depending upon whether you’re in London, out on circuit or wherever you are, you are up, you are generally at work, at court for around 9 o’clock and depending upon what the application or hearing is, then you’re there for half an hour, half a day or the whole all day. And then when you’ve finished that you start all over again.

What's the circuit?

England and Wales is divided into a number of different circuits. You have the South-Eastern circuit which covers London, Kent, Sussex. You have the Western circuit which covers Hampshire, Wiltshire and the West Country and you have other circuits, the Oxford & Midlands circuit, and it’s just an easy way of designating the geographical location of the work in which you are involved in.

Who else works in Chambers?

It varies from chambers to chambers. In our chambers we have barristers clerks and they are responsible from taking the phone-calls and enquiries from solicitors as to who is available to do a certain piece of work or whether the particular barrister which they want to have deal with the work is available and they are also responsible for negotiating our fees. Other chambers have support staff and quite often you have members of the bar who employ some support staff just to help them mark up papers and suchlike.

What are the best bits about your job?

I never thought of myself as a people person but the wonderful thing about my job is that everyday almost, you are meeting someone new, someone with a story to tell and you are doing your best for them to ensure that they get a fair hearing in front of the judge and to ensure they get a fair result in front of the judge and arguing that case and ultimately succeeding in that case is one of the best feelings I think you can get from any job.

What are the worst bits about your job?

The best and worst bit about the job is the fact that you are working so hard. It’s not unusual to put in as I have said earlier a 14-16 hr day on occasions. If you’ve got a case the next day that is your deadline so you can’t phone in sick the next day, you can’t say “I’m not prepared”, you have to do the work. That’s enjoyable but it also puts an enormous strain on you simply because you have to be ready to go the next day, and then when you turn up the next day you have someone else fighting you. So the worst thing is that you are never actually working in a team towards a certain result. What you’re doing is trying to destroy the other persons case and bolster your own case and so there are some occasions where you are not absolutely certain about how you’re proceeding with a case and once you begin to have that element of self-doubt you can on occasions make concessions which perhaps you shouldn’t do and for me the times that I have enjoyed my job the least is where I haven’t had the full confidence of my arguments and I’ve perhaps made a concession which I shouldn’t have done.

What has been your greatest achievement?

The work that I’m dealing with is generally between divorcing couples sorting out the financial aspects of their divorce and it doesn’t necessarily or often involve appeal court advocacy. So what you’re dealing with is just trying to sort out for these people the finances so that they can go on and get on with their lives. The most enjoyable aspect of that is where someone is lying and trying to cheat the other person and you succeed in proving that they are cheating and lying and persuading the judge that what you are saying is the proper way of dealing with it, is in fact the correct way of dealing with it. I for one had this case where this gentleman owned about 30-40 buy-to-let properties and he was saying they were worth almost nothing and yet during the course of cross-examination we managed to get from him a concession that he had been lying about certain aspects of that, he’d been lying about his income, about his asset resources and every argument that he put up we were able to successfully rebut so that at the end of the day the judge just gave us everything we asked for.

Is it just like you see on the TV?

It is not like you see on TV! Occasionally you manage to cross-examine someone into the ground and they hold their hands up and say “Yes I was hiding this money, yes I did this, yes I did that”. Normally it’s a case of gradually eroding the other side’s argument so that the judge accepts what you say. You generally don’t win every single point that you argue, you generally win about 50-60% of them. Certainly the work I do involves pouring through people’s bank statements, seeing where the money has gone, looking at their actions and seeing if it’s consistent with the case which they have put forward. My wife, in fact calls me a glorified account unfortunately because that is what it involves, it involves a detailed look at figures and a good understanding of the law so that you can make the arguments to the judge at court. It’s slightly wearying when you perform that analysis and in fact what it shows up is that person is telling the truth and you really haven’t got an argument as a result all the work you have done on that particular point, and to be fair most people are honest I think in the context of ancillary relief proceedings. You do get an element of dishonesty but not the element where people are trying to hide hundreds of thousands of pounds, certainly in the sort of work that I am doing.

Any regrets?

The biggest mistake I think you can have is not having the courage of your arguments and when you turn up at court and you're prepared you should be ready and willing to fight them notwithstanding the strength of the other person’s side because you don’t know what the judge is going to do.

What is the pay like and are there any perks?

