BabyBarista

Friday, 5 February 2010

BabyBarista arrives Down Under

I'm really delighted that BabyBarista and the Art of War has just received a very nice review in The Journal of the New South Wales Bar Association called 'Bar News' which you can read by clicking here or on the picture of the left. I'm even more pleased by the fact that the review is by Richard Beasley who is not only a practising barrister (and a qualified solicitor) but also the author of one of my very favourite legal novels ever Hell Has Harbour Views which is both extremely funny and also a fantastic page turner of a read which I couldn't recommend more highly. It is available direct from Australian bookshops such as SeekBooks.com.au and also on amazon.co.uk.

Monday, 1 February 2010

Sunday, 24 January 2010

Mention of BabyBarista on the 'Leaving Law' website

You can read the article here or below.

Tim Kevan

Now in:

Creative Writing, Portfolio Careers, Arts and Media

Went about it:

I practised as a barrister for over ten years at 1 Temple Gardens in London. During this time I wrote or co-wrote a bunch of law books which in many ways helped to develop my practice. These were later followed by a motivational book entitled ‘Why Lawyers Should Surf’ which I co-wrote with Dr Michelle Tempest and which encouraged lawyers to look for inspiration outside of law and used surfing and the power of the ocean as metaphors for living the day to day. But I still had an ambition to write a novel and after the first draft of the surf book was finished I very much wanted to sit down and write a legal thriller. But instead what popped out was a legal comedy about a fictional young barrister doing pupillage. I called him BabyBarista which was a play on words based on his first impression being that his coffee-making skills were probably as important to that year as any forensic legal abilities he may have. It’s a strange thing to say but I discovered that this bold, irreverent and mischievous voice along with a collection of colourful characters had simply jumped into my head and the words started pouring onto the page. I wrote it in the form of a diary and posted it online as a blog at http://babybarista.blogspot.com. I was hopeful it might raise a few smiles but in my wildest dreams I hadn’t imagined quite the extraordinary set of circumstances which then unfolded. First The Lawyer commented “If this is a fictional account it is genius”. I then emailed a few publishers and started getting interest. I was also lucky enough to be approached by a couple of literary agents and chose to go with Euan Thorneycroft of AM Heath who has been extremely helpful at all stages of the process from looking at the story itself to negotiating with the publisher. In addition, I was also contacted by The Times which offered to host the blog (at http://timesonline.typepad.com/baby_barista) and finally, I got a book deal with Bloomsbury Publishing of Harry Potter fame - all within the space of less than three months. The book came out last August and is called BabyBarista and the Art of War. It’s a fictional caricature of life at the Bar and centres around BabyB’s first year in chambers where he is fighting his fellow pupils for the coveted prize of a permanent tenancy. Thankfully, it appears to have been well-received with broadcaster Jeremy Vine describing it as “a wonderful, racing read - well-drawn, smartly plotted and laugh out loud” and The Times Law Section calling it as “a gallop of a read” and their Books Section mentioning its “relentlessly racy, rumbustiously Rumpolean humour”. In the meantime I had co-founded a couple of legal businesses and these started to take off. The first provides free legal email newsletters (www.lawbriefupdate.com) as well as a subscription law journal. The content is provided mostly by barristers and solicitors and aims to digest into manageable form what can often be an overload of information for the legal practitioner. The other business provides online CPD training for personal injury and employment lawyers through video seminars or webinars (www.cpdwebinars.com) and this has proven to be particularly popular due to the fact that lawyers are able to gain their CPD hours watching and interacting with top speakers whilst not having to leave the comfort of their own desks or perhaps more importantly not having to lose a day out of the office going off to a conference or the like. With all this going on I was still trying to get down to the coast as much as possible and had bought a house in North Devon which was not far away from where I had been brought up as well as being next to the various surfing beaches in that area. Whilst trying to juggle all of these things I eventually decided to move down there full-time and take a break from the Bar in order that I could finish the novel and work on the businesses as well getting into the sea whenever there was swell.

Comment

It’s certainly been an exhilarating time and wonderful to have some time out to concentrate on other things than law. Being back down by the sea has really made me appreciate how important it is to concentrate on quality of life and to give yourself the time and space to pursue all manner of passions and interests which you might have. For me that meant getting out into the sea and enjoying all that the countryside has to offer. This has not just been through surfing but also through simple pleasures such as taking on a little border terrier puppy and getting him out onto the beach and into the hills, growing stuff in the garden from runner beans to rhubarb and even brewing elderflower wine or making sloe gin. It’s also a real pleasure to be back living in a rural community with all its various traditions and institutions, a place where neighbours look out for each other and friends often live just a short walk away. Ultimately I intend to return to the Bar part-time and based in Devon though hopefully through my chambers in London. But with the perspective of having spent time out it will hopefully help me ensure that I maintain some sort of balance not only between work and play but also between the various different types of work which we as lawyers are able to take on. Photograph: Copyright Jay Stirzaker

Sunday, 27 December 2009

Two reviews of BabyBarista in The Weekly Law Reports Student Newsletter Autumn/Christmas 2009 (click to enlarge)

Wednesday, 23 December 2009

Article in Legal Week about literary lawyers from a few months ago

Article from a few months in Legal Week about literary lawyers.

Success stories

Author: Alex Aldridge 02 Jul 2009 10:13

Alex Aldridge meets the next generation of literary lawyers and asks what it takes to get published

With their weakness for long-winded sentences, concern with preserving reputation and grinding 24/7 workloads, lawyers aren’t the sort of people you’d immediately associate with creative writing. But the link between law and literature has always been strong. And where Charles Dickens, Henry Cecil Leon and John Mortimer once walked, now come the next generation of lawyer-novelists.

One Temple Gardens barrister Tim Kevan – AKA Times Online legal blogger BabyBarista – is the lawyer-turned-writer of the moment. The commercial disputes and personal injury specialist’s first novel, BabyBarista and the Art of War, will be published by Bloomsbury in July.

Having begun BabyBarista as an independent blog three years ago, Kevan was contacted by The Times with an offer to host the blog on its website about six months after he started writing. A book deal followed soon after. “What has happened is beyond my wildest dreams,” says Kevan, who did most of the writing while “sitting on trains to various courts”. He adds that he has no problem adapting his style to make it accessible to non-lawyers: “Barristers are, by nature, storytellers. And the human interest side of life at the Bar makes great material for books.”

More tricky was keeping his identity quiet as speculation as to the identity of BabyBarista raged around the Inns of Court (the blog was written anonymously until Kevan outed himself earlier this year). “I was keen to keep my name under wraps in the beginning, as I enjoyed the anonymity of the writing, though given that it was genuinely fictional and that I was writing in the voice of a pupil barrister, I didn’t arouse too much suspicion.”

Based in Devon, where he is taking a few years off to surf, write and run an online seminars business, Kevan is set to return to practise law in the near future (he still holds a door tenancy at 1 Temple Gardens), having found that he misses the camaraderie of life at the Bar. He has no plans to give up the writing though, with a BabyBarista sequel based on his continuing Times Online blog already underway.

Another lawyer drawing inspiration from the legal profession to fulfil his creative urges is Andrew Iyer. By day, Iyer (pictured) heads up Ince & Co’s energy litigation team. By night, he pens John Grisham-style thrillers. He’s currently working on his third book, The Discovery, having already crafted two thrillers, Domino Run and The Betrayed. All the books feature lawyers in lead roles – the first starring a City solicitor, the second a partner in a provincial law firm and the third an in-house lawyer.

Iyer got into creative writing in his teens, contributing short stories to his school magazine, before going on to write plays at university. Alongside his two novels, he has also penned a professionally-performed play about football called The Big Game and an off-Broadway musical revue, Living in America.

Where does he find the time? “Mainly after work and when I’m travelling on business – which is something I do fairly regularly as an energy lawyer,” responds Iyer. “It takes discipline, but once I get going it actually helps me to relax.” He adds that the case management skills he has honed through his years as a litigator have helped him when “developing the mechanics of a novel”.

Although Iyer is passionate about writing, he is realistic about its downsides – “the solitude, the obsessive element of honing a particular plot, the financial uncertainty” – and has no plans to leave his day job. His advice to aspiring authors has a correspondingly down-to-earth theme: “If your sole intention is to get published, then you’ll probably be disappointed. Focus on writing the novel for the sake of it, because you enjoy it. If you do that, you’ll probably end up with a better draft.”

Unlike Kevan and Iyer, barrister and children’s author Frank Hinks QC mostly steers clear of the law when in writer mode. “There are a couple of times when I’ve drawn inspiration from the law – in the Magic Magpie, I based a character on a notorious Chancery division judge – but generally I get my ideas elsewhere,” says the Serle Court Chambers silk. As for the style of writing, Hinks describes it as “the antithesis of anything I ever drafted at the Chancery Bar – chalk and cheese”. A flick through his latest book, The Kingdom of the Deep – a story about some boys magicked to an underwater kingdom by a witch (fortunately, they’re rescued by a cat) – confirms this.

Hinks wrote his first full-length children’s adventure when he was 16, but it wasn’t until he had children himself – providing a captive audience on which to perfect his storytelling skills – that he started thinking about writing seriously. The recession of the early 1990s provided him with a perfect window of opportunity: “Suddenly all the property work just disappeared and I found myself sitting in my room at Lincoln’s Inn with just enough work for three days a week, at which point I thought: ‘Right, this is the time to write up the stories I’ve been telling the kids.’”

But Hinks’ decision to diversify his practice to include authoring children’s books (for which he also does the illustrations) didn’t meet everyone’s approval: “At first when my senior clerk came into my room while I was working on an illustration, he’d look at me as if I was snorting cocaine,” he recalls. Happily, the doubters have since come around, with Hinks now ‘out’ as an author/illustrator: “For much of my life my intellectual side was fulfilled, but my creative side wasn’t. At the moment, though, I’m satisfying both.”

The strictly adult writing of ex-Allen & Overy (A&O) senior associate Deidre Clark is a long way from The Kingdom of the Deep. Having spent two decades doing 70-hour weeks as a corporate lawyer with Simpson Thacher in New York and then A&O in London, Clark suddenly found herself with free time on her hands after a move to A&O’s less hectic Moscow office. She decided to put it to use by embarking on a sexually-charged novel about expat life – written under the pseudonym Deidre Dare. After several months of posting chapters on her website, the A&O management in London got wind of what Clark was doing and dismissed her, leading to a flurry of media attention and an unfair dismissal lawsuit.

“The whole thing was awful – the worst time of my life,” she recalls. “There was this gigantic scandal, my family were very upset, and from January to March it was very bad. But then, as human beings do, I adjusted to the situation.”

The bright side of all of this was that she attracted an editor and agent for her book and got a weekly column with a Russian English-language newspaper, The Moscow News. The $200 per week that she earns from the column is not quite A&O rates, but it’s just about enough to keep her ticking over while she waits for her book to be published and fights the unfair dismissal case. “I have enough money for a year or so, but I’m still facing a crisis – my hope is that my book will support me,” adds Clark.

How to get published

•Court publicity. Getting into a bust-up with her employer over erotic writing published on a website featuring semi-naked photos of herself worked for Deidre Dare, but it cost her a top-paying job.
•Self-publish. Frank Hinks QC published his first batch of short stories under the name ‘Perronet Press’ – a publishing house he set up himself. After the initial success of those books, Hinks decided to continue self-publishing. His most recent book, The Kingdom of the Deep, was reviewed in both The Guardian and The Telegraph.
•Persevere. “You’ve got to be thick-skinned,” says Andrew Iyer, a partner at Ince & Co and author of two legal thrillers. “I never actually managed to get an agent, but I kept sending out my manuscript and eventually secured a publishing deal directly.”
•Blog. The blogosphere may contain a lot of rubbish, but that means when something good comes along it tends to get noticed, as BabyBarista author Tim Kevan discovered when The Times and two publishing houses came calling after stumbling upon his fictional blog about life at the junior Bar.

BabyBarista on Cambridge University Alumni Website

Click the image on the left to enlarge or click
here to see the original.

Friday, 18 December 2009

Review of BabyB at Spada's Swordplay Blog

Nice review of BabyBarista and the Art of War at the excellent legal blog run by Spada and entitled Swordplay. You can read the full article and all the recommendations here. The following is the text about BabyBarista:

"Barrister-turned-writer Kevan seems to have secured more plaudits than a Nobel prize winner with his first novel, a romp through London’s Inns of Court. Baby Barista is fast, furious and effervescent, a Bucks Fizz-meets-Machiavelli of a book. Fans might care to slip a book token amid its pages – Kevan is penning a sequel."

Thursday, 17 December 2009

Wednesday, 16 December 2009

Article for Writers and Artists website about the writing of BabyBarista

Here's an article by Tim Kevan which was published a little while ago on the Writers and Artists website about the writing of BabyBarista.

From blog to book deal
October 26, 2009 by Writers, Artists and Insiders

Back in 2007 I had been practising as a barrister for some nine years when I started writing a blog about a fictional young trainee barrister who I called BabyBarista, a play on words based on his first impression being that his coffee-making skills were probably as important to that year as any forensic legal abilities he may have.
One of the most satisfying things I found about blogging was the immediacy of the publishing process. You think it up, type it out on your keyboard and then publish. It also allows the writer in many ways to busk or play around with ideas and see how they work.

It’s a strange thing to say but I discovered that this bold, irreverent and mischievous voice along with a collection of colourful characters had simply jumped into my head and the words started pouring on to the page. I was hopeful it might raise a few smiles, but in my wildest dreams I hadn’t imagined quite the extraordinary set of circumstances which then unfolded.

First it received a glowing comment in a legal magazine and off the back of that I emailed a few publishers and started getting interest as well as taking on a literary agent who had approached me direct. In the meantime, The Times kindly offered to host the blog and finally, I was offered a book deal with Bloomsbury – all within the space of less than three months.

Since that hectic start, it’s been a long haul. I took a break from practising as a barrister and moved to North Devon, where not only have I been able to go surfing a little more frequently but I also finished the book. It finally came out in August and does seem to have been well received with broadcaster Jeremy Vine describing it as “a wonderful, racing read – well drawn, smartly plotted and laugh-out-loud”.

The book is called BabyBarista and the Art of War and centres around BabyB’s first year in chambers where he is fighting his fellow pupils for the coveted prize of a permanent tenancy. It’s a fictional caricature of life at the Bar and includes characters that probably exist in most workplaces. Alongside the pupillage race is an altogether different battle with BabyB’s corrupt pupilmaster whose dishonest fiddling of chambers’ records all starts to unravel and threatens to embroil BabyB’s entire career.

With the first book finished, I’m now working on book two in the series and very much enjoying life down here by the sea.

What can (and can’t) a blog do for a writer? “Blogging is definitely one tool which might help some writers. The need to keep it up-to-date can provide discipline and the diary format gives an immediate structure, particularly for first person narratives.” Read more in our full interview with Tim Kevan.

Tim Kevan is a barrister and writer and the author of ‘BabyBarista and The Art of War’ published by Bloomsbury.

Thursday, 10 December 2009

Review of BabyBarista at CaseCheck ™

Nice review of BabyBarista and the Art of War at CaseCheck ™ which you can also read below. CaseCheck ™ is a legal resource used by lawyers, law students, in-house lawyers, paralegals, claims handlers, barristers and advocates throughout the UK and the rest of the world. Register at www.casecheck.co.uk to establish your own profile, access their full functionality and receive their weekly bulletin.

From Blogger to Bloomsbury: BabyBarista and The Art of War

Many of you will be familiar with Tim Kevan as the barrister behind PI Brief Update, PI Journal and Law Brief Update.
You may also be aware of his involvement alongside Daniel Barnett in the innovative CPD Webinars, which offers you the full benefit of CPD instruction for your whole office, without the hassle of having to travel anywhere.

You may be less familiar with the fact that he co-authored Why Lawyers Should Surf with Dr Michelle Tempest before Bloomsbury published his first fiction novel ‘BabyBarista and the Art of War’.

‘BabyBarista and the Art of War’ is a comedy revolving around one pupil barrister’s attempts to secure the only tenancy place available in a character rich set of chambers. The ‘Art of War’ in the title refers to Sun Tzu’s influential book on military strategy which BabyB’s pupil master presents him with on his first day:

“Litigation is like war, Baby Barista. Read this and learn.’

Instead of deploying Sun Tzu’s strategies to assist him in court, Baby B focuses on how he can secure the coveted tenancy spot at the expense of his three fellow pupils. Financial pressures at home serve as justification for his actions.

I generally try to keep away from legal fiction, but I must say that I really enjoyed BabyBarista, particularly through its link with the ‘Art of War’. The book was also made more enjoyable for me as a result of my assumptions that there must be a few individuals at the English bar squirming at lightly veiled descriptions of their worst characteristics.

‘Everyone will be able to identify him as being ‘X’ and her as being ‘Y’, I thought.

But when I asked Tim about this he clearly pointed out that this was not the case - even after I had asked him the same question, in a different way, approximately fifteen times.

“Not in the slightest – the book is fiction – full stop.”

“But how, then, did you come up with such rich characters if they are absolutely 100% fiction?”

Tim then explained;

“For me they were almost like real characters in my mind. I wanted to write a legal thriller, but what came out, initially as a blog, was this comedy. The characters just came into my brain and I tuned, almost like a radio, into their frequency.”

“The blog, http://babybarista.blogspot.com/, was picked up by the Times Online and then, following a review by the Lawyer magazine, I emailed a whole load of publishers. Bloomsbury got back to me after that and I also managed to get a literary agent around the same time.”

“ The support of the Bloomsbury editors and my literary agent was invaluable in terms of helping me with the structure and character development. (i.e. BabyB’s private life, aspect of his mother’s life, physical details, romance etc). They helped me to introduce different angles to the story, making it a more rounded, fuller novel as opposed to the blog, which was more like a race to the finishing line.”

Writing is probably seen as being a solitary existence in which one labours away on an idea for months unsure as to whether it will ever see the light of day but Tim’s experience shows that this has perhaps changed.

Using a free tool like Blogger, Tim could immediately access a publishing platform for his creativity and thereby permit the characters to grow and develop within an environment where he could measure take up, reaction and returning visitors. Suddenly there was an audience, returning for the next instalment. Think of a legal Belle Du Jour, without the sex, but with wigs.

As Tim says;

“Writing a blog is definitely a very useful tool in that it facilitates the process of writing in a first person narrative and it is also a very good way of presenting your work”

In terms of spreading word of his blog Tim did use his own newsletters but he also says that getting involved in the legal blogging community helped in that he promoted the blogs of others and they, in turn, promoted his. The legal editor of the Times Online became a member of his audience and this editor’s suggestion that the Times Online should host his blog drastically increased Baby Barista’s reach.

For Tim the path has ultimately lead him from online to offline, from free to paid for and in Tim’s explanation of the effort Bloomsbury and his literary agent put into helping him turn a blog into a novel one feels that £11.99 (or £8.36 on Amazon) is a price worth paying for a well crafted, highly enjoyable chambers based comedy.

Sunday, 6 December 2009

BabyBarista covered in Legal Week (click to enlarge)

Friday, 4 December 2009

University of Kent's 'The Argument' reviews BabyBarista

Nice review of BabyBarista and the Art of War at the University of Kent's The Argument.

Life at the Bar – BabyBarista and The Art of War by Tim Kevan
written by Shirah Zirambamuzale on Dec.03, 2009

BabyBarista and The Art of War by Tim Kevan
(Bloomsbury 2009. ISBN 9780747594642)

I agree with many that this book may be a true portrayal of life at the Bar, but I would also argue that this is true of many successful professions and success in general. Based on a Times Online blog by the same author, the book traces the life of a law student who acquires pupillage at a prestigious set of chambers in London. An Oxford law graduate with a first, the student is in stiff competition with other baby barristers with top-class degrees from Cambridge and Harvard. And, as if this was not enough, BabyBarista has to contend with his mounting debts and those of his mother, a working-class single woman who has borrowed heavily to pay for her son’s legal education. This background sets the plot where BabyBarista is left with no option but to outwit his fellow competitors by all means necessary. Through a combination of dubious tricks and the aid of his manual, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, BabyBarista concocts a series of measures which see him facing moral dilemmas, fighting to pay off his mother’s heavy debts and competing for the only tenancy available at Chambers. Beneath all the drama, tragedy and comedy found on every page of the book, the author also provides a satirical yet vivid account of life at the Bar. The book portrays most barristers as being arrogant, pretentious, corrupt and unrealistically aloof. Solicitors too are not spared as some are painted as being money hungry ambulance-chasers while others are ‘ClichéClangers’ and ‘skilled in the creative art of billing’. It isn’t all ghastly portrayals, however, as the book also has several examples of barristers who have coped with the pressures of the legal profession and gone about their business with integrity. One thing that I sympathise with is the debt one incurs during the endeavour to become a barrister, but the appalling thing is that the financial difficulty does not end with one succeeding at the Bar but evolves into one continuing a lifestyle they cannot afford just to fit in with the other tenants at Chambers. Finally, I was very impressed with the author and his style of writing, as it was imaginative and very captivating, and contrary to the preconceived notion that life at the Bar is tedious and not half as exciting as we soon discover in the book. Overall, this book reflects well on life at the Bar. Another issue that the book competently addresses is the notion of the ‘class ceiling’ and the bias of established chambers towards the Oxbridge class. This book, however, suggests that this traditional bias may be nearing its end. The author perfectly highlighted this when he captured a moment when an ageing barrister bemoaned the changing face of the Bar, complaining about the fact ‘… that over half of our next-door chambers’s [sic] tenants are now non-Oxbridge’. One can be optimistic from this alone. This, as the author puts it, is ‘the wonderful modern Bar’.

Saturday, 28 November 2009

BabyBarista in Cambridge University Law Society Magazine (click to enlarge)

Thursday, 26 November 2009

BabyBarista covered in Legal Week Student Edition (click to enlarge)

Thursday, 19 November 2009

BabyBarista reviewed in Devon Life (click to enlarge)

Wednesday, 18 November 2009

BabyBarista in Magdalene College, Cambridge Magazine 'Magdalene Matters' (click to enlarge)

Thursday, 12 November 2009

BabyBarista in Middle Templar Magazine (click to enlarge)

Tuesday, 10 November 2009

Article about BabyBarista by Tim Kevan for The Bar Society of King's College London

To read the original article, click here or see below.

Writing for Harry Potter’s Publisher

Tim Kevan tells us how he came to write a novel for Bloomsbury Publishing

Back in early 2007 I had been practising as a barrister at 1 Temple Gardens for some nine years and was enjoying the life of a common law practitioner based in London. One of the wonderful advantages of being a barrister is the independence that being self-employed brings with it and the ability to be able to do other things as well as practising if so desired. So it was with me that I started doing some writing about a fictional young barrister doing pupillage who I called BabyBarista, a play on words based on his first impression being that his coffee-making skills were probably as important to that year as any forensic legal abilities he may have. It’s a strange thing to say but I discovered that this bold, irreverent and mischievous voice along with a collection of colourful characters had simply jumped into my head and the words started pouring onto the page. I wrote it as a blog and was hopeful it might raise a few smiles but in my wildest dreams I hadn’t imagined quite the extraordinary set of circumstances which then unfolded. First The Lawyer Magazine commented “If this is a fictional account it is genius”. I then emailed a few publishers and started getting interest as well as taking on a literary agent who had approached me direct. In the meantime, I was contacted by Alex Spence of The Times and he very kindly offered to host the blog and finally, I was offfered a book deal with Bloomsbury Publishing of Harry Potter fame - all within the space of less than three months.

Since that hectic start, it’s been a long haul. I took a break from practising as a barrister and moved to North Devon where not only have I been able to go surfing a little more frequently but I also finished the first book in the BabyBarista series as well as continuing to write the blog. The book finally came out in August and does seem to have been well-received with broadcaster Jeremy Vine describing it as “a wonderful, racing read - well-drawn, smartly plotted and laugh out loud” and The Timescalling it “a cross between The Talented Mr Ripley, Rumpole and Bridget Jones's Diary...a gallop of a read”. Perhaps most flattering of all, given that I am a fan of John Mortimer was Counsel Magazine which said that “BabyBarista has certainly earned the right to stand there alongside Rumpole in the pantheon of legal fiction”.

The book is called BabyBarista and the Art of War and centres around BabyB’s first year in chambers where he is fighting his fellow pupils for the coveted prize of a permanent tenancy. It’s a fictional caricature of life at the Bar and includes characters that probably exist in most workplaces such as UpTights, OldRuin, BusyBody, Worrier and even JudgeJewellery and her penchant for stealing cheap jewellery. Alongside the pupillage race is an altogether different battle with BabyB’s corrupt pupilmaster TheBoss whose dishonest fiddling of chambers’ records to avoid a negligence action all starts to unravel and threatens to embroil BabyB’s entire career.

With the first book finished, I’m continuing to write the blog as well as working on book two in the series. Ultimately I intend to return to the Bar part-time and based in Devon but hopefully through my chambers in London. In the meantime, I continue to enjoy life down here by the sea.

