Test of time

‘All that is solid melts into air.’ So said Karl Marx of capitalism’s well-attested capacity for revolutionising the relations of production. 

One wonders if the intermittently fashionable German philosopher ever encountered the England and Wales bar. Has any celebrated institution or tradition in British public life proven more insulated from this not-so-irresistible tendency?

Before any disgruntled wigs write in, this is meant as a compliment. The bar’s runaway success is not disputed (though it’s a bit more complicated for practitioners dependent on public money).

I have been unable to date the once perennial argument for fusion of the solicitor and barrister professions, but it was certainly being talked about as long ago as the 1920s. Keen advocates (sic) of fusion have included former Law Society presidents and June Venters, the first woman solicitor silk.

You hardly need to be told that it never happened. The legal profession’s ‘Big Bang’ – the Legal Services Act 2007 – might have been a catalyst. Instead, it was the dampest of squibs.

Boosterish sessions at the bar’s annual conference once proselytised for the Bar Standards Board entity model. This allows for solicitors and barristers to work and own together. Several hundred of these alternative business structures were confidently forecast in the first year. There were 54. More than seven years on, there are about 160 entities in total – most of them modest.  It is surely instructive that the BSB’s workshop on how to set up an ABS, to which barristers are still invited to link on its website, dates from 2016. Heck, the speakers are practically wearing flares. 

Regulatory arbitrage is not talked about much any more, either. It was once commonly suggested that practitioners would combine and choose the watchdog most accommodating to their business models. They ended up cleaving to the devils they knew.

Why has the chambers model proved so enduring? Innate conservatism has something to do with it, but in essence we must revert to economics. The distinctive roles of solicitor and barrister, as presently constituted, remain highly attractive domestically and internationally, along with the other attributes that make the England and Wales jurisdiction so powerful. And so profitable too, for the great majority of practitioners.

Brexit, I feel curiously bound to note in conclusion, has barely dented this historical pre-eminence.