It really changes from year to year. Certainly when I joined the bar at the outset you could expect to earn gross somewhere in the region of £30,000 to £50,000 in your first year. But that’s me working in a general common law set, dealing with all sorts of work, family, criminal and civil law, whereas if you joined a big commercial set of chambers I should think that they would ridicule that amount of income in the first year. The difficulty is that since then there’s been an erosion of the rates of pay which barristers get certainly for legal aid work and you will find that junior barristers are struggling to some extent particularly if they are doing legal aid type work, particularly in crime. Once you have yourself established then the sky is the limit. You have people such as Jonathan Sumption, Nicoloas Moston who are the David Beckhams of the world and they get stratospheric pay for stratospheric ability and I doubt that there are more than 50 or 100 people, and that’s probably an exaggeration who are in that level. I don’t know what the average rate of pay for the bar is but certainly in family law, in ancillary relief, as you progress you deal with the bigger and bigger cases, you are taking on more responsibility, you’ve got more seniority and so the rates of pay increase and I would expect that most people in the sort of work that I am doing have a good standard of living as a result of the work that they do. The difficulty of is course that there are no perks. So whilst you might earn £100,000 of gross pay, you have to pay you have to pay chambers expenses on that and that may range from 10-25%, you have to pay for your travel, you have to pay for your own office, you have to pay your tax after that and there are no perks, in that you don’t have any pension and you don’t have a company car and if you don’t work, you don’t earn. So whilst you might be able to take 26 weeks holiday a year you’re not going to get paid for those 26 weeks when you are not working. If you are a solicitor and you’re in a partnership then you share your profits according to the partnership agreement and so you might benefit from some of the profits generated by someone else and of course you’re sharing the expenses of the solicitor’s partnership. Barristers do not share any of the profits. All we do is club together to share some of the expenses such as having premises, having staff to deal with your diary and collect your fees and dealing with the purchase of stationery and suchlike.

How long is a working day and do you have to work out of hours?

As a barrister you are generally not standing council to a particular client and so when you get a set of instructions you do that particular piece of work and then you send that piece of work back to the solicitor and you hear no more about it unless they contact you again. So your normal working day is aimed at completing a particular set of instructions or doing a particular piece of court work and then you have to put in the amount of time and preparation that is required in order to complete that and there are only 24 hours in a day and if you have been very busy the day before you can find yourself working 16 hours, getting a little bit of sleep and then getting up at 5 or 6 in the morning to do some more work in time for going to court and so you will find that barristers often only have one day off a week and that is the Saturday because they have to spend part of the Sunday preparing for Monday’s case and I would say that many barristers work well over 60 hours a week.

Is there much in the way of travel?

It really depends on the sort of practice which you have. Most commercial barristers are based in London. There are some sets in Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester which deal with commercial work and I would expect that most of the time they are in chambers preparing their work, doing written work, advices on behalf of their clients. So I doubt they are travelling much out on circuit. If you are a general common law barristers which I am in a general common law set then you will find yourself travelling out to the various courts which are all around the country to do the work. Our chambers has a particular leaning towards the Western circuit so I find myself travelling to Portsmouth, Southampton, Swindon, Bristol, as well as working in the principal registry in London. So it really depends on the sort of chambers you are in. There are many sets in London who almost do solely work in the principal registry of the family division and so they are only based in London or in the High Court. But you will find that lots of barristers do quite a bit of travelling. It doesn’t generally involve travelling abroad – there are some cases where barristers go off to the Cayman Islands to fight over someone’s will, they go to Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia but generally most barristers practice in the UK.

Do you have to be based anywhere in particular?

There are any number of different types of barrister’s chambers. You have some barrister’s chambers which consist of just one barrister. You have other chambers which are set up in the regional centres around the country, for instance there are barrister sets in Portsmouth, barrister sets in Bristol, Southampton, Exeter. They are all around the country wherever there is a large court centre you might expect to find a barristers chambers but predominantly they are based in London. The set that I work with is based both in London, Winchester and Swindon to cover the areas where we generally do our work. This is because that’s where the High Court is, the High Court is here so that deals with the Queen’s Bench division, the Chancery division, Family division, Commercial division, the Technology courts and then the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords are in London. So traditionally most of the work has been London based and so that’s where you find most of the barrister’s chambers set up.

