Confessions of a Barrister

‘It’s a boy, Mr Sherman, his name’s Russell Winnock.’

‘A boy? What, like in short trousers?’

‘No.’

‘Oh for god’s sake. The last thing I want is some young lad hanging around me – pupils are a bloody nuisance at the best of times.’

I soon realised what Clem Wilson meant by Ronnie Sherman’s foibles: he was a hopeless chauvinist, misogynist and snob and an even more hopeless alcoholic. He had clearly been given me as an unwanted gift in a desperate attempt to re-invigorate his interest in a flagging career, because Ronnie Sherman had become one of those old barristers who spends more time talking about the great cases of the past than preparing the mediocre cases of the present.

My six months with Ronnie were indeed an education. I learnt how to do a bail application without having any clue what your case actually was; I learnt how to drink a bottle of wine and two pints of bitter during lunch, after which I would watch my pupil-master either swerve and sway on his feet as he embarked on a lengthy and meandering cross-examination, or engineer an adjournment because he was not actually capable of embarking upon any cross-examination at all. I learnt how to ignore Judges, solicitors and junior clerks; I learnt how to lie to a wife or loved one about my whereabouts and I learnt how I was entering the profession at the worst time ever. ‘Russell,’ he would tell me, ‘you should have been doing this job twenty years ago – the money was great and everyone knew their place. Not like now.’

But amazingly, despite this reluctance to have me hanging round him, and despite the fact that he was mostly pissed after two o’clock, Ronnie Sherman did teach me some vital things about being a barrister: he taught me how to properly address a Judge, how to conduct yourself in court and about the strange rituals and customs of the Bar and the judicial system; but most of all, he taught me – and I’m not sure that he would admit to this – about how to treat your clients. You see, despite his bluff snobbery, pomposity and supposed antipathy towards most other sectors of society, when Ronnie Sherman was with his clients, he was transformed. When he entered a cell or a conference room, he would instantly change; he would listen gently and carefully, instinctively understanding and empathetic. Every client, regardless of the charge they faced, their background or history – tragic or stupid – would be treated with compassion and courtesy. In an instant he could put a young lad facing prison for the first time at ease, or coax a confession out of the worst kind of sex offender. And that ability – to build a trusting relationship with your client – is possibly the most important that a barrister can possess. Because the law isn’t just about, well, laws and statutes and being learned or clever, it’s about people. As a barrister you’re becoming involved in a person’s life at a time when that life has gone wrong.

And that, dear reader, is the beauty of the pupilage system. A young barrister, fresh from Bar School and totally wet behind the ears, spends the first six months of his or her career doing nothing but sitting behind their pupil-master, observing the right and wrong way to do things.

A couple of years after being my pupil-master, the Lord Chancellor’s department decided to make Ronnie a Judge; surprisingly, considering his outward disapproval of most people’s lives, they made him a family Judge.

What’s the difference between a solicitor and a barrister? (#ulink_ca95cf3f-d4b5-5017-b36e-820e1ec479de)

One afternoon, I walked through the foyer of chambers, heading to the room where our pigeonholes are kept. There is one for each barrister, set out, like everything else in this job, strictly in order of seniority or call. I checked mine on the off-chance that there was either a massive cheque or a massive brief nestling inside it. There was neither, only a flier advertising the services of a company offering me a low-interest loan to pay my tax bill. I groaned and went to make my way up a back staircase to my room.

This was a mistake. The back stairs took me past the Senior Clerk’s office – the office of Clem Wilson, and as I walked past his door, he spotted me.

‘Mr Winnock.’

I considered pretending not to hear, but knew that that wouldn’t make any difference: if Clem Wilson wanted to talk to me, then the conversation would happen one way or another.

‘Hi Clem,’ I proffered, ‘everything okay?’

‘Come in and sit down,’ he suggested wearily. I felt like a piece of lettuce being addressed by a slug.

‘I’m a bit worried, Mr Winnock,’ he said.

‘Worried?’ I asked him. ‘Why?’

Now, at this stage, it’s worth noting that I had lost a trial earlier that day and Clem Wilson will already have heard. You see, he hears everything, he knows everything, he’s like the East German government of the 1960s and 70s, he has people everywhere.

But Clem Wilson won’t give a toss about the result of my trial, or whether justice was done or not. In fact, it wouldn’t matter to him if I lost every case I ever did. No, all Clem Wilson cares about is keeping the solicitors happy.

I suppose it’s about time that I explained the relationship between a solicitor and a barrister. After the ‘how do you defend someone who’s guilty’ question, this is the second most popular question we’re asked: ‘What’s the difference between a barrister and a solicitor?’

Well, though the answer is no longer as straightforward as it once was, I suppose a good way of looking at it is this: solicitors are akin to GPs – if you are ill, they are the first port of call to give you the once-over, prescribe a bit of medicine if it’s not too serious, and listen to your tales of woe. Barristers are a bit like consultants – the ones in the operating theatre wielding the scalpel. And just as in medicine, if anything is seriously wrong when you go to a GP you’re referred to a consultant, so it is in law. If the solicitor can’t sort out your problem then you’ll be referred to a barrister who will be the person who represents you in the Crown Court or similar Civil and Family Courts.

