 ‘I feel extremely strongly about the fact that so few employed barristers make silk, despite the superb range of talent available. The excuse is that QC is a mark of advocacy excellence, but that’s rubbish. There are loads of silks who never go to court. We haven’t had a silk awarded for several years – you can count the ones we do have on one mutilated hand – and we have no women silks at all. We also have no higher judicial appointments despite the enormous amount of expertise we have that could be tapped.’
She is also fuming that despite significant input from BACFI on the recent Department for Constitutional Affairs consultation about judicial appointments, the final paper contained scant reference to employed barristers.
‘Sometimes it’s like banging your head against a brick wall. We offer solutions on how we can help and we are ignored. The proof of the pudding is in the eating – just give us a couple of appointments, so what we contribute can be recognised.’
Louise Fluker, chairwoman of the EBC and general counsel of printing group De La Rue, says the survey results could be misleading since responses came from only 8% of the 2,800-member employed bar (around a fifth of all barristers).
She says: ‘The numbers who responded are quite small and it is a matter of perception rather than reality. The Inns are seen as relevant to initial education and call, and it is quite easy to lose touch thereafter – even for self-employed barristers.
‘The Inns now do much more for employed barristers. For example, Gray’s Inn has a specific dinner every year for employed barristers and benchers. There are employed barristers who are benchers of their Inn, and employed barristers are involved in education.’
Mirza Ahmad, chairman of the Bar Association for Local Government & the Public Service, who is by day chief legal officer at Birmingham City Council, says: ‘I would add that the circuits ignore employed barristers too. It is not just a matter of the Inns being solely in the dock.’
Senior prosecutor Kris Venkatasami, convenor of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) section at the First Division Association – the union for senior civil servants – acknowledges that many employed barristers feel neglected, but says improvements have been made.
‘It is the view of many employed barristers that they are treated as second-class citizens. This may have been the case several years ago, but recent chairmen of the Bar Council and the EBC are working hard to change this perception.’
However, Ms Parnell says that although the Bar Council has made ‘significant steps’ to change its attitude towards employed barristers – particularly among its younger members – there is still a minority that does not appear to know what barristers in employment do.
‘They seem to think that we’re not using the law for any particular purpose and that we spend our time filling in forms and photocopying. They haven’t quite woken up to the contribution the employed bar makes – around 70% of firms in the City will have in-house barristers, which is very significant.’
A Bar Council spokesman says people who think that way are not in touch with how the market is going. ‘It is evident employed barristers are carrying out a serious legal function within substantial organisations. It is in the interests of the self-employed bar to have a good relationship with the employed bar – that way opens up business opportunities, especially with direct access to the bar.’
Ms Parnell says the poor attitude is reflected in the ‘hoops one has to go to in order to offer pupillage in employment’.
‘The regulations promulgated by the Bar Council are perfectly laudable to ensure proper training but still it hasn’t quite grasped the reality of what people do in employment and the specialised areas it can provide training in. So it makes it rather difficult for someone in employment to offer a pupillage.’
She explains that to obtain higher rights of audience, bar vocational course graduates must complete two six-month pupillages. Because pupillages are somewhat scarce, many complete the first six-month pupillage – and thus can call themselves barristers – then enter employment without completing the second stint.
Pupillages, she says, are obtainable in-house at a company, but only if the organisation employs two other barristers with higher rights of audience, which is rare. ‘We say it is not a level playing field, she insists. ‘We think everyone should have standard training for barristers and that’s got to include some advocacy training. But people in the Temple could spend their whole pupillage drafting papers and not going to court at all.’
She adds: ‘A lot of people in employment would like to offer pupillages, but the amount of form- filling you have to do is a nightmare.’
The Bar Council spokesman says the rules of pupillage in employment have been crafted to deliver a number of places and to ensure they provide a good mix of experience. The administration involved, he says, is comparable with that required in the self-employed sector.
He emphasises: ‘We want lots of pupillages in employment. This is the message we have been banging out again and again. We don’t want people to be in a prejudicial position if they train in-house and one of the ways of guaranteeing that is to ensure they have exposure to advocacy or people with advocacy experience.’
Mr Venkatasami explains that in the CPS, all barristers exercise rights of audience in the magistrates’ courts, but only a limited number can appear in the Crown Court.
‘This restriction exists because employers are reluctant to allow employed lawyers in the higher courts,’ he says.