What is the working environment like?

It is formal when you are in court in that you are expected and you are required to wear a suit, or the female equivalent, it has to be a dark suit. In chambers we generally expect people to wear a suit or if casual, smart casual. The people you work with are people from all different walks of life, certainly in this set of chambers, people who have done another career before coming to the bar, people who have come to the bar straight from university and within chambers it’s very informal. We like to think of ourselves, certainly in these chambers, as friends and colleagues and so there is a degree of socialising outside of chambers. Within chambers you don’t feel that there are any barriers to you going and talking to anyone about any of the cases in which you are involved. And that’s one of the beauties of being at the bar because quite often there’s no right answer to the question that you are posed and it’s very useful to be able to go and speak to someone more senior who may have had experience of this sort of problem before who’s then able to give you some advice as to how he or she thinks it might pan out. And because the bar is a profession of equals to some extent you have to be able to be confident in dealing with anyone within chambers whether they are junior or senior to you and that moves outside of chambers as well. Working where we do we have I think about 65-70 members of chambers spread over our three geographical locations and because, certainly in the Temple, most of the buildings are listed, you will find that a number of barristers are sharing each room, some barristers, very senior barristers have their own rooms, some who have predominantly paperwork practices will have their own rooms and people are coming in and out of chambers everyday because most people are going off to court in the morning and they are only coming back at 2,3, 4 or 5 o’clock in the afternoon and whilst it might appear to be terribly traditional the reality is that it’s just where people work and it’s the right place for barristers to work and so there is nothing traditional, I think about the relationship that barristers have with one to the other. I think the way the bar is structured now, more than 50% of all applicants are now women, there are large numbers of ethnic minorities coming into the bar, our joint head of chambers, Jane Miller - obviously a woman, Oba Nsugbe – he’s a Nigerian lawyer, and so I think the discrimination which probably existed 15 to 20 years ago doesn’t apply so much anymore and I think that it’s very much a meritocracy, certainly within these chambers. If you’re good enough you’ll get in, if you’re not good enough you won’t and it makes no difference whether you’re male/female, whether you went to public or state school, if you’re from Ghana or Nigeria or from Canada, as I am. Criminal barristers appearing in the Crown and Higher Courts will wear a wig and gown. Family barristers generally don’t where a wig and gown. All we have to do is wear a suit and tie.

What are the key skills required for your job?

The requirements of this job mean that if you want to succeed you have to be incredibly hard working and you have to be able to express yourself clearly so that you can get your argument over to a judge or explain the position to a client fairly succinctly in terms which the person you are talking to can understand. You will have a different level of language used with the client as compared to the language that you use to a judge. So you will have to be dedicated enough to get through the 2 or 3 lever arch files that you might have to read every evening, then to prepare your written documentation. You have to have a good understanding of the law as it applies to the sort of work that you are doing and you have to be able to express yourself sufficiently clearly so that the judge, the client or opponent knows exactly what the case is about and then can decide on the merits of the case in the way you have presented it.

How did you get into your job?

In the old days there was no requirement to have a degree to be a barrister, there’s certainly one member of this chambers who doesn’t have a degree and he is one of the foremost criminal practitioners on circuit, the next leader of circuit. In order to get in now you have to have a degree, it doesn’t have to be a law degree, you can always go on the one year law conversion course. Anyone who wants to be a barrister has to go through the bar vocational course, and that’s a one year course and so the training you have to undergo is 4 or 5 years before you start your pupillage and your pupillage is one year long and involves 2 stages: the first 6 months when you are not allowed in court you just follow your pupil supervisor around trying to learn what he or she is doing, trying to see how the law applies in practice and then 6 months you remain attached to your pupil supervisor but you’re going off to court and doing work yourself. There is a large degree of competition in order to obtain a pupillage and the reason for that is that there are so many bar vocational courses running at the moment so there is a large influx in the number of people who are qualified to start their pupillages and there are very few pupillages available. The main way of getting a pupillage within chambers is to go through OLPAS and that is an online application system whereby you nominate 5 chambers you wish to join as a pupil and your application form is sent off to each of those chambers and they will decide after an interview process whether or not they wish to issue you with a pupillage offer and if you accept that then you join them for your pupillage. In making that application you have to set out your academic history, what you have done, what you believe qualifies you to be a good barrister - that generally involves looking at work experience in solicitors firms, mini-pupillages within barristers chambers and mooting experiencing undertaken whilst at university and bar school. Once that application has been submitted the difficulty is for those going through those applications that the quality of candidate is so high that it is very difficult to differentiate between these immensely qualified people and so what we’re generally looking for is for something that makes you stand out either academically or in what you’ve done within your work experience or in what you’ve done outside of work. It doesn’t necessarily assist to write “War & Peace” on your application form. It’s much better to put your points succinctly on the understanding that the person who is going through your application form probably has 20 or 30 of those to get through in order to sift out one or two to put forward for interview. As a chambers, we get something in the region of 200-300 applications. Those are then parcelled up in groups of 20 and sent out to individual barristers who then read through them and say yes or no. The no’s then get sent onto another barrister to make sure that that “no” has been properly granted and so that person is not going to be offered a pupillage. We take it very seriously because of the immense amount of work that these applicants have put in, in order to get to the stage where they can apply for pupillage and of course many of them will have run up enormous students debts in order to get to that stage so we take the application process very seriously within chambers.

