My Brief Career: The trials of a young lawyer

by Harry Mount

Short Books, 9.99

Neil Rose

Inspired by the media image of barristers and to a degree by George Carman, itinerant Harry Mount settled on the bar as his career of choice after spending his early 20s moving from job to job.

What he got out of the following year, it appears, is very little except this small memoir of life as a pupil at an unnamed chambers in the Inner Temple.

This book will not be on any Bar Council list of approved reading for would-be barristers.

Mr Mount says the characters are fictional composites, although everything that takes place is based on real incidents, and what emerges is a Dickensian picture of a bar still hamstrung by stifling convention and barristers with barely developed social skills.

His first pupilmaster was the worst - a man of no social graces or even conversation.

'Anything that involved some interest in the day-to-day activities of human beings was beyond him,' Mr Mount writes.

Mr Mount had to sit, hour after hour in the corner of his pupilmaster's room, often just staring at the bookcase of law reports 12 inches from his nose.

He moves on to other pupilmasters who are slightly more pleasant, if no more capable of meaningful human contact, while competing with his fellow pupil in chambers, Silas, to produce the worst hard-luck stories.

Silas won, on balance, for once having spoken back to his pupilmaster and then suffered the humiliation of being introduced to clients as 'Wart', and later having to spend a morning standing in front of his pupilmaster's desk, and moving slightly across when told, so as to block the sun.

With the exception of one friendly woman, the other barristers in chambers are little better, cold not only to pupils but to each other; this is best illustrated by the excruciating daily tea ritual, where any member in chambers has to gather at 4pm on the dot in their head's room.

Mr Mount does get to meet George Carman, when his pupilmaster is involved in a case with the great libel lawyer.

And he lives up to his billing by making a particular effort to talk to Mr Mount.

The wider bar also fares badly, from the behaviour of clerks and the formality of the Inns, to the banality of the vast majority of the work.

'If a job isn't supposed to provide pleasure,' Mr Mount concludes, 'it's unlikely to be pleasurable.'

Unsurprisingly, Mr Mount is not offered a tenancy and has decisions to make about his future, with the pressure to pursue a proper career now he is in his late 20s butting up against his antipathy for the bar.

He winds up, without quite explaining how, as a journalist on the Daily Telegraph, and eventually has the shock of discovering that he has found a job he likes.

Given the emptiness of his life as a pupil, it is no surprise that this is a small book that can be read in a couple of hours - even then, it drifts in places.

But it is on the whole well written and entertaining, and yet another reminder that there are corners of the legal profession which have yet to embrace the 21st or even, perhaps, the 20th century.