Tim Kevan is a member of the Middle Temple and the author of ‘BabyBarista and The Art of War’ published by Bloomsbury and available on amazon for £8.39 (incl p&p). For more information visit www.timkevan.com.

Thursday, 5 November 2009

Short summary of BabyBarista reviews

Broadcaster Jeremy Vine: "a wonderful, racing read - well-drawn, smartly plotted and laugh out loud"

The Times: "a cross between The Talented Mr Ripley, Rumpole and Bridget Jones’s Diary...a gallop of a read"

The Independent: "For all those aspiring advocates who believe they are entering a glamorous or even principled profession, this book is essential reading."

The Lawyer Magazine: "If this is a fictional account it is genius"

Big Issue (Scotland): "[a] blistering romp through chambers...devilishly funny"

Western Morning News: "hilarious...his characters...are all deliciously ghastly."

Edinburgh Evening News: "fascinating, subversive and pretty much impossible to put down"

Counsel Magazine: "has certainly earned the right to stand there alongside Rumpole in the pantheon of legal fiction."

The Bookseller (choice for August 2009 and a top title): "wickedly funny"

Northern Echo: "Possibly the funniest blog-turned-book to hit the shelves this year"

Legal Week: "more than enough laughs to keep the reader on the right side of the dubious ethical path plotted by the central protagonist"

Bar Council: "Tim follows in a tradition of barristers writing legal comedy including...the great John Mortimer"

U.S. Review site Rebecca's Reads: ""hilariously funny...British Humour at its Pristine Best."

Author Boris Starling (Messiah): "sharp, acerbic, and almost illegally funny"

Author David Wolstencroft (creator of Spooks): "Tim Kevan is a masterful manipulator"

Newsreader and broadcaster Katie Derham: "[BabyBarista] is very clever, very funny, and his double dealing antics had me gripped."

Boxer Barry McGuigan MBE: "a terrific read which makes you both laugh and keep the pages turning"

Actress Denise Welch (Coronation Street, Loose Women): "sassy, sexy and hilariously funny."

Author Andy Martin (Stealing the Wave, Invisible Cows): "beyond any reasonable doubt fast, funny, and furious".

Author Thomas Farber (Face of the Deep): "Tim Kevan has deployed extreme wit...very well-honed satire"

Blogger Charon QC: "a Hogarthian romp, a parody, a satire with edge"

Blogger Geeklawyer: "a hilarious parody of the profession" and "a side-splitting read"

Infamy or Praise blog: "a book worth reading; it's entertaining and insightful...well worth your time"

Overlawyered.com blog: "a fun story...with a dash of the mischief and romance of Ferris Bueller"

Family Lore Blog: "genuinely laugh-out-loud...well thought-out and cleverly written...pure comedy"

Delia Venables Legal Information: "an extremely funny exposure of what it is like to be a pupil barrister"

Law Minx blog: "a fine and rollicking yarn...you won't be able to put it down once you've started!"

Family Law Week Blog: "[a] hugely enjoyable debunking of the world of the Bar"

Lee Solicitors blog: "a rollicking read...[a] hybrid between...John Mortimer...infused with a feel of James Herriot."

Blogger Michael Scutt: "There's plenty to amuse both lawyers and non-lawyers alike...a good holiday read..."

Sunday, 1 November 2009

BabyBarista Book Launch covered by Devon Life's Social Diary (click to enlarge)

Monday, 26 October 2009

Writers and Artists Yearbook website interview Tim Kevan about how BabyBarista came about

I have just recently done an interview for the Writers and Artists Yearbook website about getting a book deal which can be read here. I also wrote a blog post for them which appears here and extracts from the book are published here.

Monday, 12 October 2009

Nice review of BabyB by blogger and solicitor Michael Scutt

Nice review of BabyBarista and the Art of War by Michael Scutt, a blogger and a partner at Dale Langley & Co which you can either read below or click here.

What are lawyers really like?

Now, if this doesn’t provoke a whole heap of comments, no doubt mainly derogatory, nothing will. This being the silly season it seems like an ideal time to ask the question. And I’m not going to tell you the answer. Instead I suggest you read Tim Kevan’s new book “Baby Barista and the Art of War”, just published by Bloomsbury and which is based on his blog in The Times. Tim is also a barrister, albeit he is currently taking a break from practising in favour of surfing in Devon and walking his dog.

It’s a thoroughly amusing read and should be required reading for anyone contemplating a career at the Bar (or as a solicitor, we don’t come out too well either). It’s the story of a “Pupil” (newly-qualified) barrister training in Chambers trying to outwit and outmanoeuvre the three other pupils in the hunt for the holy grail at the Bar; a tenancy in Chambers. The characters are all vividly drawn and credible; the situations the characters find themselves in all give a real flavour of litigation from the side of the practitioner. There’s plenty to amuse both lawyers and non-lawyers alike.

It’s not just a comedy though. He also touches on big issues such as the independence of the Bar which will become much more of a live issue now that solicitors and barristers can go into partnership together since the introduction of Legal Disciplinary Partnerships last April. For instance,

“For all their supposed independence, most barristers seem to live in a state of complete paranoia and spend so much time kowtowing to solicitors that their independence is worth even less than their pride”

You’ll also read the best explanation of why you shouldn’t sign up for a no win no fee agreement to fund your case, but instead get legal expense insurance in advance so that the lawyers don’t start worrying about how they are going to get paid. No win no fee agreements do create a conflict of interest between lawyer and client and the question of how they (we) get paid becomes “a big fat ugly screaming beast jumping up and down on their head”. Too true.

It’s a good holiday read – list price is £11.99, but considerably cheaper from Amazon.

Monday, 5 October 2009

Two more reviews for BabyB

Edinburgh Evening News 22/8/09
Blogger Tim Kevan's diary of a trainee barrister desperate to win a job is fascinating, subversive and pretty much impossible to put down.

The Northern Echo 29/8/09
POSSIBLY the funniest blog-turned-book to hit the shelves this year, Tim Bevan’s diary of a trainee barrister desperate to win a job is fascinating, subversive and pretty much impossible to put down.

Wednesday, 30 September 2009

Review of BabyBarista at leading U.S.Book Review website Rebecca's Reads

Review of BabyBarista and the Art of War at leading U.S.Book Review website Rebecca's Reads by Narayan Radhakrishnan. You can either read it below or click here.

A couple of weeks back while reviewing David Rosenfelt’s “New Tricks” for this website, I had wistfully remarked on whether lawyers take themselves too seriously. Have we lost our sense of humour? Each other lawyer novel we take is a legal thriller and I was sad that humorous legal prose was on its way out. The heydays of A.P. Herbert and John Mortimer’s Rumpole series seemed to be a thing of past. Most lawyers seemed to follows the John Grisham school of thought rather than the John Mortimer school. It was, while I was in this pensive mood, that I got my hands on “Baby Barista and the Art of War” by Tim Kevan - a hilariously funny novel about what really, really happens behind the walls of various law firms across the world.

This novel had initially started of as anonymous blog. Its immense popularity caught the attention of The Times Newspaper and slowly the same developed into a novel. BabyBarista is a newly enrolled English Barrister. It’s his first day in chambers, and the majesty of law, lawyers and justice is too much for BabyBarista. But BabyBarista finds a different world in the chambers, a world different from what he had thought. The pompous judges, the ruthless ambition, snide tricks, underhand dealings all are part of the regular lawyer game. The first year is crucial for BabyBarista. It can make him or break him. The race is on for the seat of permanent tenancy in the Chambers. And in the fray are three others who go by the names TopFirst, Busybody and Worrier. One of them alone will get the coveted seat. As well, BabyBarista uses all the tricks up his sleeve to get that post. What follows is simply hilarious, a tale of ambition and greed, all narrated in a humorous vein that is well mildly put- British Humour at its Pristine Best.

Highly, highly recommended.

Baby Barista and the Art of War

Tim Kevan

Bloomsbury Group (2009)

ISBN 9780747594642

Reviewed by Narayan Radhakrishnan for Rebecca's Reads (7/09)

Sunday, 20 September 2009

Review of BabyBarista at Lee Solicitors' blog

Nice review of BabyBarista and the Art of War by Lee McIlwaine of Lee Solicitors which you can either read below or click here.

Babybarista and the Art of War - A new fitting new young barrister to join the set of Rumploe and others

Its rare I ever feel compelled to review a book much less on this site but this is an exception. Babybarista was initially a blog published by the Times newspaper. The identity of the author was kept confidential and the blog was widely read. I came to it late. The authors identity was recently revealed and he is a widely and well respected Barrister in his own right.
The book is a “rollicking read” and it to my mind exceeds the hype on the cover. Personally I thought the story a promising hybrid between the great works of John Mortimer (Rumpole) infused with a feel of James Herriot. When finished I wanted to read the next instalment and I hope one arrives darn soon!

The plot is as one would expect from a Barrister tight and precise. The characters are sharply and quickly defined and that’s good because it leaves the story to concentrate on the central theme which is the unnatural selection fight between the central character “babybarista” and the three other young hopefuls. In the story we see how the dog eat dog world of the advocate is played out and how on occasion the skills that will keep this barrister afloat in the career ahead start to take shape in a world of hidden alliances and submerged risks. Somehow even though some of the things babybarista does are darn sneaky you still kind of think that he’d have survived anyway……

By the first chapter I was hooked and a few chapters in chuckling out loud expecially where some of the exchanges between the senior barristers and the Judges took place. I always wondered what happened to those whom in a sort of Harry Potter manner had the “sorting hat” of life select them for a life at the bar. I do hope this is not how it really is but yet how some of the barristers treat the Solicitors in the book makes me wonder if its not a bit more honest than it pretends. Tell you what …you buy a copy and let me know. Its a veritable bargin and worth every penny. I hope the author reads this and whats more some television producer does too because I could see this as a TV program I really could.

The link to amazon is below:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/BabyBarista-Art-War-Tim-Kevan/dp/0747594643/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251750589&sr=8-1

Monday, 7 September 2009

Nice review of BabyBarista at top U.S.blog Overlawyered.com

Very nice review of BabyBarista and the Art of War at leading U.S. blog Overlawyered.com by David Giacalone who formerly blogged at EthicalEsq. and f/k/a. You can either read it below or click here.

BabyBarista serves up a cool, dark brew-haha

By David Giacalone

[Review of Tim Kevan, BabyBarista and the Art of War (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, published August 3; about $25 including shipping from the UK to the USA; also at Amazon.com U.S.)]

Because I’ve retired from weblog punditry, Walter has generously let me borrow the Overlawyered pulpit to tell you about Tim Kevan’s first novelBaby Barista and the Art of War, which is based on Kevan’s Times Online weblog BabyBarista. If, as I expect, you like your summer reading laced with a generous — and consistently humorous — serving of confessional lawyer bashing, I think you’ll want to end or extend the season with this enjoyable new novel.

A chorus of rave reviews, many of them gushing out of Tim’s chummy-old-chap network of British blawgers the past two months (see, e.g., Charon QC,John Bolch, GeekLawyer, and Jacquig, plus one more sober Yank, Colin Samuels), have already well described the book and its portrait of a greedy, self-serving, mendacious Bar. So I will not go into great detail about the plot or the characters. As always, I have two basic questions when reviewing a book: 1) Was my time spent reading it a good investment? and 2) Who (if anyone) is likely to benefit from (or enjoy) reading it? For this novel, I’ll add a third question: Is there a way for folks here in the former colonies to overcome our cultural differences and get more out of BBAW?

As you can guess by now, I think my time was well-used reading BBAW. I was expecting a fun story that confirmed my belief that many avaricious lawyers tend to charge too much and serve their own interests before their clients’ needs or the demands of justice, and I got it. The well-paced and planned plot has the protagonist, the newly degreed “BabyBarista,” spending an apprenticeship year in “pupillage” to a group of barristers — trying to beat out three (and eventually four) other young lawyers for a “tenancy” position in the barristers’ chambers.

Prior reviewers have correctly noted that BabyB is far from an admirable character. As the title of the book suggests, he quickly decides that pupillage is like war, and models his behavior after the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu (plus tactics from the movie Wall Street, with a dash of the mischief and romance of Ferris Bueller). Despite occasional qualms of conscience, BabyB “plots, lies, and manipulates his way through the twelve months of pupillage” (Charon QC). Despite all his dirty tricks and the feeling that he just might become like the experienced barristers he holds in such low esteem, it is hard not to like and root for Tim Kevan’s BabyB.

Although the characters (except for BabyB’s best friend Claire) are all given merely descriptive names — i.e., OldRuin, TheBoss, TopFirst, BusyBody, Worrier, The Vamp, UpTights, OldSmoothie, etc. — Kevan gives the major figures enough depth to allow us to sympathize with some, loathe others (while also seeing their humanity), and recognize many of them from our own lives. Running feuds between several of the characters come alive through witty dialogue that often also advances the plot.

My own alter ego ethicalEsq was bemused but not surprised by UK lawyers acting very much like the worst segments of the American bar: taking huge fees for little work, entering settlements at their clients’ expense (to assure a fee, or to get to a golf course or an early lunch), exploiting underlings, disrespecting a “litigant in person” (pro se) party, making it dangerous to raise sexual harassment charges, etc. It was heartening to hear BabyB warn clients about the risks of no-win-no-fee (contingency) arrangements, and enlightening to see how personal injury claims are fabricated. For the entire 266 pages, the Bar’s foibles and vices are laid bare, but with a light (if exaggerated) touch rather than a heavy hand.

Charon QC got it right and says it better than I could:

[Tim Kevan] paints a wonderfully surreal picture of the Bar, stretching belief but at the same time leaving the reader wondering where the inspiration came from. . . .
I liked the way Tim used his experience of practice to parody different scenarios, different styles of work and personality, and some of the changes the legal profession is going through. His section on claim farms and their handling of accident claims is just wonderful. We have a judge who plays online bridge during hearings, an Insurance company which settles cases with a barrister by playing Battleships – the old game from childhood – and we have general mayhem and riot. . . .BabyBarista is a Hogarthian romp, a parody, a satire with edge and I have no hesitation in finding for Tim Kevan and recommending it to you.

I agree with Colin Samuels at Blawg Review that the ending was “a bit too abrupt and convenient” — which is to say, I would happily have continued reading a longer, more-developed version. Colin is also correct to point out that the book becomes easier for some within the Bar to dismiss because of its “exclusive focus on the misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance within BabyBarista’s chambers without even passing looks at others.” Nonetheless, without detracting from the worrisome truth behind the satire, I think the author spends enough time on the good qualities of OldRuin and Claire to reassure the reader that not all lawyers are scoundrels, and that BabyB may redeem himself eventually. The focus on the dark side of the profession gives BBAW its bite and its comedic punch.

So, who should read this book? Any lawyer with a sense of humor and a desire to face the demons of our profession; and anyone thinking about entering the profession but worried about losing their soul in the race for money and status. Also, tort reformers and other policy wonks looking for reasons to trim the sails of the legal profession, but who don’t mind momentarily lightening up on the topic. And (despite a plethora of inside-the-profession jokes and references), Jack Cade, Dick the Butcher and the rest of the general public, who so often want to “kill all the lawyers.”

On the other hand, folks like former D.C. Bar President John C. Keeney Jr. — who blames pop culture for the profession’s bad reputation and who asked that fellow lawyers “all join me in refusing to laugh at lawyer jokes” (Washington Lawyer, November 2004) — should probably stay away. Ditto the “prudes, puritans, and professional sour-pusses” in the Bar who are easily offended by any suggestion that lawyers can be sexy or engage in sexual relations, or who don’t understand the use of irony and satire in the war against sexism.

Despite all of the above praise, I want to recommend a little more work for my weblog friend Tim Kevan. I think he could and should use his BabyBarista website, or Barrister Blog, to present an appendix to BBAW for Non-Brits. A lack of knowledge of the workings of the UK legal system detracted a bit from my understanding and enjoyment of the novel, and may also affect many other lawyers and non-lawyers outside of the UK. We need a brief description of the roles of barristers and solicitors, and how they interact, along with more details about the organization within chambers, and the legal education process.

We also need a UK to USA glossary (or a full-blown primer on UK-English as a Second Language) to explain all of the words, idioms and cultural references in BBAW that are quite foreign to Americans (especially Baby Boomers and our elders). Tim wrote last month about the problems of translating the book into Chinese. Much is lost in translation for those of us brought up on American English and culture, too.

Blame it on my lawyer personality, but I was compelled to look up an awful lot of words and phrases, for example:

twigged – to understand, usually after some initial difficulty
bovvered – from “bovver,” troublemaking or rowdiness by street gang youths (from the Cockney pronunciation of “bother”)
“quite likely” – a phrase used to annoy others when they ask you a question
Brummie – a resident of Birmingham, England
“not a patch on you” – not be nearly as good as somebody or something

. . . and many more words, phrases, geographic and social/class references, and other allusions (e.g., Robin Reliant) in BBAW. Reading the book was enjoyable and worthwhile, despite my ignorance of UK lore and life, but it might have been sublime if I didn’t have to scratch my head and head to Google so often.

Finally, in case you’re worried about the emotional and mental health of the legal profession after reading BBAW, you should know that Tim Kevan has written (with psychiatrist Michelle Tempest) an antidote to what ails the Bar and his BabyB. It’s called Why Lawyers Should Surf, and it uses the metaphor of surfing and the ocean flow to help lawyers find the tools to fight the profession’s high-dominance personality traits, and the “skepticism skills” that can make successful lawyers, but can bring great stress and distress to our personal lives. As the summer ends, or Labor Day ushers in more responsibilities and deadlines, let Tim wind you up with BabyBarista and the Art of War, and then soothe your psyche with lessons from ocean surfing.

Disclaimer. It was not until I finished reading the book and glanced at the Acknowledgements page that I discovered my name among well over a hundred people Tim thanks for their “invaluable help in making BabyBarista.” My name must be there because of the cheerleading I did as a fellow blawger for his Barrister Blog and my envious reporting of Tim’s coup landing the BabyBarista weblog at the TimesOnline. I had no hand in the novel’s content or structure.

P.S. If you’re interested in a witty first novel by another lawyer, with fully-developed characterization of the lawyer-protagonist, plus more actual lawyering, and an excellent explanation of the psychology and strategy that goes into making a personal injury negligence case and bringing it to trial, see “An Almost Life” by Kevin Mednick (The Permanent Press, December 2007;reviewed at f/k/a).]

***

David Giacalone formerly blogged at EthicalEsq. and f/k/a.

Friday, 4 September 2009

Review of BabyBarista in The Independent newspaper

Review of BabyBarista and the Art of War in The Independent newspaper today which you can either read below or click here.

Hard cases and harsh verdicts out of court

Reviewed by Robert Verkaik

The Bar is home to one of the country's oldest institutions: an anachronism of a profession that stubbornly clings to its quill-and-pen rituals in a modern world shaped by internet developments. Its four fusty Inns of Court and the barristers who inhabit them are ripe for satire. Tim Kevan's blog, BabyBarista, is the most recent attempt to exploit the Bar's peculiar practices for comic effect. Viewed from the perspective of a trainee barrister, his fictional reports from the coal-face of the courts paint a picture of a profession peopled by pompous egomaniacs who have long lost touch with the real world.

For those who have followed the adventures of BabyB, the richness of detail in Kevan's observations gives the distinct impression that what he is writing about is much closer to the truth than the wide terms of his blog's legal disclaimer would have us believe. Kevan spent 10 years practising as a barrister in London and much of his blogging is informed by what he saw.

Legal reformers have long argued that the Bar is a closed world where professional advancement is still based on private education, nepotism and unholy alliances between judges, barristers and the litigation- funding solicitors. But what we discover in Kevan's book of his blog is far worse.
Bigotry, sexism and greed characterise the relationships between the men and women lawyers in charge of London's powerful and wealthy chambers, while justice is a courtroom shibboleth that justifies the business of making money out of law. Kevan ridicules almost all of it, including the system which rewards barristers for adjourning trials and the cab-rank rule which is suppose to stop lawyers from refusing to take briefs they don't like.

Into this world embarks BabyB, who wins a funded pupilage at a middle-sized set of chambers in Grays Inn. He soon discovers that his summer job in Starbucks is of much more use than anything he was taught at law school. In between his coffee-making and photocopying duties, BabyB is expected to massage the ego of his corrupt pupil-master while keeping the instructing solicitors sweet.

BabyBarista and The Art of War does more than poke fun at the Bar. It is a blog with a plot. BabyB soon learns that if he is going to be taken on as a tenant (membership of chambers) he will need to see off several well-placed rivals. What unfolds is a fight to the death where no holds are barred and no punches pulled. In the ensuing farce, the intrepid young barrister becomes a scheming Machiavellian at the centre of a series of intrigues intended to ensure that his name is the only one that emerges from the tenancy selection process. For all those aspiring advocates who believe they are entering a glamorous or even principled profession, this book is essential reading.

Sunday, 30 August 2009

Leading American Blogger reviews 'BabyBarista and the Art of War'

Very nice review of 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' from leading American blogger Colin Samuels on his blog which you can read Infamy or Praise which you can read here and below. It is also re-printed at Blawg Review. To order the book at a heavily discounted £7.19 (incl p&p) on amazon, click here.

I'm often frustrated by book reviews for the simple reason that most tend to avoid answering the question "Is this book worth reading?" I'll not make that mistake in writing about Tim Kevan's BabyBarista and The Art of War. This is a book worth reading; it's entertaining and insightful, building upon the best aspects of the much-praised BabyBarista blog and providing greater depth and color (or should that be colour?) to its characters and stories. It's not a flawless novel, but it's well worth your time. Kevan's publishers were kind enough to send me a pre-release copy for review (the book will be widely available on 3 August), but I enjoyed it so much that I ordered a copy for a friend rather than part with my own. I can't think of higher praise to offer than that.

Kevan is a witty and observant writer, skills he's honed at his formerly-anonymous blog. While many other blogs have had decidedly mixed results in translating what worked online into dead-tree success, Kevan shows a keen appreciation of his online audience's tastes. He keeps his pacing brisk without being too choppy; he adds to the roles played by secondary and incidental characters without losing focus on BabyBarista and his circle of friends and rivals; he offers insight into the arcane and insular world of the barrister without playing-down dark satire.

BabyBarista and The Art of War focuses on BabyBarista's death march through his year-long pupillage, a final-stage apprenticeship during which law graduates gain work experience with practicing barristers and compete with other pupils to for a position as a barrister in an established chambers. He describes the process in his diary of his first day:

[T]he ordeal through which the Bar Council continues to force its brightest and best.... A sort of upper-class reality show in microcosm every one of your foibles will be analysed and where a blackball system exists so that if you annoy one person, you're out. [Y]ou're playing to the lowest common denominator. Attempting to be as inoffensive as possible in the sound knowledge that it won't be the votes in favour that get you in but the lack of votes against.

The novel's principal characters come to life without intrusive exposition. BabyBarista is spare with details of his own situation, but what he provides to his friend, Claire, to his mentor, OldRuin, or directly to us serves to illuminate the financial desperation which drives him to succeed in his pupillage both by displaying his own merits and by subtly destroying his fellow pupils' chances. His three (later four) co-pupils seem at first to be mere caricatures of familiar personalities — Worrier is details-obsessed to the point she's unable to function professionally; BusyBody's instinct to be everywhere, to have her hand in every project, and to be all things to all people makes her a whirl of unproductive but frenzied activity; TopFirst's stellar academic achievements and social connections mask a wicked soul. As time goes by, however, these characters acquire greater depth and by the time a fourth pupil-competitor joins the fray, all of their behaviors become understandable. This is not to say that they, or BabyBarista necessarily, become invariably sympathetic characters, but they become real, something mere caricatures cannot be.

BabyBarista's pupillage experiences provide some startling criticisms of the practice of law generally and the pupillage system particularly. BabyBarista and his mother have essentially locked themselves into a high-stakes wager that, against exceptionally-long odds, BabyB can complete his climb from modest origins to lucrative barristers' chambers. As he nears that objective, the added (often unreasonable) financial pressures of the pupillage year heighten his sense of desperation and drive him to trade what he knows to be right for expedient gains or short-term personal or professional advantage. He laments that "[I]t's no different to bear baiting or cock fighting. They plunge us into debt before we get here and then leave us to fight it out, Deathmatch style." Later, after a particularly appalling incident, he warns that "[W]hatever you do, don't let the lawyers start worrying about getting paid. However much they protest otherwise, it's there in their mind. Not even at the back of their mind." His experiences highlight a system which seems designed in part to focus pupils' and barristers' minds on their own finances rather than clients' best interests and to effectively filter out those without independent means from the practice of law.