What's your top tip for breaking into your industry?

There is no one top tip I’m afraid. You have to have good academics, good A-levels and a good degree. If you don’t have both then you’ve got to have at least a good degree. We then expect you to do quite well in bar school and then we expect to see some sort of work experience, but it’s generally just the way the application is phrased that makes you stand out from other applicants and so we would expect there to be something in there, some spark that differentiates you from someone else. It doesn’t assist to have done 10 mini-pupillages or 10 pieces of work experience at a solicitors firm. It’s much more important that you show that you’re actually driven by something, whether it’s legal or otherwise which makes us think that here’s someone who’s interesting, here’s someone who’s shown dedication in one other aspect of their lives, who’s likely to show the same dedication to their work at the bar.

How can you make the most of a pupillage?

There are two types of pupillages that you can do. You have a formal pupillage which you undertake at the end of your bar vocational course which is a 12 month pupillage, and there are mini-pupillages available and I think those are set out in the Pupillage Handbook and some chambers allow students to come and do work experience with them for a week. It’s going to be quite difficult for you to get much out of that because you probably won’t have the necessary understanding of all the aspects of being a barrister in order to really see what it’s about. But it’s a good way for just getting a feeling of what life at the bar is like and in that time, in the mini-pupillage I would suggest you just try and soak up as much as you can and try and see what the work of a barrister actually entails rather than what you think it involves. When you are doing a pupillage the most important thing to do is to work hard and to do produce what your pupil master or pupil mistress wishes you to produce. So if you’re asked to go away and get the answer, they want the answer. They don’t want 8 pages of what the law might be, they want someone to tell them what the answer is and the reasons for that answer. And just to be very very hard working so that your pupil supervisor is satisfied that you will be someone who will be a credit to their chambers when you ultimately take tenancy.

What's the career progress and how quickly can you move up the career ladder?

When you do your pupillage you have a first six months and a second six months and for the first six months all you’re doing is trailing around with a barrister, doing work that that barrister has asked you to do, writing advices, researching areas of law and in your second six months you’re actually out at court. The first case I did at court, what I had to say was: “I have nothing to add your honour” and that’s likely for a large number of barristers because they’re not trusted to do anything when they first start off and understandably so because they have no experience. If you impress during the course of your pupillage then you will be offered a tenancy either at your set of chambers or some other set of chambers to which you have applied. Once you begin as a tenant then in effect you are on your own to a very large degree. When you are instructed in a case you take responsibility for that case and even though at the outset it may something incredibly minor, it may be minor to your eyes but it might be very important to the client. And gradually as you gain in experience and prove yourself, so you will get more and more important types of case. So in the criminal sphere whilst you might start off dealing with an assault charge, as time goes on and you prove yourself you might find yourself as a junior dealing with rape cases, dealing with serious GBH cases and in my field what you will find when you start you are dealing with cases which don’t involve very much in the way of assets and as time goes on you’re dealing with cases involving billionaires, I advised the other day in a case involving a billionaire. So it’s just a question of proving yourself and then impressing the solicitor and then the client so that you are trusted to do better work. Over time, once you’ve established yourself as a good, competent barrister, if you are outstanding you can then apply and try and be awarded Queens Counsel and that is something which you might not begin to think about doing until you are 12/13 years core. There are some people who are doing it who have succeeded who are mild core and they are the very pinnacle of the profession when it comes to the area of law in which they practice. Then you will carry on practising and it’s a meritocracy – if you’re good at what you do you will get the good cases and if you’re not so good, you may not.

