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I recently retired from self-employment as a self-styled "freelance paralegal". This was work I used to do, self-employed, part-time, for modest reward, for a couple of years, and which I did pro bono before that, occasionally.

One of the less important ways in which I could, in theory, have helped my mainly self-represented clients, typically so-called "litigants-in-person", as their paid servant, was simply by being with them in court, as their "supporters" (supporting them in various ways).

When their hearings were in private, I wouldn't even have been allowed to be in court with them *without* their citing of McKenzie v McKenzie as authority for them even to be allowed to have a single supporter in court with them at all, during a hearing that was otherwise in private! (Whose fault is that?)

If that situation had ever arisen in my work, I suppose I'd have had to watch my poor client plead to the court just to let me stay in an otherwise SECRET court with him, as his so-called "McKenzie Friend", for the duration of *that* particular, paid-for or pro bono gig of mine.

If, exceptionally, my client had begged and pleaded for help with the *advocacy*, perhaps (who knows?) a deputy county court judge or suchlike tinpot despot might even have put my hypothetical client out of his misery, temporarily, by at least allowing, grudgingly, a more eloquent than he friend of his (e.g. me) to utter (who knows?) a whole sentence or two on his behalf (so-called "audience"), putting better than he could in those few sentences of ad hoc "audience" what a simple chap like my hypothetical client, himself too poor to hire a proper lawyer, was struggling to say, to a judge; a client who had a friend in court with him, who (he assured the judge) could say what my client wanted to say better than my client could, if only the judge would just let me speak those few sentences for my client (assuming that forbidding that free speech, rather than denying it, wasn't *too* much to ask, in the interests of justice.) Like it was a big thing to let me, rather than my client, explain something, without professional indemnity insurance or whatever, to a bloke with all the self-importance he imagined came, part and parcel, with his acting up. that day, as a deputy judge, in a day off from his day job.

The overriding objective of the CPR 1 is (in a nutshell) true justice coupled with efficiency. Ha ha ha.

The overriding objective most definitely isn't *protectionism*, so that justice will forever remain denied to poor litigants who cannot afford to hire as their advocates posh people like the typical readers of your rag who occasionally reply anonymously, who have climbed a professional ladder that I fell off decades ago because I was then too poor to buy my way up that ladder, not because I wasn't brainy enough. Posh people, that is, with greedy expectations of wages that are way out of my league, who (typically) had rich dads and connections that must for sure be better than mine, sufficient to finish a legal education that I could only start, before I ran out of funds.

I started my legal education in good faith, and didn't flunk it. But I still couldn't qualify as a barrister, for class reasons (in the Marxist sense); despite the Inns of Court School of Law having confided in me that my videoed presentation in its selection procedure was the best of that year.

Being a so-called "McKenzie Friend" of a client of mine was a service that I might have delivered, within my business plan. But I cannot remember ever actually having delivered this service to any client of mine.

More often, I drafted pleadings and applications and witness statements (etc), for my clients (or their witnesses) to sign (following my clients' instructions).

All this activity was *transparent*, as far as courts were concerned, and "second fiddle", low-profile work as far as tribunals were concerned, in which I was allowed to really indulge my fantasies of being some sort of "lawyer", representing my clients as their "lay advocate".

I also helped a client who (exceptionally) could afford to be represented in court by a law firm, first of all to find a suitable law firm to represent him (I head-hunted his solicitor-advocate), and to instruct his solicitor (in this case, solicitor-advocate). I have helped solicitors who represent my clients and theirs in the conduct of their litigation with drafting.

This entire mood of the gazette is wrong, of bashing activists like me who didn't quite make it, either as solicitors or barristers, not because we were stupid, and failed exams, but because we weren't posh enough to get leg-up needed, to start earning the dollars that most of your readers earner.

A swallow does not make a summer. Still less does a single cowboy (for the sake of argument) self-styled as a "McKenzie Friend", pilloried in the press, discredit the entire profession. or hobby, or something in between, of (at least) moderately intelligent people, like me, at least slightly educated about the law, who show more mercy to victims of injustice than "real" lawyers do, and who try harder than these real lawyers do usually, to make the courts DELIVER JUSTICE, instead of just making "lawyers" rich.