He adds that gaining the rights is ‘not very onerous’, but ‘because of competing priorities it can be difficult to find time to appear. There is no need for rule changes, [but] the mind-set of employers needs to change’.
So, if the employed barrister’s lot is such a tough one, why would a lawyer follow such a career path? One reason, says Ms Parnell, is definitely money.
She says: ‘The salaries can be phenomenally attractive – they can way exceed the remuneration of the criminal bar. If you’re going to do a an employed bar pupillage, an employer will pay you a salary which will always be significantly better than every pupillage award by a set of chambers.
‘Another advantage is that you can build up a very specialist niche practice, which you wouldn’t necessarily have the ability to do in the Temple.’
Mr Venkatasami says the main benefits of being an employed barrister are job security, pensions, paid annual leave and variety of work. However, he admits that the experience can ‘sometimes feel like school’, with appraisals that the self-employed need never experience.
He adds: ‘After a short spell, someone who was good in the CPS would be doing demanding and very challenging work, for example, rape prosecutions or racially aggravated crime. In the wider Government Legal Service, they could be working to ministers and drafting controversial legislation.’
Ms Fluker says: ‘As with an employed solicitor, there are the benefits of being an employee – regular income and benefits in kind – plus the additional benefit of seeing projects from start to finish. There is great career variety, with the opportunity in large organisations of developing a career, and in smaller ones of having a significantly varied practice.’
Vicky Clark, director of legal recruitment firm BCL Legal, says in-house lawyers earn from £30,000 with one year’s call experience to £150,000 as a head of legal, with in-house barristers able to earn as much as law firm partners if they are successful. She says competition for employed barristers’ jobs in law firms is fierce because ‘there aren’t very many’.
Ms Clark says that although employed barristers often carry out a similar role to employed solicitors, employers in sectors where regular court work is expected would often prefer to employ the former. ‘Experience of more advocacy gives them the edge,’ she says.
However, she adds that barristers often find it harder than solicitors to get jobs in industry because of their lack of general non-contentious experience. ‘It is often virtually impossible for that very reason, unless perhaps where employment advocacy or regulatory prosecutions are the main area focused on by that business.’
Anthony Armitage, director of legal tendering service FirstLAW and chairman of the In-House Lawyers Association, says: ‘As an employer, I would be concerned about employing an advocate with little or no non-contentious experience, because a large part of the in-house lawyer’s role involves understanding transactional pressures and how to prevent disputes arising in the first place.’
However, Ms Parnell argues that barristers’ training can give them the edge in business.
‘We have the ability because of our training to assimilate the pertinent facts from large quantities of information, find the problem and come up with solutions. Our presentation skills are also of benefit because we can put the point over effectively to the employer – presenting in a boardroom isn’t that different to presenting in court. We are also very self-starting; we can have problems dumped on us and then left to get on with it.’
Why then, given that pupillages are hard to come by and in-house barristers do a similar job as their solicitor counterparts, do barristers not train as solicitors?
Ms Parnell says: ‘I don’t think it necessarily is a similar job. There are enormous quantities of niche areas of law which employed barristers can specialise in, whereas a solicitor’s role might be more generalised. Also in my experience, employed barristers tend to get paid more.’
The Bar Council spokesman says: ‘I would imagine that an in-house barrister would have more of the role of counsellor of the organisation, while a solicitor might have more of a role of a processor of the law. Barristers want to be barristers. It’s a different form of specialism which gives them the option of becoming part of the collegiate structure of the bar and allows for consideration of a move into the self-employed bar or the judiciary.’
Mr Ahmad says that would-be in-house barristers should not be put off applying for a position just because the advertisement uses the word ‘solicitor’.
‘There has always been a tendency to appoint solicitors to the legal staff of a local authority rather than barristers, but there has always been a small group of the latter. There are also openings for those wishing to concentrate on advocacy by taking up “assistant solicitor” posts specialising in local authority prosecutions and appearing at planning and other inquiries and tribunals.’
Mr Armitage adds: ‘Job descriptions for in-house lawyers that I have seen invariably make reference to minimum legal qualifications but rarely, if ever, invite applications from one branch of the profession only. What matters to most employers is the candidate’s skills and experience and his or her suitability to the role. These merit-based criteria cannot be assessed by reference to whether the applicant is a barrister or a solicitor.’
Lucy Trevelyan is a freelance journalist
|
|
|
No comments yet