Putting the case for the jury

Imagine a legal profession where jury service is part of the job.

Ian Francis argues that such work can help hone lawyers' self-development

No one would argue that juries were not up to the job if we built jury service into our professional life.

Imagine this conversation between two lawyers: 'Brilliant new promotion.

I saw the competition you were up against.

How did you get it?'

'I put it down to the firm not spending so much on training.'

'How's that?'

'I got called for jury service.

The judge told us that the trial would last a fortnight.

I didn't think the firm would wear that, so I went to see the boss to get a letter saying so.

The boss is a sly old fox.

He said: "I was just about to send you to Cranberry University on an expensive week-long development course.

This jury lark sounds a much better bet."

'And he couldn't have been more right.

The second day in, the man who had been voted foreman went sick, and I was elected as his substitute.

The case was complicated, and the jury had some forceful and eccentric people on it.

I have seldom worked harder, but I have never felt so fulfilled as the end of a project.

'So when this new job came up, the similarity between that and being the foreman of that jury was so strong that I was able to write it straight into my application form, and that got me onto the shortlist and even up against some of the heavyweights who applied.

Best bit of training I ever did.'

This is not a true story, but it could be, and it should be.

Professional and managerial people largely excuse themselves from jury service these days.

To the few that do not, this fact is a scandal.

Rosie Millard, arts correspondent at the BBC, was summoned for jury service in 2000.

She says: 'The instant reaction from colleagues and friends was that it was a bit of a joke.

"Just say it is inconvenient for work," said a friend.

My jury was highly representative - of people with time on their hands.

Where were the teachers, the professionals, the City bankers? The jury is largely made up of housewives and the unemployed.

Everyone else is too busy in the office.'

Journalist and political commentator Ivor Gaber came to a similar conclusion in 2001.

He thought that the middle-class boycott of jury service was having the effect of making judges and barristers treat juries 'as verging on the simple - people who require everything to be spelled out for them...

(so that) it becomes almost impossible for them to use their judgement across the full range of evidence they have heard'.

One effect of this must be the hours lawyers spend arguing about evidence the jury cannot be allowed to hear.

These days, the professions - including the legal profession - and the public services properly put a huge premium on training.

They send their staff for appreciable periods on expensive courses, all of which combine theory and self-examination with the most effective form of putting this into practice that they can devise in such an artificial setting.

The training concentrates on two main components - self-development, and working with other people in teams, so that the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.

It is difficult to imaging a form of activity that does more to fulfil these two functions than service on a jury.

Criminal trials, like business or professional life, throw up problems of the most varied and awkward kinds.

Here are two needs that should be matched together.

Employers require appropriate and realistic training.

The community badly needs the best jurors it can find, so that the ideal that we all share of the wisdom and balance of the jury may be enhanced, and the system defended by achievement.

Ian Francis represents Norfolk on the Law Society Council