Bean stalks ministers

The new chairman of the bar council, David Bean Q.C., tells Jeremy Fleming about his future plans for juries, wigs and getting rid of the old school perception of barristers

As an employment silk from Matrix - the trendy human rights chambers set up last year - the new Bar Council chairman, 47-year-old David Bean QC, is well-placed to bring some fresh air to the cloistered Inns of Court.

Mr Bean is clear on what the priorities will be during his tenure: the Auld review, the Office of Fair Trading's (OFT) report on competition in the professions, fighting for increases in barristers' fees, and bringing equal opportunities for access to the bar.On the Auld report he seems confident that unity between the bar and the Law Society, and public and press support, will help to convince the government that its proposals for curtailing jury trials are not viable.Even in fraud trials, where a number of acquittals by juries - in the Guinness and Maxwell cases, for example - have been met unenthusiastically by the press, he is clear that juries are best.'In some cases there have been whispering campaigns discrediting judgments of juries, but imagine if those decisions had been made by just one judge - there would have been an outcry.'Another issue about which Mr Bean is flexing his muscles is the response to the OFT's report last year on competition within the professions - which had some dark things to say about the bar's prohibition on partnerships with barristers.Sydney Kentridge QC is scheduled to file a report - giving a flavour of the bar's response - this month.

It will then be debated at the bar's annual conference in February, before the comprehensive response goes back to the OFT.But Mr Bean gives a clear taster of the way the bar is thinking: 'I don't think that we'll agree to barristers going into partnership, handling client money, or going on the court record to litigate - that's what litigation solicitors are for.'He explains that barristers are not prepared to take on the regulatory pressures that these tasks would require.

'It is a large, expensive and burdensome regulatory regime, and the Law Society has been under severe stress over regulation.

Why would barristers want to take that on when there's a perfectly reasonable path open to them if they want to go into partnership - by becoming a solicitor?'This year has seen a burgeoning of City firms' in-house advocacy departments, with Linklaters recently turning out 40 graduates with its new advocacy qualification.A cluster of City firms now has the capacity to deliver advocacy direct to clients without the need for the bar.But Mr Bean seems confident that the bar will be unaffected by these developments.

'The effect will only be marginal,' he says, 'because 80% of solicitors in England and Wales are in firms with four partners or fewer, and most will not have more than one solicitor with a penchant for advocacy, who certainly won't cover the whole range of advocacy specialisms.'Although Mr Bean acknowledges that City firms have been making a serious investment in advocacy, he maintains that solicitors will not consider themselves to be best serving their clients' if they are in court twice a year doing long trials.

Besides, he says, 'advocacy represents a minimal amount of their profit costs'.Once the issues specific to the next year are out of the way, Mr Bean will have to address matters which constantly linger over the bar: increasing access, and fighting the perception of a stuffy profession.He says: 'It's all perception rather than reality.

There is a belief among some people that the bar is only for public school and Oxbridge types, who call each other by their surnames, wear striped trousers and throw bread rolls, before challenging each other to games where the forfeit is a bottle of port.'Mr Bean says this image of young barristers, which has been fostered by television programmes over the years, has done the bar no end of harm.

He says there are now some impressive ethnic minority and women barristers as role models at the top of the profession.But he concedes that there is a real problem with funding, and that although the bar has now adopted a compulsory minimum payment for pupillage, there are still problems with making finance available.One difficulty the bar faces is the perception that family links help, and Mr Bean says that some chambers now have an official policy of refusing to let those with blood relatives working in chambers apply for pupillage or tenancy.Would it not be better to incorporate this as a bar-wide code to banish for good the whisperings of nepotism and favours?Mr Bean thinks not: 'Apart from the fact that enforcing such a prohibition would be difficult in law, if you had a rule at the bar that relatives couldn't be admitted the next suggestion would be "what about people from the same Oxbridge or London University college, or people who live in the same village?".'He says the bar is trying to counteract the effect of the old school tie by launching a programme of visits to former polytechnics by young barristers 'to seek to persuade the best and the brightest to visit the bar'.He adds: 'I'm not anxious for thousands of students to qualify for the bar but I am anxious that those who come should be the best.'On the issue of wigs Mr Bean seems relaxed, and has abandoned the more conservative stance of his predecessor Roy Amlot QC, who wanted solicitor-advocates to remain bare-headed as a mark of their difference from the bar: 'I'm happy to get rid of wigs in civil cases, but most advocates and judges want them retained in criminal cases.

If solicitors want to wear wigs in the criminal courts - why shouldn't they?'But he is against fusion of the professions.

In the first place, he says, 'the system ain't broke and so it doesn't need fixing', but he adds that lawyers themselves do not want to perform each others roles, otherwise the rates of solicitors becoming barristers and vice versa would be much greater.In addition, he says that countries with fused professions do not have lawyers with better reputations: 'Look at the US - more lawyers, more litigation, more anti-lawyer jokes, higher fees.'