The practicing barristers who mentor BabyBarista illustrate both the best and worst aspects of legal practice. OldRuin provides an aspirational view of the lawyer as a professional, held by others and himself to a higher standard of conduct; he is at times unrealistic about the realities of modern legal practice and unwilling to challenge its more base practitioners, but he also offers some insights which should make clear to all of us who practice law that ours is a profession and not merely a business. TheBoss is a cautionary tale from start to end; he behaves unethically and cowardly, but even he becomes more real as we come to understand that he is like a Ghost of BabyBarista Yet to Come (apologies to Dickens). TheBoss is in many ways the product and victim of the finance-obsessed side of legal practice which afflicts BabyBarista; whereas BabyB sees the riches of practice, rightly or wrongly, as his and his mother's salvations, for TheBoss it has become a damnation, trapping him into an increasingly-desperate cycle of misdeeds to perpetuate his lifestyle and social position. In lesser hands, characters like OldRuin and TheBoss would be like the stereotypical angel and devil perched on the protagonist's shoulders, whispering in his ear, but Kevan writes his secondary players far less clichéed.

As I've said, though, BabyBarista is not a flawless novel. Structurally, the ending is a bit too abrupt and convenient; considering how effectively Kevan paced and plotted his novel to that point, he could have arrived at his destination with greater style and less haste. More broadly, while Kevan ventures beyond the constraints of his successful blog, he doesn't venture very far beyond. It seems that BabyBarista's chambers are meant to be at least somewhat representative of other chambers and of the larger bar. Nonetheless, the exclusive focus on the misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance within BabyBarista's chambers without even passing looks at others' (despite his extensive interaction with Claire and other pupils in the shared library and elsewhere) creates an impression that BabyB's chambers are an aberration. This tends to undercut the universality of his struggles and experiences, diminishing them as broader commentaries on pupillage and legal practice. Those on the inside of the profession, barristers particularly, will relish the satirical elements but may find it somewhat too easy to dismiss Kevan's deeper criticisms when his satire strays a bit too far in places into broad comedy. If readers find Kevan's insights into the practice of law easier to dismiss for these reasons, that's an opportunity lost; these issues deserve to be considered and discussed seriously.

It's churlish of me to note that what Kevan's done, he's done very well, but to then mark him down a bit for expanding on an excellent blog but not transcending it. Please understand, however, that this is the criticism of someone who greatly enjoyed BabyBarista and The Art of War and recommends it highly, but who can still imagine how much more it might have been.

Wednesday, 26 August 2009

BabyBarista reviewed in Counsel Magazine (click to enlarge)

Nice review of BabyBarista and the Art of War from Thom Dyke in Counsel Magazine which you can either read below or by clicking on the image on the left.

John Mortimer once described the process of undertaking pupillage as one of life's "splendid miseries". In BabyBarista and The Art of War, Tim Kevan provides a startling portrait of the year-long quest for tenancy by his eponymous hero, BabyBarista. Describing the gruelling year of pupillage as "a sort of upper-class reality show in microcosm", the book chronicles the progress of BabyBarista, who engages in all manner of brief-swapping and bed-hopping schemes in the hope of securing his prize.

BabyBarista began life as a blog written by Tim Kevan who was taking time out from his practise at 1 Temple Gardens. It quickly became a hit and was picked up by The Times, who offered to host the blog, expanding its audience out of the niche world of the legal blogosphere and into the mainstream. Whilst it was originally written anonymously, Kevan chose to "out" himself as the blog's author earlier this year, after much speculation as to who was behind the BabyBarista mask.

Written in a lively and engaging style, BabyBarista has more than enough laughs to keep the reader on the right side of the dubious ethical path plotted by the central protagonist as he takes on his fellow pupils, TopFirst, BusyBody, Worrier and ThirdSix. Taking Sun Tzu's Art of War as his guide, BabyBarista weaves an increasingly tangled web as the year unfolds, as he attempts to keep on the right side of his pupilmaster, instructing solicitor and the Bar Standards Board. But Kevan also tackles the more thorny questions of professional misconduct and the financial hardship suffered by many members of the junior Bar.

Whilst Kevan may not present life at the Bar in the rosiest light, he clearly has a genuine affection for the profession. Characters such as OldRuin (described as Dumbledore meets Clarence, the angel from It's A Wonderful Life) and TheBusker are drawn with real warmth and understanding. BabyBarista is part of a long-standing tradition of legal fiction, and it is inevitable that comparisons will be drawn with Rumpole and the hugely overrated Henry Cecil.

But it is the world of the blog to which BabyBarista owes the most. One suspects that BabyBarista would be as much at home in the backstabbing, corporate world of Jeremy Blachman's Anonymous Lawyer as he is in the Inns of Court. The very nature of a blog as an "online confessional", lends itself well to the often isolated world of the legal profession. This popularity is reflected in the lively mix of legal bloggers, where Simon Myerson QC's Pupillage and How to Get It, and th slightly more tongue-in-cheek Charon QC, jostle for position with bloggers like Law Minx and Android's Reminiscences.

Kevan is currently working on the sequel to BabyBarista. On the strength of this first instalment of the story, I hope it will not be the last as BabyBarista has certainly earned the right to stand alongside Rumpole in the pantheon of legal fiction. Genuinely funny, BabyBarista deserves to become compulsory reading for prospective pupils and pupilmasters alike.

Thom Dyke is starting pupillage at Hardwicke Building in October.

Tuesday, 25 August 2009

Another review for BabyBarista in The Times

Another review of BabyBarista and the Art of War in The Times which you can either read below or click here.

Baby Barista and the Art of War by Tim Kevan
The Times review by Iain Finlayson
Write about what you know, is the baseline advice to first-time novelists. Kevan, who practiced [sic] as a London barrister for a decade and writes a blog for Times Online, seems to have taken it to heart. His novel is presented in diary form, a year in the life of Baby Barista, ambitious young London lawyer, part-time Starbucks barista and pupil barrister, who pitches his youthful wits against three competitors for the big prize - a place in a prestigious set of chambers. Baby’s relentlessly racy, rumbustiously Rumpolean humour is faintly reminiscent, in a high-end, modern manner, of the series of funny, frothy, sometimes fatuous novels of Richard Gordon, beginning with Doctor in the House and the single legal novel, Brothers in Law. He comes across as a spirited student of Sun-Tzu, Machiavelli, Brigid Jones and the Artful Dodger.
Bloomsbury, £11.99. Buy it from Books First.

NB Due to a mistake by The Times, this review first appeared in hard copy on 15 August 2009 in a slightly different version of which the corrected version read as follows:

BabyBarista and the Art of War by Tim Keven
(Bloomsbury, £11.99; Buy this book; 288pp)
This is “The Legal Apprentice”, a high-concept TV show disguised as a smart book. It is faintly reminiscent of the funny, sometimes fatuous novels of Richard Gordon, beginning with Doctor in the House and the single legal novel, Brothers in Law. BabyBarista, part-time Starbucks barista and pupil barrister, pitches his wits against three rivals for the big prize: a place in a prestigious set of chambers. Keven’s book began life as a blogspot, went to The Times as a column, and has now been clapped between soft covers. He comes across as a spirited student of Sun-Tzu, Machiavelli and The Artful Dodger.

Tuesday, 11 August 2009

BabyBarista reviewed in The Big Issue Scotland (click to enlarge)

Monday, 10 August 2009

BabyBarista reviewed in Legal Week

Great review of BabyBarista and the Art of War from Thom Dyke in Legal Week which you can read below or click here.

'An upper class reality show'

Pupil-to-be Thom Dyke reviews blog-turned-novel ‘BabyBarista and The Art of War'

John Mortimer once described the process of undertaking pupillage as one of life's "splendid miseries". In BabyBarista and The Art of War, Tim Kevan provides a portrait of the year-long quest for tenancy. Describing the gruelling year of pupillage as "a sort of upper-class reality show in microcosm", the book chronicles the progress of BabyBarista, who engages in all manner of brief-swapping and bed-hopping schemes in the hope of securing his prize of a permanent position at chambers.

BabyBarista began life as a blog written by 1 Temple Gardens tenant Tim Kevan. The blog quickly became a hit among the legal blogging community. It was picked up by The Times, which offered to host the blog, expanding its audience out of the niche world of the legal blogosphere and into the mainstream. While it was originally written anonymously, Kevan chose to out himself as the blog's author earlier this year after much speculation as to who was behind the BabyBarista mask.

Written in a lively and engaging style, BabyBarista has more than enough laughs to keep the reader on the right side of the dubious ethical path plotted by the central protagonist as he takes on his fellow pupils, TopFirst, BusyBody, Worrier and ThirdSix. Taking Sun Tzu's Art of War as his guide, BabyBarista weaves an increasingly tangled web as the year unfolds, attempting to stay in favour with his pupilmaster, instructing solicitor and the Bar Standards Board. But Kevan also tackles the more thorny questions of professional misconduct and the financial hardship suffered by many members of the junior Bar.

While Kevan may not present life at the Bar in the rosiest light, he clearly has a genuine affection for the profession. Characters such as OldRuin (described as Dumbledore meets Clarence, the angel from It's A Wonderful Life) and TheBusker are drawn with real warmth and understanding.

BabyBarista is part of a long-standing tradition of legal fiction, and it is inevitable that comparisons will be drawn with Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey and the work of judge-turned-writer Henry Cecil. But it is the world of the blog to which BabyBarista owes the most. One suspects that BabyBarista would be as much at home in the backstabbing, corporate world of Jeremy Blachman's Anonymous Lawyer - another novel that started out as a blog - as he is in the Inns of Court. The very nature of a blog as an 'online confessional', lends itself well to the often isolated world of the legal profession. This is reflected in the popularity of blogging among lawyers, particularly in the US.

On the strength of this first instalment of the story, I hope it will not be the last. And it looks like it won't as Kevan is currently working on a sequel. Genuinely funny, BabyBarista deserves to become compulsory reading for prospective pupils and pupilmasters alike.

BabyBarista and The Art of War by Tim Kevan is published by Bloomsbury. Thom Dyke will start pupillage at Hardwicke Building in October.

Friday, 7 August 2009

Great review of 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' in The Times newspaper

Great review of BabyBarista and the Art of War in The Times newspaper yesterday. To read it either click here (second review down) or see the text below.

Baby Barista and the Art of War by Tim Kevan

This book’s genesis is in an anonymous blog started in 2007. The book emerges as a cross between The Talented Mr Ripley, Rumpole and Bridget Jones’s Diary.

The reader is pitched into Baby Barista’s manipulative, scheming and, often, downright evil battle to gain tenancy over his competing pupils. The plot burns up the pages and the characters that range within are all highly observed and coloured with Kevan’s acerbic wit.

Few people have names other than the nicknames bestowed by Baby Barista. This technique alone seduces smiles. They include Old Smoothie and The Vamp; there is a junior clerk “Fancies Himself”, while solicitors provide the characters of “Slippery Slope” and “Cliche Clanger”. There are some decent moral legal figures such as Old Ruin and The Busker. However, it is the selfish, lying, money-grubbing and duplicitous lawyer characters who dominate the narrative.

It would have been refreshing if Kevan had lingered longer over his decent lawyers to counterbalance his voracious characters. However, the emphasis on the grotesque does have the effect of ratcheting up the plot.

Ultimately, the book is a gallop of a read. It is a clever legal romp, a comedy mixed with ruminations about life, liberally peppered with black humour and layered in farce. It firmly proclaims, and disclaims, that it is fiction but there are many Bar absurdities from which Kevan has accurately drawn. As to whether any of the cast represent generic legal characters lurking in the profession, all I can say is that you may very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment.

Baby Barista by Tim Kevan, Bloomsbury Publishing, £11.99
Review by Kirsty Brimelow

Saturday, 1 August 2009

BabyBarista reviewed in Western Morning News (click to enlarge original or see text below)

Comic capers in chambers
Sarah Pitt meets a barrister-cum-author whose irreverent look at the legal profession has even the Bar Council laughing.
BabyBarista and the Art of War By Tim Kevan. Bloomsbury, £11.99

So what’s so funny about being a barrister? The answer is here, in Tim Kevan’s hilarious account of the life of the fight for supremacy among pupil barristers in a London chambers. Our hero BabyBarista is up against three other competing for the prize to be taken on permanently at the end of the year of pupillage, by fair means or foul.
In diary format, the book – originally a blog on The Times Online – sees the author sink to increasingly levels of low cunning as he seeks to outwit his fellow pupils, who include the arrogant TopFirst, Cambridge graduate with a prize-winning CV and ego to match. As it says on the cover, “it’s sort of Big Brother, but with little horsehair wigs”.
Tim, 38, now lives in Braunton, North Devon, where he goes surfing at the merest hint of a swell. His book, though, published this month, started life as a blog he wrote while working as a barrister on London, something that consumed 10 years of his life.
With its catalogue of larger-than-life – some might say grotesque – characters the novel struck a chord with an audience far wider than the legal profession (though it made Tim’s colleagues in chambers laugh too). Steeped as he had been in the legal environment for so long, his characters just flowed from his imagination.
And they are all deliciously ghastly. There is BabyBarista’s oily, corrupt pupil master TheBoss, the raking-it-in sexist OldSmoothie, constantly sparring with female contemporary UpTights, and the kleptomaniac JudgeJewellery, who can’t stop herself nicking cheap earrings from high street jewellers CheapAndNasty and wearing them to court.
Tim says he enjoyed being a barrister just as much as he enjoys lampooning the profession in his fiction (he is planning to return to the Bar when writing permits). But he can see there is more to life than arguing legal points in a stuffy courtroom. He is the author, with psychiatrist Dr Michelle Tempest, of the motivational book Why lawyers Should Surf.
In BabyBarista and the Art of War, it is lawyer TheBusker, into surfing, who laconically wins his cases without even trying, by leaning back in his chair and suggesting, as his opponent gets increasingly heated, that they all stop sweating the small stuff. In one case, in a court in Minehead (the Somerset seaside town where Tim grew up), he persuades a judge, in a few calm words, that pilfering can be excused as an example of the age-old tradition of “gleaning”.
“My two favourite barrister characters are OldRuin and TheBusker,” says Tim. “Those two characters are how a barrister should be, whereas the others are caricatures mostly. They are grotesque, but you still like writing about them, and reading about them.”
BabyBarista gets his name from the coffee-making that seems to be his most crucial responsibility as a pupil barrister; TheBoss is most particular about the way he wants his coffee ground – finely “so that it has as much surface area as possible”.
BabyBarista is not Tim. He is from the generation below, the twenty-somethings, who might plausibly be adept at the most contemporary methods of stitching up opponents; setting up fake e-mail accounts and using mobile phones as covert camera. “I’m 38, but his is really a voice 15 years younger than me, and I love the fact that his voice just popped out,” says Tim. “He is really modern, up to these modern tricks.”
While the book has drawn comparisons with Rumpole, John Mortimer’s barrister would be old enough to be BabyBarista’s grandfather or even great-grandfather. Tim himself looks back on his own year as a pupil-barrister fondly. In his case three out of four of the pupil-barristers were given a tenancy, and, no, he didn’t resort to the same strategies as BabyBarista to get his place, though he makes excuses for his fictitious creation’s behaviour, saying “it is a very stressful year”.
The book flowed all the more easily and hilariously because it was made up, he says. Even his professional body, the Bar Council, has been sufficiently tickled by his depiction of the pantomime that is chambers life to recommend the book for holiday reading.
A particular gem is his description of afternoon tea, which none of the barristers ever miss.
“Despite the fact that the members collectively earn enough to buy their own factory, the chocolate biscuits are always treated as a great delicacy, probably due to the fact that chambers only provides the cheaper plain biscuits for client conferences.”
It’s reassuring to know they’ve got their priorities right.

Sunday, 26 July 2009

Good review of 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' from Delia Venables

Good review of 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' from Delia Venables the author of the leading internet legal hub www.venables.co.uk which you can read here and also below. To pre-order the book at a heavily discounted £7.19 (incl p&p), click here.

Baby Barista is a book by Tim Kevan, just published by Bloomsbury. Tim Kevan practised as a barrister at Middle Temple for 10 years and has written quite a few serious law books but he has now branched out into a extremely funny exposure of what it is like to be a pupil barrister. His account was published as an anonymous blog on Times Online for a year or more and indeed continues now in the same persona (still referred to in the blog as Baby Barista although now he is a "proper" barrister). The book brings together the main series of blogs, written as a diary, with the young barrister realising that to gain a tenancy requires more than honest hard work. It is very funny and exposes the practices of the bar in a rather scary way (do things really happen like this?). I thoroughly enjoyed it and, judging from the plaudits already received from many well known people, it will be a runaway success. (The subtext "and The Art of War", a Chinese military treatise written by Sun Tzu in the 6th century BC, is a fascinating insight as well but I won't attempt to summarise that.)

If you need a little light reading for the summer, or alternatively a present for your mother or other dear one who is not quite sure what you do, then go for it. For £8.99 plus p & p it's a steal - you can order it online now, as above, or even cheaper here.

BabyBarista wins a Law Minx Blog Award!

Thank you to top blogger Law Minx not only for one of her blog awards but also for a very nice review of 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' which you can read here and below. To pre-order the book at a heavily discounted £7.19 (incl p&p), click here.

The(Nervous) Shock of the Year Award - Goes to Mr. Tim Kevan for the truly amazing revelation that he is not ONLY the true architect of the machinations of Mr Baby Barista but also author of a fine book entitled ‘Baby Barista and the Art of War’ which I have had the great good fortune to read before it hits the shelves in August and found to be a fine and ROLLOCKING yarn related to Baby B’s Quest for Tenancy; it is a book which I urge you, Dear BlogWatchers, in the strongest possible terms, to place at the top of your Summer Reading List. Trust me, you won’t be able to put it down once you’ve started!!!

Saturday, 25 July 2009

Nice review of 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' by Family Law Week blog

Nice review of 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' from top blogger and barrister Jacqui Gilliatt of the Family Lore blog here and also below. To pre-order the book at a heavily discounted £7.19 (incl p&p), click here.

No doubt a number of pupils were secretly rather relieved when the identity of the author of the Time’s Baby Barista blog was finally revealed in the Times to be Tim Kevan so that the finger of suspicion was no longer pointing at them. I have long been a fan of the blog describing its style elsewhere as Henry Cecil on speed. Every new pupil of mine (Natasha, take note) is lent a copy of Brothers-in-Law by Henry Cecil which, although now a little dated, describes the life of a post-war pupil along with some of the more quaint traditions of the bar. The book was also made into a very fine film starring Ian Carmichael & Terry Thomas (and later a radio & tv programme starring Richard Briers) and was one of a series of legal novels written by Henry Cecil who became a Judge in 1949 & used to sit in Clerkenwell & Shoreditch, I believe. I am also rather fond of the follow up book – Daughters-in-Law for obvious reasons. You can buy the books from Amazon

For more pupil lit I would also thoroughly recommend the appropriately named The Pupil by Caro Fraser (Henry Cecil on Viagra?) the first in her delicious serious about Caper Court Chambers and the gorgeously seductive Leo. Caro’s take on lawyers is that we are all crippled inside as she puts it.

If I had any doubts about how the Baby Barista column might stand up as a book (especially as I have read it already) they are entirely dispelled by Baby Barista & the Art of War (which you can also buy from Amazon . The whole is most definitely greater than the sum of its parts and it’s lovely to have it all in one place so you don’t have that feeling you have missed an episode. It’s just as witty on re-reading. And just as much fun trying to match the characters to real life barristers (& please don’t tell me who I remind you of & I will return the courtesy!). But, of course, none of it could be true could it?

One particular passage made me wince. TheBoss to his pupil:

“..we start off in this job with so much potential. The world is our oyster and we can do anything we choose. We then spend years taking ourselves further and further away from the mainstream until we are so specialised that if we were to jump ship there would not even be a life-raft nearby. We are good only for being barristers. Otherwise it’s straight back down to the bottom of the pile aged forty-four”.

Substitute ‘family lawyer’ for ‘barrister’ and it sums up many of the conversations I have been having with family practitioners in recent months.

And SlipperySlope:

“The law’s not about ivory towers or wigs and gowns. It’s about one thing and that’s costs. Not justice. Not rights. Not defending the innocent or prosecuting the guilty. It’s cold, hard, stinking cash. Your time, literally, is money. You sign away your life, but for a price of which even Faust himself would be proud.”

Fortunately, these are atypically bleak moments in an otherwise hugely enjoyable debunking of the world of the Bar. But is Baby Barista really as Machiavellian as he is made out to be? Most of his victims are odious and richly deserve what they get. He has far too soft a spot for OldRuin whose life he saves, returning a brief to do so & upsetting his HeadClerk (is he mad?). He loves his mother despite her embarrassing appearance at the chambers’ tea party bearing cake. Part of his drive to succeed in the tenancy stakes is the desire to keep her from hookey street. And then there is the fragrant Claire for whom he is clearly destined so long as she doesn’t find out the full extent of his shenanigans. If there is a moral to this amoral story perhaps it is that inside every barrister is a nice person trying to get out?

Monday, 20 July 2009

Bar Council publicises 'BabyBarista and The Art of War'

Very grateful to The General Council of the Bar for mention of 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' here and also printed below. To pre-order the book at a heavily discounted £7.19 (incl p&p), click here.

BabyBarista and the Art of War

If you are looking for a light hearted entertaining holiday read, then you may wish to purchase a copy of Tim Kevan's book BabyBarista and the Art of War. Already widely known as a blog on The Times’ website, the book is being published by Bloomsbury in August of this year.

BabyBarista and the Art of War is Tim Kevan's first novel, and was described by broadcaster Jeremy Vine as "a wonderful, racing read - well-drawn, smartly plotted and laugh out loud" and by author Boris Starling as "sharp, acerbic, and almost illegally funny".

Tim Kevan practised as a barrister for over ten years at 1 Temple Gardens in London. He specialised in particular in sports law, personal injury, civil fraud and credit hire and wrote or co-wrote ten law books. He was also a member of the Bar Council’s Public Affairs Committee.

Tim told the Bar Council: “Having so far had ten very happy years practising at the Bar, it has been a wonderful opportunity in the last couple of years to do something a bit different and to create a book which will hopefully make people smile.”

Tim follows in a tradition of barristers writing legal comedy including Henry Cecil, Clive Coleman and the great John Mortimer and his famous Rumpole of the Bailey series. He is also the co-author (with Dr Michelle Tempest) of Why Lawyers Should Surf’ (xpl Publishing, 2007). For more information visit Tim’s website.

Sunday, 19 July 2009

Good review of 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' from John Bolch of the Family Lore blog

Nice review of 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' from top blogger John Bolch of the Family Lore blog here and also below. To pre-order the book at a heavily discounted £7.19 (incl p&p), click here.

As someone who has always prided themselves in having a healthy irreverence for the legal profession, and being a regular reader of the BabyBarista blog in The Times, I anticipated that I would enjoy reading BabyBarista and The Art of War...

BabyBarista ('BabyB') is a pupil barrister, vying with three other pupils in his chambers for the lucrative prize of a tenancy. His pupilmaster tells him that "litigation is like war", and hands him a copy of The Art of War, the famous manual on warfare written in the 6th century BC by Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu. The advice is not lost upon BabyB, who proceeds to utilise Sun Tzu's wisdom in his own war against his fellow pupils.

What follows is a non-stop romp through BabyB's year of pupillage, in which he (almost) shamelessly uses every underhand tactic available to him to ensure that it is he rather than his rivals who is awarded the coveted tenancy. Along the way we witness blackmail, deception and all manner of dirty tricks being employed by BabyB, yet we never lose affection for his character. Perhaps that is in part because some of the other characters are equally venal, or just plain unpleasant. And this does not just apply to the other pupils. Kevan paints a wonderful picture of not just the modern Bar but the legal profession generally as we meet greedy, vain and self-serving barristers, corrupt solicitors and even a shoplifting judge.

What of justice? Well, it hardly gets a look-in throughout, with the interests of the lawyers (including the judges) taking precedence, and cases being settled for their benefit (pecuniary or otherwise), rather than the benefit of the parties involved. "Like a croupier in a big casino, all they were doing was administering other people's bets" comments BabyB of claims lawyers. When we do get into a courtroom, we find that "for all its airs and graces" it "is just as much of a low-down, dirty free-for-all as pupillage", with decisions hinging upon the skills of the barristers, rather than on the merits of their cases. BabyB himself soon comes to this realisation: "you get the result you pay for”, he says, "as for justice, I think it's time we're honest and simply stick it on eBay and see what it fetches."

But the book is not just a one-dimensional tirade about the excesses of the legal profession. There are characters who really do care about what they are doing, and we are regularly treated to brief interludes that have little or nothing to do with the main story, but are amongst the most amusing parts of the book. I hesitate to use the cliché, but some of these are genuinely laugh-out-loud.

So, what is one to make of BabyBarista and The Art of War? It is obviously well thought-out and cleverly written, but was it Kevan's intention to 'blow the lid' on the profession? I think not. True, many of the plot lines and anecdotes contain a grain of truth, but this is not serious stuff, much as those with an axe to grind against the profession may wish it to be. The aim is unabashed amusement, the main players are intentionally caricatures and the plot lines are unashamedly exaggerated. The result is pure comedy: no more, no less.