Where do you see the industry going?

I think it really depends on what you’re looking to do and it depends on what you’re interested in. If you are tremendously interested in civil and human rights – that’s actually a very sexy area of work, it always will be now that we’ve incorporated the Human Rights Act into English law – and so there will always be interesting cases involving human rights work or judicial review of what the government have decided. Judicial review applies where the government have made a decision and someone seeks to challenge that decision on the basis that it has been improperly decided. So challenging the government, dealing with human rights litigation is always very exciting and that will continue to be exciting and a growth area, and indeed Cherie Booth QC, Tony Blair’s wife, that’s the area of law in which she practices. On the other side of the coin, employment law is a growth area at the moment. Employment law is continually changing and so there are new decisions coming in from the employment appeals tribunal every day which affect the practice of employment law. And in my own field of ancillary relief that at the moment is a fairly exciting topic – we have seen the McCartney divorce coming through, we had the decision in Charman and Charman, Miller and McMiller and so these are featuring in the newspapers more and more. It’s difficult to say what’s going to be exciting and profitable to be involved in, in 2 years time but certainly for those who wish to be at the cutting edge of advocacy in a way, dealing with interesting cases, some might say crime is always the most interesting because you’re dealing with very important matters and often dealing with it in front of a jury, rather than the sort of advocacy with which I’m involved which is persuading an experienced tribunal who has probably performed a preliminary review about the merits of your case.

Is there scope for movement during or after this career?

If you do not succeed in your application for tenancy then you are in a difficult position. You have to decide whether you are to continue to commit yourself to the bar and make an application for tenancy elsewhere than your present chambers to apply for what’s called a third 6 pupillage where you continue working and try to impress a new chambers and so hope to get into the bar that way. If you don’t succeed in that then there are previous pupils in these chambers who have gone off to forge careers in city firms as solicitors. Once you are in practice then the bar is flexible in allowing people to take career breaks, for people to break off their career to go and have children, to work a few days of the week rather than a full five day week in order to be at home to look after the children and after practicing for a certain amount of time you can apply for positions within the judiciary as part-time judges. There are part-time district judges, part-time circuit judges which will enable you to mix your career so as well as doing the practice as a barrister you are also sitting as a part-time judge and of course many people apply to become judges ultimately when they are 45/50 or something like that.

What are the industry resources that someone interested in joining must know about?

Many members of the specialist bar have put together organisations, so I am a member of the Family Law Bar Association which is active in keeping barristers up to date with recent law, which is active socially and which is active in promoting the interests of the Family Bar. For instance, one of the things which the Family Bar is very keen to do is to ensure that barristers who are representing people involved in care proceedings are properly remunerated. Care proceedings involve applications by local authority to try and remove a child from his parents because the parents aren’t able properly to look after that child and one can imagine that it’s one of the most heart rendering cases to deal with and if the levels of remuneration aren’t sufficient then you will find people who are enormously able as barristers who practice within care proceedings looking to do other types of work because they simply can’t carry on doing that sort of work. In other areas you have the personal injury bar association, the chancery bar association so there are many specialist organisations which assist practicing barristers with their practice and with matters which are relevant to them. If you are a new entrant to the bar, then you will have to get the pupillage handbook which sets out details for the pupillages which are offered by barristers chambers, the length of the pupillage, whether it’s the first 6, the second 6 or a 12 month pupillage, it will tell you the amount you will get by way of income during that period because historically you used to have to pay to be a pupil in a set of chambers, and it will give you information about the sort of work that that barrister does. If you are more interested in specific areas relating to the bar you can always go onto the bar council website which will give you some better details about what you can expect working as a barrister.

If you weren't in this career, what would you be doing?

If I hadn’t been doing this I probably would have liked to have gone into industry and try to be a manager of a particular branch of a company so that you actually had full responsibility in so far as it’s possible for what goes on there because that would then match the responsibility you have as a barrister and one would want to be able to take important decisions that make a difference on the basis of what you think is right and then live or die by those decisions which is what you have to do as a barrister to some extent.