Confessions of a Barrister

The practical implication of all this is that, very often, barristers who are doing the job honestly and professionally will find themselves advising against their own financial self-interest.

Take the following couple of examples.

I was instructed to defend a Polish chap whose family had been involved in a feud with another Polish family. There were over 700 pages on the brief and the trial was listed to last for five weeks – it would have been worth a few bob to say the least.

On the morning of the first day, my client, whose name was Jan Koszlak – a very nice man as it happens, if you put to one side his penchant for attacking people who crossed him with a Samurai sword – came to me and asked if he should plead guilty to the charge. As he said it my heart groaned, or rather, my bank balance groaned. I knew that a plea on day one of the trial would cost me a few thousand quid. I also knew that it was a trial that we could win, but that would by no means be guaranteed.

If I was thinking in a selfish way, I would have said, no, you should definitely run a trial. But I couldn’t do that, it wouldn’t have been right. So instead I said to Jan, ‘Well, if you plead now, you’ll get a little bit of credit, not much, but it will still be a lesser sentence than if you run a trial and lose. It is,’ I said, ‘up to you.’

Jan weighed this up, looked at me carefully, and asked, ‘What would you do?’ A question many defendants ask, and all barristers hate.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, which is the honest response. ‘It would be easy for me to say run the trial, but I’m not the one facing the porridge.’

‘Will I win?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘I have no idea. As soon as a case goes before a jury, it will have a life of its own.’

‘What are the odds?’ he asked (another question which all barristers hate), and I answered the way I always do, which is the only safe way to answer: ‘About 50-50.’

He nodded to himself, and then said slowly, ‘Okay, I’ll plead guilty. I can’t take the risk of longer time in jail.’

I smiled and told him he was probably doing the wisest thing, but inside I was screaming, ‘You’ve just cost me thousands of bloody pounds!’

Another time, I was sent to represent a man who was accused of grooming teenage girls for the purposes of sex. My client, Ron, was a 42-year-old welder living with his mother, who had been posing on Facebook, and various other social media websites, as Kyle, a sixteen-year-old school boy with Boy Band hair and a detailed understanding of teenager-speak (WTF, OMG, LMFAO etc., you know the stuff).

Kyle was rumbled when he made the mistake of trying to chat up Cindy, who wasn’t, as she claimed, a fourteen-year-old, slightly experienced little minx, with a keen interest in One Direction, push-up bras and lads with tattoos, but actually Detective Constable Steve Parker, a 36-year-old father of two who played blind-side flanker for Redbridge RFC Second team and listened to Radio 2. DC Parker was part of Operation Cinderella, a ‘honey-trap’ police operation. For two weeks he had coquettishly responded to all of ‘Kyle’s’, or should I say Ron’s, questions about what underwear she was wearing and if she liked to ‘swallow’, before enough evidence was amassed to arrest and charge him.

It wasn’t actually my case; I had been asked to cover it for another member of chambers. The hearing was simply to fix a new date for a trial. I hadn’t read all the papers – just enough to give me a flavour of the charge, and see that there were hundreds of pages of exhibits to cover all the conversations that had gone on – it was, without doubt, a lucrative brief.

When I arrived, Ron was in tears. ‘I just want to plead guilty,’ he told me. ‘I can’t take any more.’

‘Okay,’ I said carefully, ‘do you accept what you are accused of doing?’