Did I enjoy reading the book? You bet I did, and any lawyer who doesn’t is taking themselves too seriously. But this book is not just for lawyers – I would recommend it to anyone seeking an entertaining read this summer.

Thursday, 16 July 2009

Nice review for 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' from top blogger Geeklawyer

Very nice review of 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' from top blogger Geeklawyer here and also below. To pre-order the book at a heavily discounted £7.19 (incl p&p), click here.

Baby Barista – the witness statement

Sometimes fiction is stranger than the truth. The truth is rarely visible in fictional accounts of the Bar, from Rumpole, This Life and onwards. We barristers are the subject of malice spite and envy from the failed barristers in the Cabinet right down to the Solicitor-Inadequates at the junior end of the profession, all of whom peddle their spite to any takers. At a time when the Bar Council is desperately attempting, and failing, to counter this black propaganda, BabyBarista enters the fray with his Machiavellian flailing, undoing all attempts at the rehabilitation of our image. Excellent.

BabyBarista is a fictional pupil at a fictional chambers and who blogs at The Times. The Art of War is the autobiography of his pupillage. BabyB is not a sympathetic character; like Geeklawyer he is scheming manipulative amoral disloyal calculating and backstabbing, but none of these virtues offset his essential badness. His only salvation comes from the fact that his rival pupils, competing against him for the single prized tenancy, are even more loathsome: ThirdSix and TopFirst are variously smug superior snobbish calculating and pretentious. Fine and necessary qualities in a barrister but not conducive to a spirit of camaraderie:

TopFirst telephoned me over the weekend. He said he wanted to talk about pupillage.
‘Look BabyB, we’re all in competition for tenancy, but let’s be realistic about this. Worrier and BusyBody are both now dead in the water and it’s developed into a straight fight between you and me.’
‘OK.’ No prizes for that one Mr Brainbox.
‘Well look, I’ve been thinking. You ever heard of the prisoner’s dilemma?’
‘[...] Yea, shows that cooperation’s often better than fighting.’
[...]
‘You’re suggesting a truce. Fine by me,’ I lied.
‘Exactly so. Fight and we may both die. Cooperate and there’s at least a small chance that maybe we’ll convince them to take us both on.’
‘Makes sense,’ I lied again. ‘You can count on me.’ [...]
… there will be no cooperation.

If you think only the pupils are oily rats then the barristers are just older more experienced versions: TheBoss – BabyB’s first pupilmaster. An unscrupulous, spineless coward, “You’re up to your neck in this, you realise,’ he told me. ‘If I go down I’m taking you with me.’“; OldSmoothie – a Peter Bowles character; TheVamp a cock hunting old slapper; TheBusker and OldRuin are, among others, old hack tenants in chambers who round out the sorry cast. This is one sorry improbable and deeply doomed set; no doubt soon to merge with Peckham Chambers and then vanish.

The Art of War is a hilarious parody of the profession and an engaging reprise of all the old cliches about us barristers. To those of us on the inside it was clearly this and no more: some of the scenarios were deeply implausible and the behaviour of the characters way beyond credibility, although it was this that rendered the humour. Geeklawyer worries a little, and somewhat hypocritically given his own blogging and Twittering behaviour, about whether this will be seen as pure humour by the public or if they will really imagine that judges and barristers will stitch them up just to get a round of golf in on a Friday? One really really hopes not.

The Art of War was a side-splitting read that Geeklawyer couldn’t put down: it gets his A+ recommendation. Open a new browser tab now and order it from Amazon immediately.
Tim Kevan, the recently outed ex-anonymous barrister behind BabyB, deserves a pat on the back for a great first novel. Geeklawyer hopes the second will arrive soon.

Monday, 13 July 2009

Great review of 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' from top blogger Charon QC

Great review of 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' from top blogger Charon QC here and also below. To pre-order the book at a heavily discounted £7.19 (incl p&p), click here.

Boring barristers?… some are far from boring… BabyBarista and the Art of War

Marcel Berlins has stirred things up with his article in the Guardian suggesting the modern advocates lack the flair and atistry of their forebears…. and suggests that modern barristers are boring.
I don’t know the name of the vintner that author of BabyBarista Tim Kevan uses… but I am going to ask him… because whatever he was drinking as he plotted out and wrote BabyBarista and The Art of War... I want some… it certainly does the business.
Tim Kevan, who is a Cambridge man and a barrister himself (although for the present he has gone surfing and writing), has created a marvellously mendacious manipulating monster for the 21st Century in the form of BabyBarista who plots, lies, and manipulates his way through the twelve months of pupillage to try and defeat TopFirst, TheWorrier, BusyBody and late entrant ThirdSix to gain the coveted tenancy.

When I was at university in the early seventies I read Brothers-in-Law, AP Herbert, Megarry and then read the entire Rumpole series written by Sir John Mortimer QC in the Eighties. BabyBarista follows this fine lineage but does not try to copy it – quite the opposite. Tim Kevan weaves colour and story through brief description and good narrative and is bang up to date on his cliches (which I suspect are deliberate to parody pre and misconceptions) and icons of the modern world of blogs, Twitter and Facebook. He paints a wonderfully surreal picture of the Bar, stretching belief but at the same time leaving the reader wondering where the inspiration came from. We meet his pupil master TheBoss – a man with absolutely no spine who, shall we say, gets into some pretty difficult water. There is TheVamp – a woman I could probably enjoy meeting myself in all senses of the word, UpTights – not my type, OldSmoothie – a pretty hopeless case and the avuncular “Feel the force, Luke” character of OldRuin – the only truly honest barrister in the entire book – apart from the lovely Claire.
I liked the way Tim used his experience of practice to parody different scenarios, different styles of work and personality, and some of the changes the legal profession is going through. His section on claim farms and their handling of accident claims is just wonderful. We have a judge who plays online bridge during hearings, an Insurance company which settles cases with a barrister by playing Battleships – the old game from childhood – and we have general mayhem and riot. I was left hoping for more extreme behaviour from BabyBarista in his quest for pupillage, conscious that I was rooting for an appalling role model for the legal profession and I enjoyed every page. Cleverly, Tim grounds the entire book with the sub-text of SunTzu, The Art of War.
As with all authors there is the obligatory “All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance… etc etc..”
I’m sure this is the case - but I couldn’t help putting a face to some of his characters from people I have met in my lifetime. This, of course, made it even more enjoyable for me. Roll on the next book.
BabyBarista is a Hogarthian romp, a parody, a satire with edge and I have no hesitation in finding for Tim Kevan and recommending it to you. Tim Kevan, a fellow blogger and friend, has done the business… and that, as my regular readers will have gathered, is my legion d’honneur… my highest accolade.. and it made me laugh… out loud.. as I read it lying in state on my futon with a bottle of Rioja to my left.

Sunday, 31 May 2009

Barry McGuigan MBE praises 'BabyBarista and the Art of War'

"BabyBarista provides an entertaining and highly amusing insight into the mysterious world of wigs and gowns. Right from the start the gloves are off and the fight for tenancy is no less dramatic than a top class boxing match. It's a terrific read which makes you both laugh and keep the pages turning. It also confirms what I've always suspected - that the courtroom is not so different from the boxing ring." Barry McGuigan MBE, former World featherweight Boxing Champion. To pre-order the book at a heavily discounted £7.19 (incl p&p), click here.

Sunday, 10 May 2009

Author Boris Starling on BabyBarista

"If you thought This Life, North Square or Sydney Carton gave barristers a bad name, you ain't seen nothing yet. Baby Barista is a worm's-eye view of the profession, and the angle is far from flattering. It is also sharp, acerbic, and almost illegally funny. There's the usual disclaimer about it being a work of fiction, but if you believe that, you should be a juror." Boris Starling, author of Messiah, Storm, Vodka and Visibility. To pre-order a copy of 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' from amazon, click here.

Monday, 20 April 2009

Jeremy Vine on BabyBarista

"With every turn of the page, my eyebrows moved slightly further up my forehead. There was me, assuming the junior bar was crammed with the serious and the high-minded, where the only trace of ambition is the politest nudge ... BabyBarista shows the eagles and eaglets with their talons out and their feathers up. It is a wonderful, racing read - well-drawn, smartly plotted and laugh out loud - and we all just have to pray that none of it is true. You'll never look at a young lawyer in the same way again." Broadcaster and journalist Jeremy Vine. To pre-order a copy of 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' from amazon, click here.

Friday, 10 April 2009

Western Morning News on BabyBarista

Tuesday, 31 March 2009

The Times reveal Tim Kevan as the author of BabyBarista

The Times Online have today revealed Tim Kevan as the writer of their blog BabyBarista. To read the article, click here. It also reports that Bloomsbury will be publishing the first book in the series entitled 'BabyBarista and the Art of War' (pictured). To buy an advance copy of the book, click here.
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Thursday, 15 January 2009

BabyBarista wins American Bar Association Award!

BabyBarista received over twice as many votes as any other site in the "Quirky" category of the American Bar Association's best blawg competition and a healthy lead over every other blog in all the categories. Officially the best legal blog in the world out of 2,000 that started out (!) The full results can be found here.

Monday, 9 April 2007

I have moved to The Times...

The Times Online asked me if they could host this blog and I was very happy to agree. Therefore, to view my most recent posts, click here.

Thursday, 5 April 2007

Day 131 (week 27): OldHand

Went off to court with my new pupilmistress UpTights this morning. Unlike TheBoss, she hardly ever settles a case at court on the basis that, “We’re paid to fight, not settle.” However, it’s almost as if she’s unable to undertake a negotiation as her rigid manner is also reflected in the way she treats her opponent’s case. Quite a contrast to TheBoss who would sidle up to opponents and suggest something like, “Don’t suppose we can get rid of this and be back in Chambers for lunch do you?” UpTights on the other hand told her opponent today,
“There’s no point talking if you’re not prepared to look at this case sensibly.”
“Well, quite,” said the other side’s barrister. Let’s call him OldHand. He clearly knew UpTights and had obviously decided that the best strategy was to wind her up. He leaned in a little too close for her liking, given her “personal space” issues and continued,
“Though I’m sure you’ll take your client’s instructions if I do make an offer.”

UpTights moved away from OldHand and replied,
“A little space please…Of course I’d take instructions. However, I really don’t think there’s any point talking further.”

After this, OldHand needled her further by getting his pupil to come over and make an offer to UpTights.
“Can’t he be bothered to come over here and tell me himself?”
“No he can’t.” The pupil answered, obviously having been briefed what to say. The offer itself was ridiculously low one and only served to irritate UpTights further. This was exacerbated when the pupil followed up with,
“[OldHand] says that if you don’t accept by the start of the hearing, it will be withdrawn.”
“Well, you can tell [OldHand]…”
“…and he also said to tell you that he looks forward to hearing what your client has to say about the offer.” After which the pupil turned on his heels.

It only got worse when we went into court. Old Hand started called UpTights “Mrs” rather than “Ms” which though she didn’t correct him clearly grated, particularly when he started mispronouncing her name as well. He also took two extremely weak points at the start of the hearing which left UpTights even more jumpy and impatient than usual. It only took a couple of hours of this before UpTights finally snapped at the judge in response to question he had asked.
“With respect, Your Honour. If you read the witness statement of the Claimant you will see…”
“Are you suggesting that I havn’t read the witness statements?”
“Of course not, Your Honour…”

UpTights by this point couldn’t help herself and during OldHand’s provocative submissions she started shaking her head and muttering,
“No, no, no.”

OldHand stopped mid-flow and said to the judge,
“I’m sorry, your Honour, but it seems my learned friend Mrs [Uptights] wishes to address you early.” At which point he sat down.
“Yes, Ms [UpTights]. Your opponent is right. I too find your constant interrupting and muttering extremely irritating and would be grateful if you would refrain from it in future.”

UpTights was speechless and simply nodded angrily at the judge before OldHand stood up, smiled over at her and continued.

By which point we were done for

Wednesday, 4 April 2007

Day 130 (week 27): Confusion

Had my first small claims hearing today and surprised myself by pulling a victory out of the hat although I have to admit that it was more by luck than judgment. It was a standard car case and during my cross-examination I became so thoroughly confused with the difference between the nearside and the offside of a car that it rubbed off on the other side’s witness. It was as if he couldn’t get it into his head that the barrister was getting something so simple wrong and so he started to doubt himself. A brilliant tactical manoeuvre for which, despite the fact that it was completely unintended, I was delighted to find that my client gave me full credit. The lesson I take away is that whatever you do in court, and however badly, do it with confidence.

In the meantime, BusyBody has told me that she is definitely pregnant and is deciding what to do over the issue of paternity. Poor Worrier is getting weighed down by her first cases and is not looking at all happy. There are just too many details in Worrier Land and I get the feeling from hearing about her first days in court that these may have been overflowing into her submissions.

No pebble left unturned.

Tuesday, 3 April 2007

Day 129 (week 27): HoneyTrap

In my search for someone to play the fictional Ginny, TopFirst’s new pen pal, I contacted one of those “Test Your Boyfriend” agencies you see mentioned in the newspapers and went to visit them in my lunch hour. As I embark upon my biggest act of war so far, I have some consolation on the fact that he is supposedly happily engaged and the reality is that my plan will fail if he remains faithful.

I found this agency in a rather seedy office in Covent Garden. I told them that I was the brother of TopFirst’s fiancée and concerned that he would be faithful to her. I explained that he is an intellectual and social snob in that order and furthermore that Ginny has been holding herself out to be a model. They said that they had a couple of star students on their books who only occasionally worked for them to pay off their student debts at the end of each academic year. I looked at their profiles and one in particular stood out due to a particularly haughty look which I think TopFirst might go for. They said they’d get back to me as to availability.

I then returned to Chambers and emailed TopFirst from Ginny’s account with the photo of HoneyTrap, my virtual creation who is suddenly becoming very real.

Monday, 2 April 2007

Day 128 (week 27): BullDog

I seriously considered calling in sick over the weekend after someone whispered that this one way of getting around the Cab Rank Rule and avoid representing the less enticing of clients. The problem was, no-one would have believed me and the damage I’d have done my tenancy chances was just too much. So I trotted off to the salubrious surroundings of Brent Magistrates’ Court where I met my first ever client, a short, bald, very fat man in his late forties who I shall politely call BullDog.

“So you’re my brief are ye? How old are you mate?”
“Twenty-seven.” I lied. My voice raising an octave in the process.
“And how long you bin practisin’?”
“Three years.” My voice going two octaves deeper as I made a fresh attempt to assert even the tiniest bit of authority. Great. My first words on my first day with my first client and they’re all unadulterated big fat porky pies.
“No way, mate! You must be one of them new ‘uns. It’s April ain’t it? My brief once told me about you lot. Look there’s another one over there.”

And so there was, all fresh-faced, shoes polished, new suit and wide-eyed earnestness. A replica of myself in fact.

I admitted my inexperience.
“So mate. You’ve just lied to your client, have you? Guess you’d better get me a good result today then. Or I might just report you.”

Just what I needed. A client who knew his rights and who now held my professional future in his grubby fat hands. It doesn’t come much more serious than lying to clients.

“So mate. This is the way I see it. I might have been a bad boy in the past but I ain’t bin caught doin’ nuffin’ for two years. Goin’ straight you can say. Tell ‘em about me daughter and ’ow I’ve been workin’ the doors to look after ’er. Might’ve skimmed a bit of the takings that night but never done it before. Know what I mean mate?”

I was beginning to understand.

“So you tell ’em I bin lookin’ after me daughter and that if they sends me inside she’d be back in care.”

When we eventually got into court, the bench was chaired by a stern-looking lady who looked like an older version of TheBoss’ mistress BattleAxe.
“I see Mr [Bulldog] has a long list of previous convictions. How does he expect to avoid a custodial sentence in these circumstances.”

I explained BullDog’s sorry tale and was met with an unflinching glare from the bench.
“Anything more?” I was asked at the end of my submissions.
“Er, no, I don’t think so,” I wavered, not sure if they were suggesting that I had missed something.
“Good.”

They then disappeared for a few minutes and came back and sentenced BullDog to six months in prison. Before he was taken away, he asked for a word with me which was granted.
“Shame about that mate. ’Fraid I’m gonna have to report you now. Real shame that. Just when you done all that work an’ all to qualify.”
“I’m very sorry, Mr [BullDog]. I honestly did my best in there. Honestly. And I’m also really sorry I didn’t tell you that I was new.”
“Too late mate. Although…it might be useful to have another brief on me books. Get quite a lot of me staff up on drugs charges, if know what I mean?”
“Well, if I can help with their defences…”
“Might take you up on that mate. S’pose I could ’old off on that complaint…” he said as he was led away. Then he turned round and gave me his best chubby little smile.
“…for now, anyway”.

So, one appearance in court and already I’m in debt to a racist, drug-dealing gangster.

On balance, not a good day.

Friday, 30 March 2007

Day 127 (week 26): My identity

It’s actually Saturday 31st March today and I am finally putting up my posts for Wednesday to Friday. Been a dreadful few days. As well as the stuff that you can read above I’ve had the scare of my life over this blog. Someone emailed me suggesting that they knew who I was on Wednesday. I panicked and considered taking the whole thing down. When I’d calmed down I went through the details I’ve given about myself and still believe that there is insufficient here to identify me. So I called their bluff by replying, “Name me, then.” To which I have had no reply.

As I’ve said before, please don’t waste your time trying to guess.

In the meantime, I’ve returned to the Boss and agreed to investigate the firm of solicitors. For now, let’s call them FakeClaims&Co. However, I’ve decided that there may be an opportunity for assistance in funding my Ginny project against TopFirst. I therefore asked TheBoss how much he was going to pay me.
“£3,000 to start investigating and £3,000 for any evidence which will implicate them.” He replied.

Should be enough to be getting on with.

Thursday, 29 March 2007

Day 126 (week 26): Cab Rank Rule

The papers arrived for my first case in court on Monday. As anticipated they involve a plea in mitigation. All I have is the charge sheet and three lines of instructions from the solicitor which read as follows:

“Instructing Solicitors apologise for the scant nature of the paperwork. Suffice to say that the client is no average scumbag or petty thief caught with his hands in the till though this is what he is being charged with. Counsel will see what Instructing Solicitors mean when he meets the client at court. He is hereby instructed to enter whatever plea in mitigation he sees fit.”

Sounds cryptic and not a little peculiar. Out of curiosity, I google my client’s name. The instructions then start to make a little more sense. Seems he’s not only a tealeaf. If it’s the same person, and it looks like it might be, then he’s also a notorious football hooligan with the Chelsea Headhunters and a member (allegedly) of the extreme right (and extremely violent) Combat 18. Certainly not someone I want to be meeting in a stressful situation never mind representing. I wonder if there’s any way at all to get out of the case. Maybe I’d have a conflict of interest due to the fact that I detest the racist Nazi views he propagates?

I phoned the Bar Standards Board anonymously to seek their guidance. No way out they said. Cab Rank Rule. As with black cabs, if your light is on and you’re available for work then you’re not allowed to pick and choose between the jobs you take. “Even racists have the right to representation” they said. Even so, why do I have top be the one doing it? And on my first day, too?

In my irritation I decide to check out this so-called Cab Rank Rule and hail a black cabbie.
“Can you take me to the top of Chancery Lane please.” I ask in my best barrister voice.
“But that’s only fifty yards away mate. Just over there. You don’t need to cab.”
“Yes, but I’d like to travel in a cab.”
“Just not worth the hassle mate. Have you seen the traffic jam I’d get caught in over there.”
“What about the cab rank rule? Don’t you have to take me wherever I want?”
“Oh. I get it. You’re another of those barristers. Hate ‘em I do. Always reminding me of that stupid rule. Well forget it, mate. Taking the mickey. Report me if you like.”

And with that he drove off.

Wednesday, 28 March 2007

Day 125 (week 26): The worm turns

Had a meeting with TheBoss today. He’s decided to go on the counter-offensive against his firm of solicitors.
“You’re in up to your neck in this, you realise”, he told me. “If I go down, you go with me.”

This was not what I wanted to hear to say the least.
“I don’t think so. All I did was to keep quiet about seeing that set of papers.”
“Far more than that, BabyB and you know it. You were fully complicit in the plan. But even worse for you is that you’ve since officially denied knowing anything about it. You’d better start realising that soon.”
“So what do you want from me? Why would you want to implicate your pupil?”
“Well, since you’re asking…”

He then went on to explain that he’d heard rumours about the firm of solicitors that are attacking him. He said that there’s been some suggestion that they’re involved in a fake claims scam but he knows nothing more. He wants me to investigate.

Just what I need on top of starting in court and the arrival of ThirdSix. I said that I’d have a think about it and get back to him.

Tuesday, 27 March 2007

Day 124 (week 26): Hail fellow, well met

After having been warned about ThirdSix yesterday, we were all gathered together this morning and formally introduced to him by HeadofChambers. Quite a few “More tea, vicar” moments as we moved from one awkward silence to another. To be fair (something I like to keep strictly to a minimum), he didn’t seem as awful on first impressions as we’d all like to imagine. Not the geeky swot I’d been expecting. Instead, he’s very much a “Hail fellow, well met” kind of hearty, rugby-playing type. Clubbable and extremely normal. Which is even worse really. BusyBody and Worrier only exacerbated the situation as they stood there salivating at this attractive new addition to the pupillage game. It was as if the name ThirdSix had become their scores for presentation in some ridiculous ‘Pupillage on Ice’ routine. Scorecards held aloft and showing all the sixes in rapturous approval, rather than some indication of his inherent badness. With all this going for him on top of his ridiculous qualifications, I can’t understand why he wasn’t taken on in his previous Chambers. Which is the question I need to be investigating a little more closely.

In the meantime, I got the requisite extension to my professional studies loan. £5,000 in all, not that I’m intending on spending anywhere near that on my little project with TopFirst. But it will always come in handy. Also did some research into hiring someone to play Ginny. Just so you know, even if I end up hiring a prostitute, she will be under strict instructions not to do anything with TopFirst. I aim to de-stabilise, not completely destroy. And anyway, there’s less scope for things to go wrong if I keep a tight hold on the parameters, so to speak. Either way, it doesn’t seem at all easy. I can’t very much just go and ring one of the numbers you see posted on one of those cards in the phone boxes. But where else do I go? First thoughts are for one of those “Test your boyfriend” agencies you read about in the papers. Where they send along some modelly type woman to chat up a boyfriend and see if he’s faithful.

As for the correspondence, TopFirst asked Ginny for a photo of herself today. So I shall have to start interviewing imminently.

Monday, 26 March 2007

Day 123 (week 26): ThirdSix

Today was possibly the worst start to the week imaginable. Just as I am making some progress in my battle with TopFirst, we are all told that for the second six months of pupillage we will be joined by someone who is commonly known as a “third six pupil”. This is basically a barrister who failed to get taken on in his own Chambers and is giving it another go elsewhere. “Git orrrf ma land” was the pretty universal reaction to the news. However much the four of us are in competition (and don’t imagine for a minute that it’s only me being a bit sneaky), there remains a kind of honour among thieves. That whatever we get up to, we’re all in it together. It’s one thing for Celebrity Big Brother to do it to spice up the mix but for a barristers’ Chambers to do it in pupillage…well…it’s just not cricket. Plain and simple. All the more so when we are then told that he is coming from one of the top commercial Chambers at the Bar. With his scholarship to Harvard and his First from Oxford he makes even TopFirst seem like a snivelling lazy skiver struggling to pass his GCSE law. That’s the only good thing, I guess, that it further destabilises TopFirst.

Just not cricket at all.

Sunday, 25 March 2007

Day 122 (week 25): HotCake

I hate to have to admit this today but I guess if this blog’s going to mean anything then I can’t very much leave it out. I received a visit from my mother to Chambers. In itself, that sounds pretty normal. But not when she arrives with a hot cake late afternoon and tells the whole clerks’ room that she’s worried that I’ve been working a little too hard and thought that this might cheer me up. Is she mad! I couldn’t have been more mortified when I was called out of a conference with the Boss to greet her. Worse still, OldSmoothie was around and spotted the comedy potential at my expense and so invited her to Chambers’ tea “where everyone can perhaps have a taste of your wonderful culinary skills”. No! Please! Just leave me alone and let me go and hide in the farthest corner of the library.

No such luck and so Chambers were merrily entertained by my mother for the whole of tea regaling the usual motherly embarrassing stories. Worse still, everyone now knows that I continue to live at home. Despite the fact that this is due to Chambers paying me a pittance for my coffee-making skills, it is still something which I had hoped to keep hidden under my little horse hair wig.

On a more positive note, the emails between Ginny and TopFirst are now becoming more regular. However, they’re also starting to get just a little flirty, flirty which is definitely not my bag I can tell you. In fact let’s just not go there. But this is war and in a conflict there are different rules. Well, no rules, truth be told.