These days, however, things have changed. Now solicitors are also allowed to wield the scalpel, so to speak. It used to be that barristers were easy to spot, because barristers wore wigs and solicitors didn’t – now some solicitors even wear wigs. Where a decade ago it was rare for a solicitor to be seen in the Crown Court as very few had bothered to get the extra qualification needed to appear there – now, it’s commonplace, and sadly for us barristers, the result is a reduction in our work.

This is a worry for us and a worry for Clem Wilson, because he’s paid a percentage of all the income from chambers, so the less work into chambers means a potential reduction in his wages. And this is why he is keen to keep solicitors happy, because he wants them to continue to instruct his barristers rather than do it themselves, or even worse, instruct other sets of chambers, such as, heaven forbid, Extempar Chambers. And, to a certain degree, that relationship works. Clem keeps the solicitors happy, the solicitors instruct us to do their cases and we all get paid. The situation only breaks down if one of his barristers upsets the solicitors.

‘I’ve been looking at your diary,’ he told me.

‘Okay.’

‘It’s not very good, Mr Winnock, is it?’

‘Well,’ I replied, ‘it’s hard for all of us at the moment – do you know there were fifteen solicitors in the robing room today, fifteen of them! How can we compete with that?’

Clem Wilson looked unimpressed. ‘Well, some seem to be managing it better than others.’

That remark was quite cutting – he’s calling me a failure. I shrugged.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘perhaps it’s about time you considered something else.’

I felt my eyes widen – ‘Something else? Like what? I’ve only ever known the law, what else could I do?’

He tried to smile in a reassuring way at me, but it came out as a smirk. ‘No, I don’t mean leave the profession – well, not yet, anyway. I mean another area of law.’

‘What, like Chancery or commercial?’

This appealed to me. Chancery and commercial barristers earn massive amounts of money, they are the true fat cats of the Bar. They are the boys – and they are usually male – who drive sports cars and have fancy apartments and expensive suits. The idea of becoming a Chancery barrister was attractive.

Clem Wilson laughed spitefully.

‘No, I was thinking family law.’

The image of me in a sports car evaporated, and was replaced by one of me in that most desperately sad of places: the Family Court. The Family Bar is even harder up than the Criminal Bar. The Family Courts are where people go to pore over the ashes of their failed marriages and broken families. The barristers who appear there are usually gentle souls who wear woolly cardigans under their robes, whilst the solicitors are the exact opposite – hard, horrible, trenchant – iron-willed storm troopers who will promise their client that they will take their former partner ‘to the cleaners’ – and then do everything they can to make good their vow.

I have no interest in the Family Courts. I hadn’t been there for over five years, when I had found myself literally banging my head against a wall as my client, a rather stinky woman, refused to agree to allow her child to be picked up from McDonald’s at 5.30 every Friday for a contact session with the father, insisting instead that it should be 6pm from Burger King. No, I am a criminal barrister – we are the heavyweight boxers of the legal world, the strutting, posing cocks of the robing room – there is no way I’m going to wear a cardie and help society’s failed former lovers sort out who gets the telly and who gets the cat.

Clem Wilson looked at me.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think the Family Courts may be the future for you, Mr Winnock, what with your liberal conscience and that.’

I’m not sure how he’s concluded that I have a liberal conscience.

‘That’s why I have taken a brief for you at the Family Court tomorrow.’

‘What? No. Thanks Clem, but it’s not for me.’

‘It’s for Whinstanley and Cooper,’ he said, then repeated slowly and with more than a hint of menace, ‘Whinstanley and Cooper,’ in an attempt to scare me. It worked.

‘They are a massive firm, Mr Winnock,’ he added, ‘they bring in lots of work to chambers, and they need someone to do an injunction hearing tomorrow. You are available.’

I sighed. I considered refusing. I considered digging my heels in. But I knew that any resistance would be futile. A big firm of solicitors wanted to instruct a barrister for a hearing and I was to be that barrister. They were far too important to chambers for Clem Wilson to refuse the work. I sighed, and before I could say another word, my Senior Clerk had placed in my hand a small bundle of papers tied with pink ribbon. On the front were the words West v West.

Silently I left the Senior Clerk’s room.

So, what is the difference between a barrister and a solicitor? Well, the answer goes far beyond who wears a wig and who doesn’t. Whilst some of the traditional differences are being diminished and done away with, in other ways, the distinction is still there and many of us would argue it is just as important as it has always been. Hopefully it will become clearer as my story continues, and, as it happens, the case of West v West isn’t a bad place to start to show the complexity of the solicitor–barrister relationship …

West v West (#ulink_644661f7-2afb-5914-b636-8548ad188418)