And I have an appointment with the bank next week.

Thursday, 22 March 2007

Day 121 (week 25): Nobody’s perfect

Today the Boss was “off” once again and I was left under the gentle supervision of OldRuin.
“You must be starting out on your feet next month.” He asked with an understanding smile.
“Yes, that’s right.” I answered a little sheepishly, despite myself.
“Bound to be nervous but remember that whatever happens, you’ll get through. Life at the Bar is a very long journey and your first teetering steps will have very little influence on your ultimate destination. Easy to get it out of perspective.”

With that he left me to mull over his words as he returned to his papers and dictated an advice into his ancient tape recorder. Later in the day, he turned to me again and mused,
“I remember my own first day in court. Vividly. Bright sunshine outside. Cherry blossom just showing. I had been married a year and Valerie desperately wanted to come and see my big day. Cheer me on as it were. A magical time. No money of course but we had a glorious flat in Ealing which had been lent to us by my uncle whilst I got myself established. Early fifties, you know. Long time now.”

He disappeared into a world of his own before continuing.
“Yes. Bow Street Magistrates. Pickpocket you know. Full trial. Made a hash of it really but Valerie was kind. She always was. Chap went down for two years. Guilty as sin but I should have got him off. The identification evidence was inadmissible and I let it in. Anyway, all worked out in the end. My head of chambers appealed the verdict and got him released. I was very ashamed that I had missed such an important point. I think my head of chambers must have realised that. “We’re none of us perfect, Old Ruin. Not even barristers.” Not even barristers indeed. Not that you would believe it the way some members of this profession go on. He’s long dead now BabyB. Kind man.”

Dear, sweet, gentle Old Ruin.

Wednesday, 21 March 2007

Day 120 (week 25): Hiring a professional

Here is my rather breathless reply to TopFirst’s email on Monday:

From: ginnyandtonic@yahoo.co.uk
To: TopFirst
Date: 19 March 2007, 3.28pm

Dear TopFirst,

I’m so grateful and pleased that you found the time to reply to my impertinent request. You asked me what university I attend. I am at Hatfield College in Durham. Mummy didn’t want me going to Oxford even though I had an offer. You might say my parents are somewhat alternative generally. Hippies who never really grew up I guess after Oxford in the sixties. As for my subject, I am studying English literature. I have to admit that I got a Third in my first year due mainly I think to just a teeny weeny bit too much partying as well travelling down to see my (now ex-) boyfriend in Cambridge. However, I pulled it back last year to my own surprise when I got a First. Where did you go to University? What do you think of being a barrister? Sounds very grown up and all. Do you have to go off to court and represent murderers?

Best wishes,

Ginny

Should press of few of TopFirst's buttons...which is a little wierd to say the least. But hey, it doesn't count if it's anonymous...right? Anyway, it might also start eliciting more information about his dad who I already know has a complicated background having been forced from the Bar after being caught with no less than a judge's wife. In the scale of barrister sins, this is pretty much near the top and would leave the culprit in a hopeless position with any judge in the land. The quality of mercy, you can be assured, would not quite be droppething as the gentle rain from heaven.

I also need to start thinking about how I’m going to get someone to play Ginny on her visit. It strikes me that it might be worth every penny to hire a professional. There could be so much scope for trouble if he falls for someone who turns out to be a prostitute, particularly if this became public knowledge. The real difficulty will be affording it. I will have to approach my bank for an extension to my professional studies loan.

I’m sure they’ll understand if I explain that it will help me in getting a tenancy.

Tuesday, 20 March 2007

Day 119 (week 25): StrikeOne

A wonderful spectacle in Chambers’ tea today. TopFirst was gossiping with OldSmoothie (they are as bad as each other) and he finally got around to whispering that BusyBody might be pregnant by a barrister in Chambers and wondered if OldSmoothie had heard anything. Needless to say, OldSmoothie took this as a direct insult to himself as he was in fact that barrister, unbeknownst to TopFirst.

“I will not put up with such impudence from anyone TopFirst, never mind a pupil. Whatever you achieved at Cambridge never ever forget that you are soundly at the bottom of the tree here in Chambers. The very bottom as it happens.”

And with that he stormed off and a hush descended on the gathering. TopFirst didn’t just look crestfallen. He looked truly mortified and skulked away within a few more minutes of awkward smalltalk. I followed him out, for appearances sake wanting to offer a sympathetic ear.

“What was that about?” I asked.
“I have absolutely no idea whatsoever.” He replied.
“Well, what did you say to prompt such an outburst?”
“I simply mentioned BusyBody’s predicament…Maybe he already knows and feels protective of the Boss? Though that would be a turnaround from his recent attitude.”
“Maybe he’d just had a bad day in court?”
“Maybe. But he seemed to take it very personally…You don’t think he’s been with BusyBody as well as the Boss, do you?”
“No way! How could she find the time?”
“Well it would explain his reaction.”
“I guess so.”
“Well that’s my tenancy chances finished anyway.”
“I hardly think so. It would be almost actionable if he held that against you. How were you possibly to know and anyway, it’s his fault, not yours.”
“You may be right but it doesn’t feel like that at the moment.”
“Remember our pact. All for one and all that. It’ll turn out ok.”
“I hope so.”

Not that I meant it. He has just received a blow that will certainly wound him although in itself is unlikely to be fatal. The real significance is that it stops his momentum in Chambers.

…And undermines his own self-confidence, which is where good old Ginny comes in.

Monday, 19 March 2007

Day 118 (week 25): Hooked

First bite on the email arrived today from TopFirst. I don’t give him credit for playing it cool by leaving it a few days. Instead, given how fastidious and generally obsessive he is, I’m sure he must have written innumerable drafts of his reply over the weekend. In the end, he settled for this one:

From: TopFirst
To: ginnyandtonic@yahoo.co.uk
Date: 19 March 2007, 10.41am

Dear Ginny,

I would be very happy to give you advice and you can be assured of my utmost discretion. Consider me bound by professional confidentiality! Please forgive my impertinence but it might help if you tell me what subject you are currently studying and at what educational establishment.

Yours sincerely,

TopFirst
BA (Hons) (Cantab), Barrister

The pompous little twerp seems to have been hooked. Now I need to reel him in.

But first, I’ll let him stew in his own self-doubt and insecurities for a couple of days.

Friday, 16 March 2007

Day 117 (week 24): HoneyTrap

Having sent over the first little bomb to TopFirst earlier in the week, I decided this evening that it was perhaps the right time to throw over a second. Let me put this in as nice a way as I can. TopFirst is a very clever and sometimes even witty individual (in a catty kind of way). However, his academic abilities are not reflected in his dealings with the fairer sex. First, despite the fact he’s engaged, he always seems to be off flirting with someone else, albeit unsuccessfully. Worse, though, are his fisherman-like tales about the ones that got away. The intellectual arrogance passes over into other spheres, it’s just the results don’t follow. So. It was time for me to set up a new email account for a new imaginary friend. Miss Virginia Haddocks-Brown who chooses to go by the address ginnyandtonic@yahoo.co.uk. Of course she does. With this done, I then sent the following email:

From: ginnyandtonic@yahoo.co.uk
To: TopFirst
Date: 16 March 2007, 8.43pm

Dear TopFirst,

I am the daughter of a close friend of OldRuin, one of your colleagues in chambers. My father, Charles Haddocks-Brown, was at Oxford with him. I thought I would drop you a line after I heard mention of you in conversation the other day when OldRuin was round for dinner. Basically, I am just coming to the end of my final year at university and I am trying to decide whether to change to law at the end of my degree. I know it might seem a bit presumptuous of me to write out of the blue but the way OldRuin described you I felt sure that you wouldn’t mind. I do hope that I am right. Please don’t tell OldRuin, though, as I havn’t yet broken it to my parents that I’m thinking of giving up my dream of being an actress. I know that most parents would heartily approve of a career in law, but not mine.

Anyway, sorry to go on. I was wondering if you might possibly be able to spare me some time in the future to talk to me about your life at the Bar and to give some advice as to where I might go from here? I’m very occasionally down in London as I do a little bit of part-time modelling just to make ends meet. Extremely boring but better than taking out a student loan, I guess. I can imagine how terribly busy you are with your cases and all but it really would be a help.

I look forward to hearing from you.

With best wishes,

Ginny Haddocks-Brown

The bait is in place and the line now fully cast.

Let’s see if he bites.

Thursday, 15 March 2007

Day 116 (week 24): UpTights

Had lunch with the person who will take over from the Boss as my pupil master at the start of April. Well, pupil mistress to be exact. I shall call her UpTights. She’s in her late-forties with a civil and criminal practice. She’s never married and has no kids (having always put career first) and is Very High Maintenance. Considered calling her BoTucks due to the work she’s had done which gives her a very peculiar kind of stretched “Mother of Barbie” type look. But it is her attitude which defines her.

“The most important thing at the Bar is boundaries, BabyBarista.”
“Sorry?”
“Clearly defined boundaries between work and non-work.”
“Er, yes.”
“I will never ask you about your life outside of Chambers and you will reciprocate. Life here. Life outside. Separate. Is that clear?”
“Of course.” Crystal.

Ouch. And she barks her words in high, clipped military tones which are a cross between Margaret Thatcher in her mad years and a Dalek screaming “Exterminate!”. UpTights is definitely her name. Looks like the easy life I’ve carved out with the Boss is about to be shattered.

“Unless you are in court, you will arrive into Chambers at 8.30am and leave at 6pm, during which your time belongs to me. Time outside those hours does not exist as far as I am concerned. Understand?”
“Yes.” I got it the first time thank you.
“And there’ll be no skiving in the library, just so you know although you will get thirty minutes between twelve thirty and one each day, during which time you will disappear from sight.”

It seems she also has what the Americans might call “personal space issues”.

“When you are in my room, you will not hover around my desk. Absolutely no hovering. Got it. No hovering.”

No hovering. Right. I think I got that too. Promises to be interesting. Particularly as somehow I have to get her onside before the tenancy decision in September. First thoughts revolve around the question as to why she is so defensive. Barriers built over years of working with lecherous dinosaurs such as HeadofChambers and OldSmoothie? Resentment that the rest of the world seems happy? Or just plain nastiness?

Whatever it is, there’s plenty to be getting on with.

Wednesday, 14 March 2007

Day 115 (week 24): Elephant trap

BusyBody came round in a flap today.

“I’m at least a week late.”
“What are you going on about? Late for what…Oh. Please. Too much information.”
“No, I’m serious. I think I might be pregnant.”
“Have you done one of those test things?”
“Not yet. But I may have to.”
“Have you told FanciesHimself? [our junior clerk]”
“Well, no. Actually, I’m not sure it’d be his or not…”
“What? Who else could it be?”
“Well, do you promise to keep this a secret.”
“Of course.” (Yeh, right).
“You know I mentioned bagging a rich barrister a few weeks ago?”
“Yeeees…” I didn’t like where this was going.
“Well, it was because I had a date with OldSmoothie that night and well, one thing led to another and you know…”
“I can guess. So you’re telling me that you might be pregnant by either OldSmoothie or FanciesHimself and you don’t which?”
“Maybe.”

Golly.

Anyway, needs must and with all the sympathy in the world for BusyBody, opportunities must be grasped and this was a prime one to set somewhat of an elephant trap for TopFirst who has fast become the Chambers’ gossip. A lot of scope for him to put his foot in it if he is just fed slightly inaccurate information. So, as part of our new spirit of co-operation I popped round to his room for coffee this afternoon when his pupilmaster was out.
“BusyBody’s been sick the last couple of mornings apparently.” Just to get the ball rolling.
“Heavy nights or something?”
“Don’t think so, she’s been off the booze for the last few weeks since…”
“Yes, don’t blame her, the way it affects her. Couple of gins…”
“Yes and she drops her briefs. You told me that one last week.”
“I mean, what was she doing with FanciesHimself of all people?”
“I know…Not as bad as The Boss, though.”
“What do you mean? Her and the Boss too? Surely not?”
“No, I’m sure you’re right.”

But we’ll let it ferment a little. As he’s prone to do when his mind is whirring (you can almost hear it), TopFirst cleaned his glasses with his tie and straightened them up on his face. He’d be a dreadful poker player and he’s going to have to get rid of some of these nervous tics if he ever wants to bluff for his clients.
“You don’t suppose she’s pregnant do you?” He mused.
“No.”
“She might be, you know.”
“Couldn’t be.”
“Would explain the sickness. And I did see her looking pretty stressed today.”
“No… doesn’t bear thinking about.”
“It could be really bad for her. Maybe she doesn’t even know whether it belongs to Fancies Himself or The Boss.”
“Wouldn’t be good.”
“I’d say.”

And then…I’m afraid I couldn’t resist,
“Old Smoothie was the one who mentioned the Boss and BusyBody. He always knows what’s going on.”

Just enough, I hope, to set TopFirst on the path to asking OldSmoothie whether BusyBody is pregnant by a barrister in Chambers. Not just because he is that barrister.

But also because he is on the tenancy committee.

Tuesday, 13 March 2007

Day 114 (week 24): Romford

Went to court in Romford today with a junior member of Chambers who I will call YoungSmoothie or YoungS for short. It’s not that he’s the son of OldSmoothie but he may as well be. Charm personified although to the extent of being slightly oily. Maybe it’s just something you grow into. Very nice walk through Romford market in which one guy had a rant at YoungS about “coming here in your whistle” which I have to admit meant nothing to me though YoungS explained later somewhat pompously that it was “cockney rhyming slang for whistle and flute, suit”. Anyway, it didn’t feel like the safest place for two barristers dressed for court.

As for the case itself, YoungS was representing an injured man (let’s call him Unlucky) who was claiming some £60,000 in damages for a broken arm caused by tripping over a pothole in a pavement. The other side had offered £15,000 to settle in the past which YoungS had strongly advised rejecting. We eventually recovered only £10,000. After the hearing, the client asked YoungS how much of this money he would see. YoungS explained to him that since he decided not to accept the £15,000 offer several months ago, the other side would not be paying his own legal costs and so they were his responsibility. He was therefore saddled with a bill for £9,500 (including £2,500 for YoungS for the day) which left him with just £500 of his own damages. This was despite the fact he had a “no-win no-fee” agreement and for all practical purposes we had lost today.

“But you advised me not to take the £15,000. Why do I still have to pay your fees?”

“Because I also advised you that ultimately it was your decision and if you didn’t take the offer, there would be some risk and potentially even costs consequences if you didn’t accept. These are those costs consequences. Sorry.”

Given that on anyone’s version he’d had a nasty injury, it seemed, to say the least, pretty unfair that he should end up with only five per cent of his damages after he’d followed his own lawyer’s advice. This was particularly so when that advice turned out to be wrong and the lawyer still got his full fees. As Unlucky left the court, YoungS whispered in a voice loud enough for those around to hear,

“Lawyers one. Clients nil.”

Monday, 12 March 2007

Day 113 (week 24): Prisoner’s dilemma

Top First telephoned me over the weekend. Said he wanted to talk about pupillage. To keep the upper hand, I said I wasn’t around but could meet on Monday. Today we therefore had lunch on Chancery Lane and he immediately started setting out his thoughts. As far as tenancy chances, he figures that Worrier and BusyBody are both dead in the water and that it’s a straight fight between him and I. No prizes for that one Mr Brainbox. He then started waffling on about some "prisoner’s dilemma". Apparently it’s shows "the benefits of co-operation". I have to admit that beyond that he had pretty much lost me although I think I got the gist of his over-analytical thought process. Basically, he was suggesting a truce. That if we help each other for the rest of pupillage there's a pretty good chance that Chambers might take the two of us. But if we fight there's the risk that we both end up fatally damaged. Naturally, I agreed with this and told him that I was relieved that he had come up with such a sensible solution. He could count on my help and support whenever he needed it. This seemed to satisfy him and he went off in rather a cheery mood.

Which was all very peculiar. It must be painful to live in a mind where everything has to be analysed down into facts, figures and over-arching theories. Perhaps it’s something about lawyers and the legal machine that takes away the essence of something and then gives the remains a label. A divorce case, for example, might be a study in human weakness or the fragility of the spirit. Yet lawyers boil it down to "dividing the assets". A fatal accident is a story of loss, grief, pain, yet it becomes an issue of "pricing the damage". Even a fight in a bar might reflect anger, frustration or jealousy and yet all the lawyers can see is whether there was an "assault" or whether it was "self-defence". With surprising creativity they manage to suck the soul from even the most colourful or tragic circumstance in order to fit it into their artificial constructions. Whatever it is about lawyers, what I know for sure is that TopFirst will make a good one.

As for his prisoner’s dilemma, I’ve since looked it up online. It seems it’s about two prisoners deciding whether to co-operate (in which case they both get six months in jail) or to betray each other (in which case they both get two years). So far, so good. But what TopFirst didn’t explain was that the theory goes on to say that if one prisoner co-operates but the other goes behind his back and betrays him, the sneaky sneak gets off scot free whilst the betrayed gets ten years in the clink. Either, he’s trying to pull a fast one or, despite his intelligence, he’s more naive and foolish than even I give him credit for.

Either way, there will be no co-operation.

Friday, 9 March 2007

Day 112 (week 23): Dr4Hire

Even in the most honourable of professions, there is the occasional bad egg. Today I experienced this in relation to an orthopaedic surgeon who I shall call Dr4Hire, a professional expert witness if ever there was one. He boasts on his CV that he completes over 1,500 reports each year. At over £600 a pop, that means he’s bringing home almost £1million a year for his medico-legal work alone and that’s on top of his two days a week NHS practice. Each piece of work consists of a ten minute ‘examination’ followed by a copy and paste job of previous reports and a prognosis in 90% of cases in the following terms:

“The Claimant has suffered from a whiplash injury to her cervical spine. It is now three months from the accident. I would expect the injury to settle within the next nine months. If it has not done so by then I would be happy to re-examine.”

The reality is that almost all of these cases settle early on and Dr4Hire gets his fat fee. Occasionally, a case is slightly bigger and takes a little longer. Today the Boss was having a case conference with Dr4Hire about one such case. The issue arose from the fact that the Claimant had had another accident only two weeks after the one in question. The other side are claiming that the Claimant’s inability to work after those two weeks was due to the second accident. Dr4Hire hadn’t yet commented on this. If the other side are right, the claim is worth £2,000 at most. If not, it’s worth over £250,000. Here’s how parts of the conference went:

“Well Dr4Hire, you’ve looked at the evidence, what is your view as to the effect of the second accident.”
“Well obviously, I think it is irrelevant. Made no difference at all.”
“How do you answer the other side’s point that the Claimant was able to work after the first accident?”
“Well…what do you want me to say here?”
“We’ve worked together many times, Dr4Hire. You know that I can’t tell you what to say. However, he did soldier on despite the pain and was about to give up work at the time of the second accident. I suppose you might want to comment on that.”
“Yes, that’s a good idea. I suppose I might. In fact, I think that the fact that he soldiered on shows what an honest and reliable witness he is.”
“Quite so, Dr4Hire. Quite so.”
“Glad you like it. Would you like me to put that into a report?”
“Certainly. Although you also might want to consider the fact that he visited his GP after the first accident and that he was taking serious amounts of painkillers.”
“Indeed. Yes. Quite so.”

“Now. Turning to the next issue, Dr4Hire. Why didn’t you mention the second accident in your medical report?”
“Because I didn’t want to damage our case.”
“Yes…I understand. Now, let’s see if that can perhaps be phrased more…how shall I put it…independently. Might it be that you considered it such a minor accident as to be irrelevant?”
“Yes, that might very well be. Quite.”

Quite so, indeed. And so it went on. Extraordinary that both the Boss and Dr4Hire will then trot off to court holding themselves out as independent experts in their own fields. Experts? Yes. But only at looking after themselves and making easy money.

Independent? I think not.

Thursday, 8 March 2007

Day 111 (week 23): Creep

I learned today the extremes of seriousness with which a barrister can take both himself and the simplest case imaginable. Off to court with a junior member of Chambers who I shall call Creep. Despite the fact that he has only been a barrister for three years he carries himself as if he is a member of the House of Lords. I’ve heard him around Chambers approaching QCs and asking them their thoughts on the latest ruling on a particular aspect of public policy. As if everyone goes round reading the law reports each day. He’ll amble up and mention a quote from a dissenting judgment as if it’s an in-joke, chuckle to himself and stand there fawning to whoever he is targeting that day. He’s desperate to be picked as a junior by one of these big beasts, to get a plum case where he can beaver away in the library and spend several months creeping up to the same person. What he doesn’t appear to realise is that he’s treated as a joke around chambers. No-one wants someone so irritating to be hanging around them everyday and so no junior brief for him. Worse, the clerks can’t stand his jumped up airs and graces and go out of their way to put him in his place with tiny cases in grotty, far-flung courts.

Today, we were in Swindon on a case management conference for a personal injury matter worth all of around £3,000. However, you’d never have guessed it if you overheard him speaking to his solicitor.
“I’ve been perusing the papers and my opinion is that there are a number of important issues which this case raises…”

No there aren’t. The Claimant has offered £3,500. The Defendant £2,500. The case will settle for £3,000. Nevertheless, Creep spent a full half an hour introducing the case to the District Judge despite the fact he didn’t even have an opponent. Eventually he was interrupted with,
“I’m sorry Mr Creep, but correct me if I’m wrong. All we have to do today, is set a trial date?”
“Well, technically Sir that is correct. However…”
“However, Mr Creep, this hearing was listed for five minutes and it has already gone on thirty. Are you ready for trial?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Good. List for the first open date after 1st April. Costs in the case. Good morning Mr Creep.”

Wednesday, 7 March 2007

Day 110 (week 23): Greed is good

An anonymous reader left a comment yesterday asking “at what cost” for a tenancy, presumably referring to the cost to our souls. Don’t let’s con ourselves here. Lawyers sell their souls the moment they start billing by the hour. Admittedly, they’re not cheap. But don’t get taken in by any high-minded justifications such as pursuing an honourable profession or seeking justice. They do it for the money. Cold hard stinking cash. Their time…is money. Literally. As faustian a pact as you’ll find and if they hadn’t got that, they’d have never survived a law degree when they could have been reading English literature, media studies (whatever that is) or anything other than dry, turgid irrelevant law reports. Artists, actors, sportsmen. Many might be more paid than lawyers. But I’m prepared to accept that most are not doing that for the money. Lawyers, never! Would they even get out of bed without the promise of it. Never. Never. Never.

But ah, you might say. What about those poor junior barristers at the criminal bar? Surely they don’t do it for the money? Of course they do. Maybe not the money now but it goes back to the arrogance thing. They all believe they’ll be the ones bringing in the serious wedge in years to come. It just takes longer to get there in some areas than others. It’s all greed. So, no more comments with any such high-minded nonsense. Instead, let’s try something novel in the legal profession and start being honest not only with ourselves but also with each other for once.

As for Chambers today, Teflon was looking rather tired. According to TopFirst, the pizza delivery company woke him up in the early hours of the last two mornings. Silly them. I hope he enjoyed his hawaiian on Monday and his margharita on Tuesday. Better is the fact that I sent him an email yesterday under a false identity pretending to be a member of the public dangling a big personal injury case in front of him. I sought his preliminary advice on the merits of my case before approaching a solicitor. All I needed was a few lines telling me if I had a case or not. If he thought I did, then obviously the case would be his down the line. Maybe it was because he was tired or maybe simply his stupidity coming out again but he fell for it hook line and sinker with the following reply:

“Dear Jane, Thank you very much for your email. Whilst strictly I am not meant to advise you directly without a solicitor, I have read what you have to say and can certainly tell you that you have a good case.”

Too right he’s not allowed to advise without a solicitor. But greed can be good and it can be bad and for Teflon today, it sunk him. I forwarded his email to the Bar Standards Board with the subject heading “Professional Conduct Complaint.”

Some might say, “Case closed.”

Tuesday, 6 March 2007

Day 109 (week 23): Free fall

TopFirst came round to gloat today. Wanted to know what it was like “spending time in jail”. “Must have been really cool”. Once again, I only hope that he gets up other people’s noses as much as my own. As I’ve seen before, he has a tendency to jump the gun when there is the smell of blood in the air. That he becomes a gossip when it can damage a fellow pupil is not in the least unusual. That he becomes breathless with the exhilaration is fatal. Vanity. Hubris, even. Enough for me to be getting on with. But it will need planning and ultimately a little luck.

In the meantime, Worrier’s been taking her life-coach’s advice a little too seriously. She now sees her “little difficulties” (accusing the Head of Chambers of being sexist) as an “opportunity to show her character” by “turning the situation on its head”. She’s certainly losing her head. Sounding more and more each day like a member of a cult. “Pupillage is great”. “I love the way they challenge our patience.” Is she mad? We’ve spent years preparing for this time and all we are tested on is our coffee-making skills for a bunch of arrogant barristers and their slightly less arrogant solicitor mates and she says it’s “a wonderful, life-enhancing experience”. It’s doing a number of things to me and my head, but enhancing is not one of those. Maybe it’s just the time of year getting to me. Maybe I’m just getting nervous about starting in court but today I have to admit that I’ve begun to question the point of this whole pupillage exercise. Pretty much every other job in the world can be interviewed for over a period of days or weeks. Not so, the Bar. Why do they think they’re so special that they can spend a whole year mistreating you whilst at the same time only giving you a one in four chance of taking you on? Bear baiting. Cockfighting. All sports which have been banned on the basis of cruelty. Yet they leave pupils to fight it out, Death Match style. A free for all that most will lose.

Except that I realise they only get away with it because of our own arrogance. No pupil believes underneath that they will not be taken on. Otherwise, no pupil would subject themselves to such ritual and protracted humiliation. Maybe it’s a ruthlessly efficient way of working out who will make it at the Bar. After all, for all it’s airs and graces, the courtroom is no more than a low down dirty free for all just like pupillage. Survival of the fittest. Yet whilst they all believe they can win, only some of us will be right in that assessment. Others, will lose their minds along the way.

Worrier, I fear, lost hers several weeks ago and is now in free fall.

Monday, 5 March 2007

Day 108 (week 23): Laughing stock

I was wrong about Teflon. He is stupider than I thought. Not only did he not keep quiet about the fact that I was sent to jail on Friday. He has deemed it fit to broadcast it to Chambers in a mass email entitled “Pupillage just got tougher” in which he has taken the picture of me on the Chambers’ website and added a wig along with a black and white striped jailbird top and some fake prison bars. Cheap courtroom big lie tactic. If he hits me hard enough some of it will stick and any suggestion that fault lies elsewhere will fall on deaf ears. By now, he’ll have deleted the records on his phone and without getting full discovery from his mobile company (no chance), there will be no way for me to prove it was him. So I’m left just to grin and bear it and hope the embarrassing episode passes by as quickly as possible. Needless to say it has led to many an amused look from members of Chambers. Worst of all is the fact that I am the laughing stock of the library community of pupil skivers who have been rattling their keys whenever I pass by their table. Very funny, I must say.

The Head Clerk called me in this afternoon and told me not to worry. He’d once had to bail out one of his barristers from a local police station after a long and very boozy lunch which had ended in the barrister standing on the steps of the High Court in full court dress and suggesting an end to judicial tyranny and a call to revolution. Okay, so they’ve got some perspective on the matter. Nevertheless, Teflon has damaged my chances of tenancy and he will pay. I haven’t told anyone that he dropped me in it. That way, when I strike, no-one will suspect other than (possibly) him who will of course be unable to point the finger without at the same time incriminating himself. So far, I have set up hotmail and yahoo accounts in his name. I also have his home phone number, home address, date of birth and obviously his work address. Enough to be getting on with.

Identity fraud is so very easy.

Friday, 2 March 2007

Day 107 (week 22): Porridge

Well today I am reporting something that I thought I’d never say. A judge sent me to jail. Only for one hour, but nevertheless… All happened when I was accompanying a junior member of Chambers to Maidstone County Court who I shall call Teflon. This is a Combined Court Centre and so you have both the civil and criminal courts all in one. More particularly, there are cells in loco. The District Judge at our hearing was very clearly old school and also in a bad mood. No doubt about it. Furthermore, Teflon was getting the brunt of that mood. Anyway, halfway through the morning a mobile phone went off and Teflon immediately turned to me and glared, after which the whole courtroom did the same. I reacted by checking my mobile phone, realising it had not been me and putting it back in my pocket. However, whilst everyone was looking at me, I very clearly saw Teflon quickly take his mobile from his pocket and switch it off. All well and good. Were it not for the fact that the Judge continued staring at me.
“Do you not know the rule against the use of mobile phones in this court?”
“Yes,” I answered. “But…”
“But nothing, young man. It only makes it worse that you were aware of the rule.”
“But, it…”
“Young man, do not interrupt me when I am speaking. You are only making matters worse for yourself. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“You are presumably also aware about how I deal with such an offence to the dignity of this court?”
“No sir.”
“Well you are about to find out. Please stand up.”
I stood.
“Young man, I hereby find you guilty of contempt of court and sentence you to one hour in the cell during which time you are to reflect on your lack of respect for the office of this court.”

He then telephoned for a security guard who immediately came to collect me and led me down to the cells, smirking as he did so. I wanted to shout out, “It wasn’t me” or as many clients call it, after the song, “Taking the Shaggy”. However, I was so utterly stunned by the speed of events and the scale of the escalation that I was silenced. I looked over to Teflon (hence the name) but he was staring at his notes. “Save the Maidstone One” I also wanted to shout. But again, nothing. Not even anything half witty. Do not pass go, do not collect £200. And then I was doing porridge. Time inside. No longer a free man. Not that I saw any evidence of oatmeal or gruel. I was put in a holding cell during which time I was able to catch up on the latest from Philip Schofield and Fern Britton on ‘This Morning’.

I was collected by the security guard an hour later and led back to court and put behind Teflon. On the way, the guard told me that the Judge had done this a few times. That I wasn’t to worry. Just “one of his foibles”. Some foible! When I arrived back, the Judge made no further remarks. Worst of all, I never even got an apology from Teflon on the way back to Chambers. Seems he’d decided to brave it out, figuring that I would decide that it wasn’t in my interests around Chambers to tell tales or to make any challenge to the judge’s ruling. “Strange thing for the Judge to do…funny little incident…” was all that he said about it, before changing the subject. Well and truly stitched up. Teflon is foolish. What he forgets is quite how easy it is to cause trouble for barristers even if I decide to let this one lie.

My real worry is whether I might be under an obligation to report this to the Bar Standards Board as we have to tell them of pretty much all crimes other than traffic offences. For the moment, I figure the quid pro quo is that Teflon will also be wanting to keep it under his non-stick wig in case I am forced to defend myself at his expense. I have therefore decided it’s better for me simply not to ask the Bar Standards Board than to risk what I might be told.

Thursday, 1 March 2007

Day 106 (week 22): Instincts

Spent some time with the Boss today. He’s been asked to write a summary of his case in the complaint against him in front of the Bar Standards Board. Hmm. The question in effect boiled down to, “What do you have to say which can possibly mitigate your amending Chambers’ records and fraudulently deceiving your solicitors that it was them and not you who had missed the limitation deadline for issuing a case”. And the answer…“Not a lot.” Poor Boss. At least he’s now made the decision to plead guilty and aim for reducing his sentence. He’s almost certain to get suspended for at least a year and maybe even permanently. It depends what he comes up with. My guess is that he’ll go for stress brought on by a wicked wife who had driven him into the arms of one of his instructing solicitors. The pressure was all just too much. Yeh, right. Let’s just hope there isn’t a woman sitting on the tribunal, for his sake.

He will also almost certainly get kicked out of Chambers. In fact, it’s surprising that he hasn’t been already and there’s definitely an element of blood being thicker than water running through the place. “One of us” and all that. Anyway, if he keeps his sentence down, he’ll still walk into a lesser Chambers. There are plenty of places at the moment that are desperate for barristers prepared to pay the rent. He’s also likely to get the work back. Solicitors are rarely aware of any barristers’ professional misconduct history. He’s even started to perk up on occasions and has mentioned that he might try and get his divorce settled during any period of suspension at which point he will be penniless and therefore any settlement will be very much less than if he were still in Chambers. Yes, so insane that he’s already got an angle to profit from his own misfortune. Of course.

Meanwhile, Battleaxe, his sturdy instructing solicitor and erstwhile mistress has remained faithful both in her affection and, luckily for the Boss, in the work that she continues to provide. In fact, such is the disdain of the clerks for the Boss at the moment that she is almost his only source of work. This means that he’s more often than not in late and leaving early which is just perfect if you’re his pupil apart from the mood swings that come with it.

In the meantime, this week, TopFirst’s been trying to chummie up. The only reason I can think of is that like me he’s realised that the other two are history and it’s a straight fight between the two of us. Plus, maybe he figures that in a showdown, he’s not going to be second to draw. Not that I think he realises any of my role in the downfall of the other two. But “instinct can be a powerful thing” as Old Ruin has often drummed into me. “Follow your instinct, BabyB. It’s worth a hundred times more than the limited amount of evidence which ever makes it into a court room.”

I do like OldRuin.

Wednesday, 28 February 2007

Day 105 (week 22): Professionally embarrassed

Given that I will be starting off in a Magistrates Court, the clerks allowed me to go off today and watch a member of Chambers do a case in Thames Magistrates Court. If you thought County Courts were grotty (and most of them are), you should take a look at their criminal law counterparts. Not only are the surroundings less salubrious but the atmosphere, unsurprisingly, has an edge of violence which is tempered only by the large number of police witnesses milling around. Went along with Junior Tenant who was mumbling that he was now above such appearances. Apparently he’s only getting £50 for the morning which bearing in mind he has to pay Chambers’ rent and also his expenses out of that, he’ll probably only be left with around £30. All he had was the name of the client and the time of the hearing. No papers or instructions from his solicitor. Luckily for him, the client (who we’ll call Guilty) wasn’t in any state to realise JuniorTenant’s difficulties. His thin pock-marked face had a feral quality which was only made worse by his twitching.
“I’m innocent right. It weren’t me and that’s an end to it.” He said, swaggering around in a bad impression of Liam Gallagher from ten years ago.
“You’re me brief. You sort it out.”

Rather than asking Guilty what he was up for, JuniorTenant snook off and whispered to the CPS that he had absolutely no idea what this was all about. The CPS barrister was not at all surprised and lent him the witness statements against Guilty. Apparently he tried to walk out of a local shop with three bottles of vodka stuffed under his jumper. Very original. Caught on CCTV and identified by two witnesses as well as the shopkeeper. JuniorTenant returned to Guilty and told him that his advice was that he should indeed plead to that effect.
“No way. I know I done it and you know I done it but that old judge up there, he don’t know nuffin' of the sort. You gonna get me off.”

That gave JuniorTenant his fast ticket back to Chambers. He rather formally said,
“Are you telling me that you want to plead not guilty even though you did it?”
“Yeh. Tha’s right. Tha’s wha' ‘appened last time with me brief. He said he’d sor' it and he did.”
“I see. Well…I’m afraid that in those circumstances I am no longer able to represent you as to do so I would have to mislead the court which I am not allowed to do. I am therefore professionally embarrassed.”
“What yeh goin’ on about? Can’t understand a word you’re sayin'.”
“I can’t represent you any longer?”
“Course yeh can.”

And so the "Can't" "Can" pantomine went on. Guilty had clearly never met a Brief so precious about his professional obligations before and wasn't prepared to cave in now which is just what JuniorTenant both wanted and anticipated as it gave him his way out of the case. Within half an hour, he’d requested an adjournment, nodding and winking at the magistrate as he said,
“I regret to report that I will have to withdraw from the case for reasons which though I am unable to tell you, I am sure you understand.”

Why not just go out and say it? May as well have done. The magistrate nodded and winked back and the CPS representative smirked. A right one we have here, he was clearly thinking. Anyway, suffice it to say that JuniorTenant was safely esconced back in Chambers and away from the grime of the criminal courts by lunchtime.

Tuesday, 27 February 2007

Day 104 (week 22): School’s out

I now have less than five weeks to go until my first appearance in court. And that’s official. Got my first case booked into the diary today. Monday 2 April at Brent Magistrate’s Court. Plea in mitigation apparently. In other words, a very big “sorry”, with bells on. Very worrying both for me and also for the client…if he knew, which he won’t. Just make sure that you never get sent to court in April or May, a time when the court system turns into a playground for baby barristers. School’s out and they’re all running around, fighting each other, falling over, getting their legs grazed and generally misbehaving.

But be in no doubt that despite all appearances (the brand new wig and gown for a start), these are novices of the first order. For my own part, I have had less than a dozen outings at speaking in public and that includes the speech I was forced to make at my eighth birthday party. All I can say is that I’m just glad I’m not the one in trouble. The real irony is that for the first few months, over half the work we’ll be doing is criminal. Target practice with people’s lives and liberty until we learn to shoot straight and give up childish things in favour of the civil courts. Kind of seems the wrong way round somehow but there you go.

Monday, 26 February 2007

Day 103 (week 22): Hiring from below stairs

It’s been like an episode of Upstairs Downstairs today. The details as to BusyBody’s activities have now spread around Chambers. It seems the second junior clerk, let’s call him FanciesHimself whispered it as “top secret” to OldSmoothie. Foolish in the extreme. OldSmoothie then mass emailed about ten people in Chambers with a word for word account of what FanciesHimself had told him. Needless to say, this was then forwarded to the rest of Chambers and is probably still rattling its way around cyber space. To spare you the sordid details, suffice it to say that BusyBody fell for FanciesHimself’s not to subtle charms and for one beautiful evening they were a couple. Come the next morning, for once in his life, FanciesHimself was on the receiving end of the sort of rejection he had inflicted at least once a week to a different girl in his home town of Southend according to his own very colourful accounts. BusyBody apparently made it clear in no uncertain terms as to why things would be going no further. This has put FanciesHimself into unknown territory and it seems that he’s actually claiming to be quite hurt. According to OldSmoothie, this meant that he had to go on a weekend bender just to “get his mind straight”. The Head Clerk, his boss, apparently told him that he was going to pretend that it didn’t even happen as to do otherwise would be just too much to contemplate. The Head of Chambers is also officially turning a blind eye for similar reasons.

There was a flurry of emails around Chambers following OldSmoothie’s revelations. One sums up what many were saying: “If you hire from below stairs, you can only expect below stairs behaviour.” Reminded me of Alan Clark’s wife who once said “If you bed people of below stairs class, they will go to the papers.” Basically reference to BusyBody’s working class background. Whilst a scholarship to a South London day school had led her to cover up her South London drawl, it has noticeably returned in recent weeks as she has become increasingly stressed. Some people had already started mimicking her accent and this has now turned into a full-on gameshow complete with clerk story to boot. The reality is that even in the twenty-first century, ten years after Tony Blair’s “New Labour, New Britain” rubbish, there are dinosaurs still surviving in many barristers’ Chambers.

Worst of all today was that I noticed that TopFirst was getting stuck in on the insults. Until now he seems to have risen above such behaviour but when I overheard him sharing the story with another member of Chambers I was not only surprised but also relieved to discover that like everyone else, he has a weakness. Like a shark with the smell of a fellow pupil’s blood in the water, his instincts took over and for the first time he showed that even he can be reckless. More importantly, he gave away in that simple conversation just quite how much he wants a tenancy in Chambers.

All I have to do now is to work out how I can ultimately turn this against him.

Friday, 23 February 2007

Day 102 (week 21): Scandal

Quite a few things have happened during my pupillage so far, not least that the Boss has committed fraud and been found out and the Head of Chambers’ sexism has appeared on YouTube. However, none of this compares to what (allegedly) happened last night. BusyBody went home with one of Chambers’ clerks. There’s nothing that makes a scandal more juicy than a bit of old-fashioned snobbery and this had the snobs gossiping in their droves this morning.

About twenty members of Chambers had gotten together in a wine bar with a few friendly solicitors to launch a book written by a particularly boring member of Chambers (and that’s saying something). Not exactly the height of glamour for a so-called book launch but nevertheless the champagne was flowing. The clerks had all been invited along as has been Chambers’ policy now for the last two years. Before that, only the head clerk was ever allowed out to social functions and even then only on marketing events. Ridiculous policy considering the clerks are not only the people who bring in most of the work but are far more capable of socialising with solicitors than most of the eccentrics in Chambers.

Anyway, the worries over the mixing barristers and clerks came to fruition last night to the horror not only of many members of the Bar but, it has to be said, a few of the clerks too. Don’t let it be said that the divide has only been perpetuated by the barristers. It seems some of the clerks also cling to the old divisions. Anyway, whatever the rights and wrongs, BusyBody drunkenly stumbled into a taboo. So far, no-one quite knows what happened but they were certainly seen canoodling on the street as they waited for a cab.

Poor BusyBody. Her head was bowed low today and she refused to talk to anybody. She’s already ruined any chances of getting taken on and she’s now gone and ruined her chances of bagging that rich barrister, too. Or at least one in these Chambers.

Thursday, 22 February 2007

Day 101 (week 21): TidySum

Worrier came to see me today and asked if I was interested in earning a little money on the side, “devilling”. I didn’t know what she was going on about. I know she’s been having a hard time but joining and then recruiting for some devil worship cult seemed a bit of an extreme reaction. No, she corrected me. It’s a bar tradition. What it apparently refers to is the practice of barristers employing junior barristers to do the work for them. But I thought we were obliged to be self-employed as barristers? Not able to employ other lawyers, unlike solicitors? Well, Worrier explained. Technically, that’s true. However, it seems there’s a loophole for “devilling”. It seems to get by on the basis that it’s an informal fee for “research”. However, Worrier went on to explain that there’s a barrister in Gray’s Inn who I shall call TidySum who has taken this to a completely new level. He currently has around thirty little devils around the bar and pays them up front one third of what he bills out for the work. This basically gives them £50 per hour which is a lot more than they’d be getting in alternative part-time work. Solicitors love him as he’s turning his papers around within forty-eight hours (although they might be surprised to hear that the work is being done by pupils). They send the brief down and he then hands it over to pupils and other junior barristers who need a bit of extra cash flow. Running it as a very healthy business. He’s based in a Chambers but they just let him be in a small annex which has the nickname “Hell’s Kitchen” for obvious reasons. He's certainly living up to his nickname by all accounts.

Anyway, I decided to go along for an interview with Worrier. There was a queue outside his room which that for a tuck shop. All standing around chatting. It seems you just rock up with your CV, he checks you out and then gives you the papers with a requirement that you return them by the next day. Worrier got a small Particulars of Claim in a contract dispute involving a faulty dishwasher. I was given an Advice as to the value of the injury in a tripping case. Should take us an hour each and we’ll both be £50 richer by tomorrow. Lawyers are a curious breed. They spend so much time devising rules to regulate themselves and then even more time devising ways of getting around those rules. Surely there must be more constructive ways of employing some of our supposedly top brains?

As for BusyBody, I walked in on her today as she was lying on the ground with her feet in the air. She announced to me that the had officially given up all hope of getting taken on in Chambers and she had therefore decided to achieve “inner peace and harmony” through “yoga and bagging a rich barrister to keep me”. I’ve now decided that given his recent difficulties, association with the Boss is only likely to hinder by association. I therefore told her that the Boss was thinking of dumping Battleaxe and that he has told me that he continues to lust after her (both lies). However, BusyBody has other ideas:
“He’s a loser. I’m not tagging on to that mess. No. I’ve got my eye on a bigger prize. Much richer and, for what it’s worth, better looking. And with a wife and family at home, he's not likely to be too demanding on my time.”

I was to get no more details from her today, although Old Smoothie springs to mind.

Wednesday, 21 February 2007

Day 100 (week 21): Battleaxe

Today someone tried to guess who I am. There is no point but for the record, I do not have the initials “PL”. An American reader wanted to know exactly what pupillage is. That is a question I have been asking myself lately. Ostensibly it’s the final part of the training for the Bar. The reality is that most of one’s time is spent making coffee, photocopying and being a general dogsbody around Chambers. What this has to do with being a barrister I’ll never know. After six months of this then you might think that all I’d be qualified for is perhaps to aspire to be a supervisor at Starbucks. But no. Instead, come the 2 April, I will be given a provisional practising certificate and let loose on an otherwise unsuspecting public by being allowed to conduct my own cases in court. Six months after this and I become a fully-fledged practising barrister. So, there you go. Just so you know. It might even work if your pupilmaster wasn’t a corrupt, yellow coward who under-settled all his cases and got off with his solicitor behind his wife’s back.

Talking of which, I finally met the mistress last night. The Boss was celebrating another settlement (obviously) and insisted on taking me to the local wine bar for a glass (or seven) of champagne. In the last couple of weeks this (ie settlement followed by champagne) has become an increasingly frequent occurrence. He’s cashing in his cases early in anticipation of the possibility of being struck off in a few months. Anyway, she was not what I expected at all. I already have the impression of the Boss’ wife as demanding, expensive and generally high maintenance and I therefore expected his mistress to be some meek, pouting solicitor who assuaged all his many insecurities. Far from it. We shall call her Battleaxe. She has a laugh like a horse, a voice like a horse and in many ways even looks like a horse. And a packhorse at that. Even after a lot of champagne. Sturdy to the point of being almost square. She’d certainly struggle to fit into the Boss’ Ferrari. However, I should have seen it coming as no sooner had she opened her mouth to reveal staccato, clipped vowels than I suddenly realised that she was just an older version of my fellow pupil BusyBody with whom the Boss has also been flirting.

Tuesday, 20 February 2007

Day 99 (week 21): No respect

My blog seems to have attracted some publicity in the last couple of days. I particularly enjoyed one of the comments which came from an American laywer in response to my post about the curious situation that leaves fatal accidents costing insurers a lot less than near fatal ones. It said, “That's why we have the wrongful death statute over here. Otherwise, good incentive to just back up the lorry, have another go, and finish off the bloke.” Comforting to know.

Anyway, with all this interest, I’ve had to go through the blog and have now changed sufficient details to keep this anonymous. Thankfully, there’s absolutely no hope of the Boss ever spotting it as he’s completely computer illiterate. He even refuses to use email as a matter of “high” principle. Gets the clerks to print out any emails he receives. Any that need a reply, he dictates into the form of a letter which he then sends snail mail to his typist. Thinks he is making a “principled” stand against modernity whereas it’s just another outlet for his snobbery. Though he sometimes pretends not to understand what it is, at other times, he blames email for a lowering of the standards of literacy and communication. Refuses to demean himself to “the lowest common denominator”. In fact, the idea of a breakdown in society generally has been bothering him rather a lot of late. Blames it for much of his difficulties in fact.

“Things are far too accountable these days.” [Meaning: “How dare they question my word, even if it was a lie.”]

“People have no respect.” [Meaning: “Whatever I’ve done wrong, people should still know their place.”]

“What right do solicitors have to be questioning a barrister in such a way?” [Meaning: “What happened to good, old-fashioned deference and for good measure, immunity from suit.”]

Monday, 19 February 2007

Day 98 (week 21): Cheaper to kill...

Today we had a conference with the solicitor in a fatal accident case. Tragic accident at work when a builder was killed by machinery falling on top of him. The Boss was representing the employer’s insurers and commented pretty early on that the case was, “A lot cheaper by virtue of him having died. Could have been worth millions in loss of earnings if he’d lived.” As it is, the deceased was separated from his wife and had no kids and the claim is therefore worth hardly anything at all.

Very strange law that makes it cheaper to kill than to maim.

In the meantime, BusyBody has gone from desolate moping to utterly hyper with no transition period in between. She´s now a caricature even of her old self. Her words are spewing out even faster than normal and mysteriously her quite posh middle England accent is occasionally dropping the odd vowel in favour of South London drawl. I´ve also heard about sightings of her working in Chambers as early as 6am and as late as midnight. All very strange, even if she is my competition. I have to admit to feeling slightly responsible for this due to the stitch up about YouTube and the Head of Chambers. However, whenever I have asked hw she was, all I get back is a staccato, “All fine. Good. Excellent. Anyway. Very busy. Very. Lots of papers. Must get through them. Lots. Anyway. Thank you. Yes. All OK. Anyway. So. How are you?”

Friday, 16 February 2007

Day 97 (week 20): OldSmoothie

Received a visit today from a member of Chambers that I shall call ‘OldSmoothie’. Not after the yoghurty fruit drink but because of his oily, self-confidence which oozes from every pore. Think To the Manor Born and Milk Tray Man but not quite there on either count. He’s about fifty. He was made a QC five years ago until which time he was moderately successful. Since then he has struggled for any work at all. It’s a common misconception that all QCs are rich. Sure, many earn just oodles of cash. Others earn no more than before they took silk. Then there is a significant minority whose practices simply collapse. They’re now too senior for the cases they were doing before and simply not good enough to get the cream. Worst of all, once you’re a QC, you can’t ‘un-silk’ yourself or whatever the word might be if someone ever tried. Have wondered if perhaps there might be some sort of legal action on the basis that it is anti-competitive or unduly restrictive. However, most people at that stage would have too much pride to fight for such a demotion and the public humiliation that would go with it. The other side of the coin is that most have stashed away enough by that point to be financially secure in any event. Many go on to become judges. Others, go on to become Committee Men, both at home and at work. Committees for their golf clubs, their private members clubs and of course, for their Chambers. OldSmoothie was just such a man.

Well, today Smoothie had a task for me from one of his committees in Chambers. It was in fact, the pupillage committee and what he wanted me to do was to sift through all of the applications for mini-pupillage and weed out those who we didn’t want. He instructions went as follows:

“You’re an Oxford man like myself. Figure I can ask you to do this properly without any complaint. Here’s what I want. Plain and simple. Take out the following and then give me the rest. No sixth-formers looking for work experience. No-one who’s been to a polyversity or whatever they call themselves these days. Doesn’t fool me. No-one over fifty – we’ll be subsidising their rent for ten years and then they’ll retire. Oh, and no-one called Wayne or Shane. Just wouldn’t look good on the board.”

Reminded me of the apocryphal story of a recruiter for an investment bank who randomly picked up half of the application forms and threw them in the bin.
“Well”, he answered, “we don’t want the unlucky ones.”

Thursday, 15 February 2007

Day 96 (week 20): It`s all about costs

It’s all about costs, I’ve realised. Everything. The whole legal world. Not justice. Not rights. Not defending the innocent or prosecuting the guilty. It’s cold, hard, calculated costs. Hours and minutes translated into money. Cash for the accident management companies, cash for the solicitors, cash for the barristers, cash for the experts and occasionally even cash for the clients. Be in no doubt, it is cash which drives this whole machine. The latest example of this came from a talk I was forced to go to this evening on whether the small claims limit for personal injury cases should be raised from £1,000 to £5,000.

The thing you need to know immediately is that you only get a tiny amount of costs in the Small Claims Court. So, a personal injury case worth £800 might only bring on a few hundred pounds worth of costs. Yet ones worth £1,500 believe it or not regularly bring in bills of over £6,000. So, if the government increases the limit for the Small Claims Court, solicitors get less costs. Plain and simple. Yet we all had to listen to some great legal brains piping up all the reasons under the sun other than that they would earn less money as to why the limit should not increase. Some may have been in earnest. However, to an outsider most appeared at best disingenuous.

The law at its very worst, exposing its filthy tarnished soul for all to see.

Wednesday, 14 February 2007

Day 95 (week 20): St. Valentine´s Day massacre

The spirit of Valentines Day doesn`t seem to have reached its way as far as Chambers. In fact, it`s been more like the St. Valentine`s Day massacre round here what with the Boss` obvious difficulties and then there´s BusyBody who I really think is not very well. She´s been moping around and only getting as far as a mumble in terms of chat. She had mentioned appealing the finding of the Head of Chambers a week or so ago but it seems from what I have been able to work out that she`s taken some advice from a criminal barrister friend of hers and he has told her that unless she can come up with any evidence to rebut the conclusion that the YouTube incident was her, then there`s just no point. Circumstantially the evidence points only one way.

Tuesday, 13 February 2007

Day 94 (week 20): Harlow County Court

So far in pupillage I’ve been to some pretty grotty places. Willesden and Mold I have mentioned. Bow County Court in Stratford is also pretty bad. However, today I visited the worst so far: Harlow in Essex. Usually a town has a heart. A beat to which even the violence steadily pulses. A character all of its own. Not so Harlow. It is town without a heart. A flatliner. A town where any life which enters risks having its soul sucked dry before it can escape. A badlands without redemption. A no-town.

Today, I visited its court. I hope never to see that place again.

Monday, 12 February 2007

Day 93 (week 20): Double shuffle

Some Mondays you just struggle to get anything done at all and this was most definitely one of those. So, rather than turning to the Boss’ papers which are decreasing by the day, I instead pulled the ultimate bunk relying on the fact that the Boss and the clerks are hardly even talking at all at present. I therefore told the Boss that the Clerks were sending me off to Luton for 12 noon. I told the Clerks that the Boss needed me to do some research in the library. Classic double shuffle. Strolled back around 4pm having watched the latest Bond movie in Leicester Square.

Some days pupillage really isn’t so bad after all.

Friday, 9 February 2007

Day 92 (week 19): Two down…

That Friday feeling today. So far, I´m a third of the way through pupillage and I have to say the least neutralised two of my three opponents for tenancy. TopFirst will be a challenge but today I´m feeling optimistic. The opportunity will present itself, of that I have no doubt. In the meantime, I must prepare the ground.

Thursday, 8 February 2007

Day 91 (week 19): Contingency plans

I am starting to wonder what the Boss is taking. He´s certainly been through the mill and he was hardly stable even when I started pupillage. However, his behaviour is becoming more erratic by the day. Today he burst into the room around 11.30am and started walking around in a circle saying to himself,
“Who needs it anyway. I´ll go and live on a desert island and become a writer. I´ll act as a consultant to solicitors. I´ll..”

He hesitated and stared at me during his pause.“You know, he continued. We start off in this job with so much potential. The world is our oyster and with the skills we needed to get here we could have done anything we chosen. We then spend years taking ourselves further and further away from the mainstream until we are so specialised that if we were to jump ship there is not even a life-raft nearby. We are good only for being barristers. Otherwise it´s straight back down to the bottom of the pile aged forty-six.”

Wednesday, 7 February 2007

Day 90 (week 19): GoodThing

One of the QCs in Chambers came to see me today. I’ll call him GoodThing due to the fact that I have never seen him be downright nasty to anyone. He pretended randomly to be just passing but it was clear he can come for a small chat. The first thing he told me after the small talk was not to worry if the Boss was sending out all of my work without even checking it. It was the Boss’ responsibility and would reflect only on him if anything went wrong.

He then went on to mention in the most roundabout way that everyone was aware that the Boss had a reputation for settling his cases and that I was not to assume that that was normal.
“We’re paid to fight cases and never forget that. Yes, sometimes cases may settle but remember, the solicitors will already have given it a pretty good go even before it gets anywhere near court. So, unless something changes, you get yourself right in there and fight.”

My guess is that there has been concern as to the influence which the Boss may have been having on my training and development.

They would be right to be worried.

Tuesday, 6 February 2007

Day 89 (week 19): A kick while down

Poor old Boss. I am genuinely feeling sorry for him at this stage of his problems. No sooner has he been granted a reprieve by Chambers than he is given a reminder of his difficulties with a double whammy today. One was the letter he had been expecting from the Bar Standards Board confirming that a complaint had been made against him. The other was from his professional insurers, the Bar Mutual, asking him to keep them posted as to any further developments on the case. This was then made worse by a phone call from his wife half way through the afternoon where she was clearly hassling him about the divorce and the financial arrangements which needed to be put in place.

For all his lack of spine, the fact he is bearing up at all under all of this is a testament to a hitherto invisible streak of metal within.

Monday, 5 February 2007

Day 88 (week 19): Vexatious

Today is litigant-in-person day once again. Let’s call him Vexatious for today’s purposes. Kind of a Groundhog Day in that it felt much the same as the last hearing in Bromley. Once again, avoided anything but the briefest of unpleasantries and then we were straight into court. The judge took control from the very start. He was clearly more prepared for Vexatious than the last time and gave him short shrift on his initial application for an adjournment and then for permission to appeal.

It was then time for Vexatious to present his case. He started by reeling off a summary which looked set to take the rest of the day. The judge cut him short and asked him if he had any witnesses.
“Only myself.”
“Well perhaps you would be kind enough as to direct yourself to the witness box then, Mr [Vexatious].”
“Yes, my Lord.”
“Your Honour.”
“Yes, my Lord, whatever you want to call me.”
“No, my name is Your Honour.”
“Sorry, Your Honour, My Lord.”
“Would you now like to take the oath.”
“No.”
“Why not.”
“Because I don’t believe in this oppressive system of so-called justice and therefore I will not swear any oath of allegiance to it or anyone associated with it.”
“It’s just an oath to tell the truth.”
“Oh.”
“So, repeat the words on the card in front of you.”

And so it went on all morning. He told us all about how the Council had it in for him and had been picking on him ever since he highlighted their error. He then went on to talk about the stress and injury which he had suffered. The judge then asked him:
“Do you have any medical evidence to support your claim in this respect?”
“Yes, Your Lord. I have a photocopy here from a medical textbook from the library. It shows that stress can cause all sorts of illnesses.”
“And do you have any evidence to show that you have any of these illnesses?”
“Yes. I have this textbook, Your Lord.”
“I see.”

It was what the Americans might call a slam dunk for the Boss. He just sat tight and didn’t say a word. The Judge clearly had the points and was going to do the work for him. Eventually, the Judge summarised Vexatious’ case far more articulately than Vexatious himself had been putting it and then said,
“Am I correct that that is your case?”
Somewhat dumbfounded, Vexatious said, “Yes, Your Lord.”

The Judge then turned to the Boss and said, “Well, it’s twelve thirty. Perhaps we can start again at two pm.”

After lunch everyone trekked back into court and the Judge said to the Boss,
“Do you have an application to make to me?”
“Yes, Your Honour. I would ask that the claim be dismissed at this stage as the Claimant has failed to prove his loss as a matter of evidence. In these circumstances there is no need to investigate the full factual dispute.”
“Thank you. Mr [Vexatious], do you have anything to say in response to this application?”
“This is an abuse. It is not why I came here today. I came to show the Council a bit of justice and just because they can afford some clever London barrister they think they can get away with murder.”
“Thank you Mr [Vexatious]. I shall now give my judgment on this application.”

He then went on to dismiss the case at half time and left costs to be assessed at a later date. Tragically for Vexatious these will now amount to over £25,000 for which he personally will be liable. A very sad case on all accounts.

Friday, 2 February 2007

Day 87 (week 18): Embarrassment

Less than two months to go until I get on my feet in court and I have to admit that I’m starting to feel a little nervous. In order to try and get an edge on the other pupils, I’ve hired a public speaking coach. It’s only £25 an hour over the telephone and I’ve had four so far. He basically gets me to recite Shakespeare and other poems and then makes me do breathing exercises during the day.

All very well in itself. But it backfired today when I was caught by the barrister I was following around at court doing one of these exercises. Thought there was no-one around in the robing room and so started reciting one of the more soppy of the Sonnets interspersed with deep breathing (ie moaning) in between each line. You can imagine my horror when the barrister emerged from the loo next door with a smirk that told me he had over-heard it all.

Thursday, 1 February 2007

Day 86 (week 18): Time out

Time dominates everything about life in Chambers. From the day you enter you are labelled not by your ability but by the time. Branded with a date mark. Your year of call. As people rise in Chambers, their rent goes up in accordance with that year of call. So does their name on the board outside. Time also overshadows the work itself. The number of hours spent preparing a particular case will determine its brief fee, along with the number of hours it will take to travel to and from court in addition to the time in court itself.

Don’t know why I mention it save for the fact that today everyone seems to be chasing the clock in one form or another and I suddenly realised that that’s how it is each and every day of a barrister’s life.

Wednesday, 31 January 2007

Day 85 (week 18): An honourable profession

Dear old-fashioned, well-mannered, loveable OldRuin. Who couldn’t like him? He’s seen scandals come and go but has himself spent most of his life playing by the rules. Rules which are as much a part of him as the wove of his tweed. Yet he’s not the self-righteous sort and has a genuine sympathy for those that put themselves into difficulty, no matter how stupid they may have been. That is how he feels towards the Boss. Not quite the prodigal Son but even so, a wayward child in one form or another. So it all became clear when he took me out for lunch at Simpson’s on the Strand today. He counselled me that I must not take these difficulties to heart and that it was a great and honourable profession which I was entering. There would always be bad eggs but in his experience they generally came a cropper of their own making. Furthermore, they were far out-numbered by the honest, decent chaps (and chapesses, he added for good measure) who rarely came to anyone’s attention.

If he was my pupilmaster things may well have been different on all fronts.

But he isn’t.

And they’re not.

Tuesday, 30 January 2007

Day 84 (week 18): Losing it

The Boss was in early today and seemed almost chipper. Not sure if he’s been seeing BusyBody’s life coach but he was peculiarly positive about everything. Even starting lecturing me about how pupillage isn’t that bad, really. Think he’s losing the plot on many different levels.

Monday, 29 January 2007

Day 83 (week 18): Reprieve

Today was the extraordinary Chambers’ meeting. Quite a social gathering to say the least. All I saw were the comings and the goings. No pupils were allowed anywhere near. I’d thought about leaving my phone in there on record but thought better of it given the present circumstances. Instead, I went off to a particular bar which I knew was frequented by at least half a dozen members of Chambers and where I was therefore likely to pick up the outcome later on.

What surprised me was quite how long the meeting took. It wasn’t until eight o’clock that I saw the first crop of them arrive. I’d been hanging out with a friend who I’d briefed sufficiently to act as my wing man on this mission to gain valuable information. As it happened, it took very little effort at all. Turns out there had been drinks served during the meeting and the group which arrived seemed, to say the least, quite relaxed. One of them called my friend and I over to join them and we didn’t need any more encouragement. They were all very open about the outcome on the basis that I was bound to find out sooner or later.

It seems that the conclusion was that there were insufficient people in attendance to be able to suspend constitutionally and so whilst they had gone through the motions of having a debate on the issue (ie a good old fashioned gossip), they had then come to the conclusion that if there were insufficient people to pass the motion, it would be more seemly to withdraw it. A moral high ground could then be taken of innocent until proven guilty. The Boss therefore wasn’t called upon to explain himself and was left outside during the whole meeting. Which is kind of lucky as I’m not sure what explanation he would have come up with if he had been called.

So, the Boss can continue earning his top dollar for at least a few more months until the Standards Board hearing. In the meantime, he’d better start working on his defence.

In the meantime, I continue to be shackled to the Chambers’ pariah though in many ways I am finding this is helpful from the expressions of sympathy I have been receiving.

Friday, 26 January 2007

Day 82 (week 17): Telephone hearings

Today I watched a telephone hearing in action. They are quite seriously the biggest example of money for old rope that I have ever seen and having now been in pupillage for almost four months, that’s saying something. Actually that’s not quite true. Boss’ settlement practice was absurd. However, as well as verging on the edge of professional ethics, I also don’t think it was particularly representative. Telephone hearings on the other hand apply to everyone.

The point with these hearings is that you only get them when they are uncontroversial. Otherwise there’d be a full oral hearing. So, you’re starting from a pretty easy base. Then if anything at all challenging does arise in the middle (as is often the case), the Judge can only fudge the issue unless he wants to adjourn and bring all the parties to a full hearing. This almost never happens. Therefore, with everyone knowing the ground rules, they end up as the most cordial exchanges a hearing could ever have. Many’s the time when everything is agreed and the Judge simply goes through the motions of getting to grips with the case only to approve the draft Order which was already in front of him.

So it was today. The barrister in question was three year’s call and sat there first of all checking his email and then perhaps showing off for his audience, partaking in a game of online chess with a friend of his in another Chambers. This was occasionally interspersed with a “Yes, I agree,” to the Judge. Apparently, they don’t pay as well as trekking off to a hearing miles away but there again, the barrister is immediately back at his desk ready to bill out more hours.

Or, as I saw today, to carry on his very important game of online chess.

Thursday, 25 January 2007

Day 81 (week 17): Other pupils

Worrier has perked up in the last few days. Apparently she’s been visiting a life coach who’s set her the challenge of turning it all around. Some challenge.

BusyBody on the other hand has not been busying anybody recently. So much so that I’m concerned. And that’s saying something. Suggested we had lunch today but I was politely but firmly rebuffed. I’ve had no vibes of suspicion. Simply those of abject defeat.

As for TopFirst, whatever he touches continues to turn to gold. It is somewhat perturbing to say the least. Poisoning remains my last resort.

I am joking. Honestly.

Wednesday, 24 January 2007

Day 80 (week 17): Multiple problems

The Boss came in today. Seems that I am the only one at this stage in whom he feels he can confide. Over lunch he told me that the reason his wife has asked for a divorce is because he has been having an affair with one of his solicitors who gives him quite a large proportion of his work. It’s got back to Chambers via her firm and it will only exacerbate his difficulties in the meeting on Monday. Undoubtedly the issue of conflict of interest will be raised. It seems that for many reasons the Boss was already unpopular with a large number of Chambers even before his present difficulties and he is not confident of being allowed to stay on.

His only hope lies in the Chambers constitution. In common with many Chambers, it is based upon the old-fashioned premise that once you’re in, you’re there for life unless you do something really, really bad. Of course this is never defined but in reality means that over 75% of Chambers has to vote in favour of suspension. Given that there are a number of members of Chambers who will not be in attendance, the reality is that there will need to be an almost unanimous vote in favour of allowing him to stay.

OldRuin has discreetly indicated that he is shooting all week and therefore unfortunately will be unable to attend.

Tuesday, 23 January 2007

Day 79 (week 17): Grumpy

Understandably the Boss has been out of Chambers this week so far. Today this left me to trundle off to yet another County Court which I shall not name so as not to identify the Judge about whom I shall now comment. Let’s call him Grumpy. The hearing was a contractual dispute worth about £20,000 and I was following a member of Chambers of five year’s call. All pretty clear really. Whether the building work on a property was done to standard or not. Couple of experts and two lay witnesses on either side. No technical points. A straight fight on the facts.

Or so you might think. From the start it seemed pretty clear that the District Judge didn’t want to hear the case. He started by telling the parties that around ten years ago he had used the particular building firm (which has branches in eight towns) for building a garden wall. He mentioned this to suggest that he had a conflict of interest and “perhaps both parties might think it best if another judge heard the case.” Both counsel went outside. It was clear from the lists that there would be no other judges available. Therefore although both Counsel readily agreed that the judge obviously wanted to get away, they weren’t prepared to accept an adjournment with such a lame excuse.

Back they went with their answer. The judge then pointed out that one of the expert’s reports and two of the witness statements had been served late (around a week for each). Both counsel immediately piped up that neither objected to this delay.
“Well, rules are rules, you know. I’m minded to adjourn this and to call the solicitors hear personally to explain their breach.”

“With respect, Sir,” came back the reply from the other side’s counsel. “We are here on a multi track trial. The parties, their lay witnesses, their legal representatives and both experts are all here for a fight. Today is probably costing the parties more than £10,000. To adjourn, Sir, would be contrary to the interests of justice.”

That would have been just the right submission. However, he continued with the following:
“In fact Sir, it is just the sort of case that if the Court of Appeal were to examine it, they would absolutely insist that it should have gone ahead today.”

Ouch. As he said these words you could almost see them leaving his mouth and at the same time he was trying to grasp for them. To take them back. Never said it. No. Never. Just your imagination. Except he just did.

“Are you threatening me?”
“No, Sir. Please, Sir, if that’s what you imagine I mean by those words, I retract them wholeheartedly.”
“Which bit do you retract? The threat?”
“Yes. No. I mean…”
“Mr [Blogs]. I have been in this game for a lot longer than I care to remember and I do not care to be lectured on what the Court of Appeal might or might not think of my local justice.”
“No, Sir.”
“I care even less for direct threats made at my office. If you want to appeal me. By all means. But never. I repeat, never. Threaten me. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Sir. I’m very…”
“Because if you threaten me, I will not only send you over to the cells at the magistrates court for contempt. I will also pass the case over the your brand new sparkling Standards Board.”
“Yes, Sir. Sorry, Sir.”
“Now. I am minded to adjourn this case unless I hear any objection to the contrary from either of you.”

Both Counsel bowed their heads in dismay. They both knew they should argue further but they both also knew that to do so would neither change the outcome nor do any further good.

Monday, 22 January 2007

Day 78 (week 17): Extraordinary meeting

Apparently an extraordinary Chambers meeting has been called to decide whether the Boss should be suspended from Chambers pending the Bar Standards hearing which could be several months. Whilst the normal course in these matters I am told is to assume innocence until proven guilty, it appears that this may be superceded by the fact that the allegation involves the Boss fiddling Chambers’ books and furthermore, the Boss is yet to come up with any defence, never mind an arguable one. It is to be held next Monday.

Friday, 19 January 2007

Day 77 (week 16): Bombshell

Today the Boss received a bombshell in the form of a letter from the Senior Partner of the firm of solicitors involved in the case of the accident on a ship in which limitation was missed. It stated that examination of Chambers’ hard disc by an expert showed that an amendment was made to the records at 7am on 4 November 2006. Specifically, an entry was added stating that the papers in the case had been sent back in July along with an advice and a fee note. This was contrary to the Boss’ account and suggested that the Boss had fraudulently doctored the records in order to avoid involvement in any professional negligence action. The letter stated that for these reasons the firm had no option but to make a formal complaint to the Bar Standards Board. Furthermore, if there was an action for professional negligence, the solicitors would be blaming the Boss and he was therefore advised to report this to his professional insurance body, the Bar Mutual Indemnity Fund.

It might be said that things are not looking good for the Boss.

Thursday, 18 January 2007

Day 76 (week 16): Worrier again

Worrier has heard all the various stories and is having difficulty believing that BusyBody could do such a thing. She came to me today just mumbling that it simply doesn’t add up. Why on earth? I agreed with her, of course. People are strange creatures and life’s mysteries are not such that we can solve them all.

Wednesday, 17 January 2007

Day 75 (week 16): BusyBody convicted

I have now heard the full story and BusyBody appears to have been completely banged to rights. The Head of Chambers called her in at 9.30am and asked for an explanation. Obviously, she pleaded ignorance. This just made the Head of Chambers even more angry. He told her about the recording, the post on YouTube and the anonymous email he had received. She repeated her protestations. Again they didn’t wash. He told her that over the weekend he had had a high-ranking police friend of his do a search on the source of the uploading of the recording and of the anonymous email and both had been traced to an IP address for a particular internet café not far from Chambers at between 6.15 and 6.30pm last Thursday. On Monday, that same friend had asked a local police officer to visit the café and obtain copies of the security videos covering those times. He had then played the video, fast-forwarding to the time when BusyBody had entered the café and then to when she left. He also pointed out that there was no-one else from Chambers to be seen.

This had floored BusyBody. She was bright enough to see that she was well and truly scuppered. She continued to plead ignorance but it was clear to her this was getting nowhere. The Head of Chambers had then gone on to tell her that whilst the police had been involved it had been on an informal basis and he did not want them to press charges for the theft of the recording. Furthermore, whilst he considered this to be an extremely serious matter, it was one which he thought should be dealt with internally by Chambers. He had already made a threatening request to YouTube via his police friend and the recording had now been taken down. As for BusyBody, she simply needed to know at this stage that she could not have made a worse start to pupillage. Her pupil-master had been infirmed and in due course the tenancy committee would be given a summary of the events. At the very least, she would be well-advised to consider applying for third sixes in case she was not taken on at this set of Chambers.
All I could offer BusyBody was my sympathy.

Tuesday, 16 January 2007

Day 74 (week 16): BusyBody panics

BusyBody came to see me in a panic today. The Head of Chambers has asked to see her first thing in the morning. Apparently he said the following:
“I’m sure you know what this is about. What on earth you were thinking with YouTube I cannot imagine but you need to know that this is being taken extremely seriously.”

She had absolutely no idea what he was talking about and wondered if I could provide any insight. Obviously, I pleaded complete ignorance. Sounded like he had lost the plot, was all I could offer.

Monday, 15 January 2007

Day 73 (week 16): Worrier confesses

Went for coffee with Worrier this morning. She told me that the Head of Chambers had come to see her on Friday and accused her of taping the conversation he had with her. She of course broke down immediately and told him everything. Given that there is nothing more sincere than Worrier under pressure (she’ll be a dreadful barrister) it must have been clear to the Head of Chambers that she was also telling the truth when she denied putting the recording on YouTube. The inevitable question after that was who had had access to the tape? The only person as far as Worrier knew was BusyBody, to whom she had lent the tape last Monday.

With forty years of seeking justice and defending the rights of the innocent, the Head of Chambers put two and two together and came up with BusyBody as the only possible culprit. After all, it couldn’t possibly be any of the tenants. They were as good as family. And if BusyBody was the only one of the pupils with access, then it was obviously her. This was particularly so given their little incident in Chambers tea a while back.

Friday, 12 January 2007

Day 72 (week 15): Unappealable

Getting tired of trundling off to small claims now without being able to get my teeth into any myself. Today was a classic example of an eccentric judge coming to an even more eccentric result simply because he didn’t like my barrister’s opponent. This is another difficulty with the small claims. Unlike any other judge in the land, those in the Small Claims Court are almost unappealable. Whilst the highest court in the land, the House of Lords can still be appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, the court for the very smallest claims is almost as a matter of fact unappealable. This is because it is extremely hard to succeed in any appeal from this court and furthermore the size of the claim almost guarantees that an appeal will not happen. Judges are fully aware of this and therefore often just ignore barristers who try to put points of law to them.

Whatever the law is in the rest of the land, it is clear that it does not beat the whim of a district judge in the Small Claims Court.

Thursday, 11 January 2007

Day 71 (week 15): The set-up

A fact that I had found out from BusyBody during the Christmas break was that she had no access to her emails at home and therefore most evenings after work she spent twenty minutes in a nearby internet café doing her personal emails (something which is disapproved of by Chambers on their time). It’s a pretty big place and although a slightly risky strategy, I got changed after work into a so-called ‘hoody’ and jeans and went off there. Sure enough, BusyBody was beavering away in the corner.

I duly uploaded the recording of the Head of Chambers onto YouTube. I did not state what it was and am confident that no-one would stumble on it accidentally as there are no search words to bring it up (so there is no point looking). I then set up a fake hotmail account and emailed the Head of Chambers the link putting various cats among various pigeons.

If any of it ever gets traced back to this internet café, the video footage should show very clearly that the only person related to Chambers who was in here was BusyBody. My hood kept me well and truly anonymous.

Wednesday, 10 January 2007

Day 70 (week 15): Steps of High Court

Old Ruin was in this morning. All dressed up in his best tweed suit. Hair unusually combed down and almost looking coy. Like a schoolboy who had prematurely aged fifty years. It seems that it would have been his wedding anniversary today. He was married in Temple Church and he proposed exactly a year earlier on bended knee on the steps of the High Court. Some thirty-five years later, his wife contracted cancer. When she was told that it was terminal, she told him that wherever she was taken in the afterlife (something in which they both believed), she would always ensure that at midday on their wedding anniversary she would be sitting on the steps of the High Court in exactly the same place that the two of them had sat after their engagement. Therefore just in case she was not able to track where he was, they could always ensure they would be together on that particular day.

It was 11am and OldRuin was ready for his love.

Tuesday, 9 January 2007

Day 69 (week 15): My recording

This evening after work I visited Worrier’s room which was empty. Found the tape in the recorder which had duly been returned by BusyBody. With the help of my trusty mobile phone I made my own recording of the conversation.

Monday, 8 January 2007

Day 68 (week 15): The recording

BusyBody came over for a chat in the library this afternoon. She told me that she’d asked Worrier if she could listen to the tape. Worrier had dug it out of her desk and lent her the tape and the recorder during the afternoon. BusyBody said that she had it in her bag and wondered if I wanted to hear it again. I said that I was in a rush but would be very interested to hear what she thought about it later.

The most interesting piece of information from that conversation was that Worrier kept the tape in her desk.

Friday, 5 January 2007

Day 67 (week 14): Small claims

Off to the Small Claims Court again today as further preparation for April. With a barrister who has been a tenant for just over a year. It seems that most tenants are resigned to doing a lot of small claims in their first two or three years. Having watched a few now it seems to me to be a bit of a free for all jurisdiction in terms of what goes on. No-one swears an oath. Often the Judge simply takes the evidence by asking the questions himself and if any documents or other evidence comes in late, the judge just sighs and goes through the motions of complaining that they should have been there earlier before allowing it in anyway. The phrase “ the strict rules of evidence don’t apply” seems to be used every five minutes and you have to question whether there are any rules of evidence which apply at all.

Palm tree justice at its very best.

Thursday, 4 January 2007

Day 66 (week 14): Real clients

We had our first Chambers training session today in preparation for our first days in court come 1 April. Slightly nerve-wracking thinking that I’ll actually be representing people after that date. My own clients with absolute responsibility for how their case is presented to the court. I don’t think clients realise that for many cases they are simply practice fodder for baby barristers. Not sure they’d exactly consent to this if solicitors were to tell them.

Wednesday, 3 January 2007

Day 65 (week 14): Mold

Today I had what might be classed as a thankless task. I was sent to visit a solicitors’ firm in Mold on behalf of the Boss in order to go makes notes on various documents and to decide what needed copying for him. Now that might sound harmless enough were it not for the fact that Mold is in North Wales and the only way of getting there was London is by a very complicated train route that meant that I was up well before the crack of dawn and arrived home around 11pm.

This was made even worse by the grottiness of the town. Now, it was a long while back that I learnt the word onomatopoeia where the word sounds like its meaning. ‘Splash’ would be a good example. Mold is another example. Though I have never been there, I imagine Grimsby comes into the same category. Brief respite only came from the town’s wit who had scrawled on a number of signs the letter ‘y’ after each mention of Mold. Hence, ‘Moldy Industrial Estate’, ‘Moldy Social Club’ etc.

The only consolation was the friendliness of the locals. Almost as if they were overcompensating for the otherwise inhospitable surroundings. However, it mitigated only slightly what was otherwise a miserable today. Particularly as I had to pick up the tab for the train fare.

Tuesday, 2 January 2007

Day 64 (week 14): Divorce

The Boss was in work today even though he wasn’t due back until Monday. Seems his wife kicked him off the holiday. Wants a divorce. More importantly for the Boss she wants half the assets and maintenance for her and their ten year old son. This was all I managed to pick up. I can only speculate that he has been having an affair. So BusyBody, it seems, was never in the picture in the first place. Whatever the reason he’s back at work earning the cash in fear of the amount with which he will now have to part.

Friday, 29 December 2006

Day 63 (week 13): The tape

True to the spirit of any disinformation campaign, today I actually told BusyBody something that was not only true but also highly unlikely. Not only will this bolster my other claims when she realises its truth but it will also serve its primary purpose of completely winding her up. Simply told her what the Head of Chambers had said to Worrier about her sex discrimination claim.

I also told her that Worrier had taped the conversation just to really get her going.

Thursday, 28 December 2006

Day 62 (week 13): …and another

I asked BusyBody what she thought of the Boss today. In fact I went so far as to whisper that he’s told me in a drunken moment and in the strictest of confidence that he quite fancied her.

Not true.

Wednesday, 27 December 2006

Day 61 (week 13): Another bluff

Chambers was eerily quiet today. Two clerks were in and probably about three barristers in addition to myself and of course, who could ever forget, BusyBody. We went out for lunch in festive spirit and I have to admit that when she’s not trying to organise everybody, she’s actually quite nice. Maybe she should just calm down a bit and stop marching round chambers like she owns it. Wasn’t going to suggest anything like that though. The more she busies around everyone the better as far as I’m concerned. In fact I told her that I’d applied to be on two Chambers committees just to try and encourage her to do the same.

Of course, I haven’t really applied to anything of the sort.

Friday, 22 December 2006

Day 60 (week 12): Holidays for some

Everyone is packing up today. Almost all of Chambers will be away over the Christmas period including two of the pupils. Annoyingly, TopFirst has managed to scrape a week away and still enhance his reputation since he is to be best man at the wedding of a friend of his who just happens to be the son of a judge. Worrier decided to take a week off after she found out about her complaint being dismissed. Nothing to lose any more for her, I guess.

Thursday, 21 December 2006

Day 59 (week 12): Boss away

The Boss has now gone off on his expensive holiday in Barbados. “Should keep Her Indoors happy” he said as whisked out of Chambers this morning. He’s away now until 8 January. You might think that meant Pupil freedom but sadly this has turned out not to be the case. Not only has he left me about 20 sets of papers to plough through but he has also asked another barrister to check that I “have enough to do”. So much for Christmas spirit extending to pupils.

Wednesday, 20 December 2006

Day 58 (week 12): Complaint dismissed

Worrier came to see me today and asked if I had time for a drink after work. Of course I did.

It seems that her complaint was dismissed. Quelle surprise!

One pupil down, two to go.

Tuesday, 19 December 2006

Day 57 (week 12): Hard discs

The Boss received a letter today from the solicitors in the case involving the accident on the ship. If you remember he had forged Chambers’ records to show that he had sent the papers back before the limitation period came to an end so that he could get out of any blame for not ensuring that the case was issued in time. The letter sought formal pre-action disclosure of Chambers records. It also sought access to Chambers’ hard disc.

The Head Clerk came in for a chat and said that given that we had nothing to hide, there was no reason why we would oppose this. The Boss was in an impossible position and was forced to agree. It sent him into somewhat of a panic, though. He made a couple of calls made to an IT friend of his as to whether a computer expert would be able to find out that the records had been changed retrospectively. The answer was that it was unclear. It depended upon the exact computer system and most importantly upon how thorough the tests were on the hard drive.

Whilst it left the Boss uneasy, I was in no doubt. The computer expert would find the fraud. I was naive even to have been a passive accomplice. However, on balance I decided that the Boss would not mention the fact that I knew about it. Involving one’s pupil in a potentially criminal act would only exacerbate his already precarious position.

I will therefore sit tight.

Monday, 18 December 2006

Day 56 (week 12): Chambers’ gossip

Inevitably there was going to be some scandal after Thursday’s party. However, as far as I know, it didn’t involve the Boss and BusyBody. Instead, two members of Chambers who are about fifteen and five years’ call (ie post-qualification) respectively came out publicly as a couple. Not in itself a big deal you might think. However, when you bear in mind the fact that the woman of five years’ call also happens to be the Head of Chambers’ daughter and the man of fifteen years’ call is married to one of the administrators then things get a little trickier. Talk about incestuous.

Friday, 15 December 2006

Day 55 (week 11): Vexatious litigants

Thankfully not too much of a sore head this morning as I left strategically when they all starting moving off for dinner. Old Ruin was in this morning regaling about Chambers parties passed. Many’s the scandal that has been revealed on such occasions. Still awaiting on the gossip from last night unfortunately.

I told him about our case on Wednesday with the litigant-in-person which raised a smile. He started telling me about the more specialised issue of vexatious litigants. Apparently when litigants-in-person get particularly bad the government eventually, through the office of the Attorney-General takes that person to court and gets an order styling them a vexatious litigant. What this means is that after that they can only bring an action with the permission of a judge. This is so that the judge can cut off any frivolous or vexatious claims before they even get started. Pretty hard to get to this stage though. Our man on Wednesday is not even near. He’d have to be suing perhaps the judge, the barrister, maybe even the pupil, the solicitors and say a dozen members of the council before it would even be considered.

Don’t like the sound of that.

Thursday, 14 December 2006

Day 54 (week 11): Chambers’ party

Just got back from the Chambers’ drinks party. The annual knees up for members of Chambers to entertain the clerks and administrators (of which in total there are ten people). I was there simply to serve the drinks as were the other three pupils. The most interesting thing about the evening was seeing what each of the spouses were like. Also seeing which of the spouses did not turn up. Notable in this respect was Mrs Boss who, I was told, had a cold.

It was held in Chambers’ large meeting room and for two hours there was free flowing champagne and canapés provided courtesy of Marks and Spencer this afternoon. For just a short space of time it was almost as if everyone forgot their petty differences, of which I have already discovered, there are many. However, a few glasses later and the cliques started to re-form into the corners of the room, with each deciding on a different destination for food. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s that everyone is self-employed and just a bit more independent than average. Maybe it’s the fact that they are outspoken for a living. Maybe it’s the same everywhere. Whatever the reason, by all accounts I have heard so far, barristers’ chambers are rife with gossip, intrigue and clashes of rather larger than life personalities.

The Boss spent quite some time talking to BusyBody about how she was enjoying pupillage as she quietly sipped away on the champagne in between rounds of serving. As for TopFirst, predictably he wasn’t drinking. Says he’s on a detox. More like a de-life. There seems to be no chink in his armour at all. Worrier is almost finished and BusyBody is likely to annoy just about everyone except the Boss. However, TopFirst is going to be more of a problem and may need a little more thought.

Wednesday, 13 December 2006

Day 53 (week 11): Litigant-in-person

Today the Boss had an interlocutory hearing, a small ten minute affair where the court makes directions as to how the case should proceed. Well, that’s how long it should have taken were it not for the litigant-in-person on the other side. This is the polite name for someone who is not legally represented. Occasionally this can be for the very best of reasons such as lack of funds. More usually it’s because the litigant has either been unable to get a firm to represent him or because he has parted company with them. This might be due, for example, to him sacking them or because solicitors get sick of the trouble he is causing or perhaps stumble on a difficulty which until then he has successfully hidden from them. Whatever it is, by and large litigants-in-person are trouble. Or so the Boss explained to me in some detail before going off on this case.

For once, he was proved right. From our arrival at Bromley County Court, it was clear that the litigant was bristling for a fight. The Boss had had some experience of such litigants and told me that it was wise to say as little as possible to them beforehand. Otherwise, he said, you risk finding whatever you said being twisted into a professional conduct complaint. He said this with such conviction that it made me wonder whether he was speaking from personal experience. The litigant also smelt slightly of alcohol which for eleven in the morning did not bode well. So, after brief unpleasantries between the litigant and the Boss, we all marched into court.

The dispute was a simple one. The litigant accused his local council of ‘harrassment’. The council, represented by the Boss, denied the allegations. In addition, they said that in any event even if what he said were true, it did not amount to a cause of action which would result in damages. The file of papers was massive and packed full of handwritten letters from the litigant himself. Lots of capital letters, underlinings and exclamation marks as if he felt that the world would not listen to him unless he made more of an effort. His written ramblings were at times incoherent and this was reflected in the submissions he gave to the judge. It was clear from the start that the judge had the measure of this case and was simply going through the motions for the benefit of the tape. He was well aware that this sort of litigant was exactly the sort of person to take what he said straight to the Court of Appeal. He therefore listened carefully to the litigant’s submissions for one and a half hours. He then looked at the Boss and having told him that he did not need to hear from him, refused the litigant’s request to put off the case for six months whilst he gathered more evidence. Instead, the trial was listed for February.

The sad thing is that the whole thing appears to have started with a genuine grievance. The council sent him a letter claiming that he had not paid his council tax. This was sent to him in error and was meant for someone with the same surname further down his street. It took several letters from the litigant before the council accepted this. In the meantime, he had got it into his head that he should be compensated for the stress that he had suffered in dealing with this. The problem at this stage of the case was that the council had now racked up over £20,000 in legal fees defending it and so the litigant had dug himself into a hole. Even if he gave up now, he would never be able to pay such a bill and therefore he almost had nothing more to lose as it were by fighting on.

And so it was that another story of human misfortune triggered a legal case which would eventually find its way onto the Boss’ desk and contribute to the lifestyle to which he had by now become accustomed.

Tuesday, 12 December 2006

Day 52 (week 11): ‘Research’

BusyBody was back again today. I’m not even sure if she’s started flirting back. Stayed about an hour doing more ‘research’ at OldRuin’s desk. I gave the Boss fifteen minutes before he mentioned the Ferrari. He did it in ten.

Monday, 11 December 2006

Day 51 (week 11): Small Claims Court

Went to watch a small claims case today in Willesden County Court. Not exactly the most salubrious of surroundings but the court was even worse. All the cases for the whole day had been listed at 10.30am on the basis I assume that a lot of people simply weren’t going to turn up. This may well be convenient to the judges but it meant that it was mayhem in the waiting room with barristers all clamouring to get in (and therefore out) first. The usher had clearly heard it all before with promises of “We’ll only be five minutes” and “It’s all been agreed” being met with raised eyebrows and a rye smile.

The number of barristers crowded into this small place was to say the least unpleasant. This was made even worse by nervous litigants all standing around in the same area. Opposing sides staring each other down. Inevitably this led to some small outbreaks of trouble and the guards had to eject at least two of the parties for disorderly conduct.

My barrister was about half way down the list and our case didn’t get on until after lunch (quite a good greasy fry on the road back to the station). Tiny case, more a squabble than an argument. What the judge called (thinking himself a wit) “A classic county court action between two stationary cars”. He was right though. Barristers on either side each only getting around £100 each which after their train fares and their contributions to Chambers’ rent probably left them with around £60 for a whole day in Willesden.

My barrister won almost just by shouting louder than his opponent. I was surprised that the District Judge allowed him to get away with it, but there you go.

Friday, 8 December 2006

Day 50 (week 10): The complaint

Worrier put in her complaint yesterday. News of it reached me by mid-afternoon. Once again, whilst I was supposedly making the coffee, I overheard one of the more senior barristers in Chambers telling the Boss about it. Specifically heard the word “foolhardy” and later, “Well, on her own head be it.”

A good start to the weekend.

Thursday, 7 December 2006

Day 49 (week 10): Solicitor party

Tonight was the first in a series of Christmas parties. This one was held by a firm of solicitors who give a lot of work to Chambers. I had been invited along by the Boss in the afternoon as he was feeling in a generous mood having made another of his last minute settlements (brief fee for tomorrow’s now defunct hearing: £4,000).

If the relationship between senior clerk and barrister is a complicated one, that between solicitor and barrister is simple. Barristers are self-employed and in a highly competitive market. Solicitors do the hiring. Barristers are desperate for the work. Solicitors have it to give out. Solicitors dangle their work in front of the barristers just as you might dangle a ball of wool in front of a kitten. In the same way, they may just as easily take it away at the last moment. Just for fun. To watch the barrister chase. Bring him down a peg or two. Then, when all his pride is lost, he is rewarded with one of the cases.

Now I accept that this may not always be the case but it certainly seemed like that tonight, watching the way the barristers fawned over the solicitors at the drinks party. It’s a game. The barristers know that but they can’t seem to control their professional paranoia. The fear that one day, no matter how successful they are now, it might all disappear. The cases might stop. That they’ll be left with nothing. Stuck in trheir ivory tower with nowhere left to escape.

Wednesday, 6 December 2006

Day 48 (week 10): Over the edge

Today Worrier wanted a final chat before embarking on any course of action in relation to her sex discrimination allegations. Over lunch she explained that she had thought very carefully about what I had said and was in agreement that the best place to pursue it was through Chambers. However, she was concerned that if she presented it to the Head of Chambers she might not get a fair hearing.

I had known full well all along that to make such a complaint would be professional suicide and now I had her standing on the edge of the cliff asking me whether she should jump. Asking her competition. One of the three other contenders for the prize of tenancy at the end of the year. Should she jump? Of course she should as far as I was concerned. However, just to make sure, I pushed her by reminding her again that if she did nothing now, it could later be held against her if things got any worse. This was indeed a winning argument and over the edge she went.

The only question then was to whom she should make the complaint.

I suggested she start with her pupilmaster.

Tuesday, 5 December 2006

Day 47 (week 10): The Senior Clerk

It’s a very strange relationship that of barrister and Senior Clerk. On the face of it, the barrister pays rent to Chambers and Chambers employ the Clerks so strictly the barrister is the employer. However, you’d never guess it to watch the Boss and his Senior Clerk in action. For all the Boss’ arrogance and pomposity, he is humility itself when the Senior Clerk walks through the door. This was particularly apparent when the Boss had another visit this afternoon. Apparently the number of barristers hit has now risen to five plus the Boss. The Senior Clerk asked him what he planned to do about it, if anything.

The Boss said that he had considered ignoring his duty of confidentiality to his solicitor client and anonymously leaking the information to his lay client. However, if he did this it was highly likely that eventually his own misconduct in the conference would come to light and therefore on balance he had decided that he would do nothing. For once, the spineless option was probably the right one in all the circumstances. The Senior Clerk commented that realistically it was unlikely that something like this would stay quiet forever. However, he obviously didn’t want to interfere in professional conduct issues and therefore left it at that.

Monday, 4 December 2006

Day 46 (week 10): Clerk network

The Senior Clerk wanted a word with the Boss this morning. He’d been ringing around the Clerk network and it seems that the solicitor from last week who is taking a share of his client’s money has pulled the same stunt on at least three other occasions with barristers in three other Chambers. All have faced the same professional conduct difficulties.

The Senior Clerk said he’d keep him posted as to any other developments and in the meantime the Boss should decide what he was going to do.

Friday, 1 December 2006

Day 45 (week 9): Cringe

Today the Boss announced that he’d just bought himself a Ferrari,
“Got a lot of grief from the trouble and strife, you know over this one. But, hey, I’m worth it.”

Hey, you’re not.

Cringeworthy, sickly mid-life crisis at its worst.

Thursday, 30 November 2006

Day 44 (week 9): Off the case

The Boss received a call from the Head Clerk this morning telling him that he’d been taken off the case which he had had the conference on yesterday.

The Boss is starting to get a little jittery. He rang the Bar Council anonymously this morning to look into his professional position. It seems that he should probably have considered withdrawing from the case at the moment he heard that such an arrangement was in place. At the very least he should have stopped the conference so that he could consider his position further before continuing. By not doing so he has left the client with the impression that the arrangement is perfectly legal.

The person at the Bar Council went even further than this though and suggested that the Boss himself may have been the victim of a wider scam perpetrated by the solicitor. By contriving the situation the Boss found himself in the solicitor took a calculated risk that the Boss would at worst say nothing, leaving the solicitor with implicit approval for his scheme from an eminent barrister.

I almost felt a little sorry for the Boss. He was truly between a rock and a hard place at this stage. Not to say anything to the client would leave him with the wrong impression. It would also leave the Boss implicated in the deception as well as leaving him open to a complaint in the future. However, to say anything whatsoever to the client would mean that he had contravened his duty to his solicitor client and expose the conflict of interest. Furthermore, his duty of confidentiality to his solicitor forbade him from putting in any sort of complaint or raising an investigation.

As far as he could see, all he could do was to sit tight and hope the client didn’t spot it. Then at least he’d be alright even if the client was then over £165,000 down.

Sometimes professional rules can have strange consequences.

Wednesday, 29 November 2006

Day 43 (week 9): One third of the damages

Today I watched the Boss stumble into and around a conflict of interest. We were sat in a conference in Chambers with the solicitor and client. The client was claiming around half a million pounds following a lifting accident at work. The client asked the Boss how much he would get in his pocket if the case settled for half a million. There was an awkward pause by the Boss as he exchanged glances with the solicitor. The solicitor then piped up with the following:
“Well, as you know, we have a contingency agreement that we will be paid one third of your damages so you will get to keep two thirds which would be just over three hundred and thirty thousand pounds.”

I almost jumped out of my seat. Even pupils know that taking a share of the damages are illegal in cases such as this. Furthermore, the solicitor would be getting his usual costs paid by the other side as well. A fast one was well and truly being pulled and I wondered whether this was because the solicitor assumed that this client was unlikely to understand this due to his lack of formal education. Even the Boss looked a little uneasy and simply commented that any costs arrangements were between the client and his solicitor and all the Boss could do was to advise as to what the client would get before that point.

At the end of the conference when the client had gone and I was supposedly making coffee for the Boss and his solicitor, I overheard the following conversation:
“You do know that contingency fees are illegal?”
“No.”
“Well they are. I also think that puts me in a difficult position. If the case goes any further, I would be bound to advise the client of this fact. Indeed, many people might say that I perhaps should have advised the client of that today or at the very least to have withdrawn from the case on the basis of a conflict of interest at that stage. So, either you’ll have to change the agreement or I will have to withdraw.”
“OK. Thanks for telling me. I’ll look into it.”

Tuesday, 28 November 2006

Day 42 (week 9): Wigs and gowns

Today the Boss and I went off to the High Court to get the stamp of approval on a consent order following a settlement. Given that it was a final hearing, we both had to put on the wig and gown which, for me, was the first time that I had done this in court. I have to admit some to some degree of satisfaction as I straightened the wig and checked it all in the mirror. However, I couldn’t help reflecting how absurd the whole thing was. It simply acted as a symbol of how completely out of touch much of the legal world and in particular the Bar was with modern society. They may have been the height of fashion in Charles II’s time. They may also have helped keep the nits and other bugs away in the nineteenth century. But these days they only perpetuated an image of the Bar as being left in the past.

Still, for today I liked it.

Monday, 27 November 2006

Day 41 (week 9): The tape

Had lunch with Worrier today. She had had her morning meeting with the Head of Chambers and she had also made a recording although I didn’t get to hear it. Needless to say, he had discouraged her from making any formal complaint, even to him. He was sure it was something which could be sorted out informally with a word in the right ear. Two choice quotes which Worrier told me about were the following (as near as I can remember):

“I can assure you that I say this with the very best of intent for your career. Be very careful where you take this. A woman can get a name for herself for causing trouble which it becomes impossible to lose in such a small world.”

“I’m afraid Dear, you’re going to have to get used to the rough and tumble of the Bar. It’s only going to get worse once you’re in court and throwing insults at each other across a courtroom. To survive in this job, you have to be tough. I’m sure [the barrister she was complaining about] was only trying to help you.”

I agreed with Worrier that his reaction perhaps wasn’t surprising given the talk he’d given us at the start of the year. However, it was extraordinary given the nature of the complaint she was making. The choices were either to make a formal complaint to Chambers or alternatively to take it straight to the Bar Council and include the Head of Chambers. I suggested she should not over-step the mark and that perhaps it was wise simply to formalise her complaint with Chambers. She said she would think about it.

Friday, 24 November 2006

Day 40 (week 8): Showdown

The Boss was in a storm today. The Senior Clerk had been to see him. Seems the Senior Partner of the firm of solicitors who were doing the accident on a ship had been in touch. Was very concerned that the Boss’ advice hadn’t been received. Wanted to know every detail as to when it was sent out. The Senior Clerk was equally concerned although he couldn’t put his finger on it as there was no way of knowing that the records had been doctored. He was therefore left having to question the Boss straight out as to what had happened. The Boss was brazen in his lies it seems. Judgment, though, is reserved and this has left him more than a little tetchy to be around.

Thursday, 23 November 2006

Day 39 (week 8): Raised eyebrows

Got an email from Worrier this morning. Apparently she has an appointment with the Head of Chambers for Monday morning. Should set the cat among the pigeons.

In the meantime, the Boss is definitely now flirting with BusyBody. Even OldRuin raised his eyebrows at me when the Boss made some comment to her today about what he’d heard about the work she was doing.

Wednesday, 22 November 2006

Day 38 (week 8): Sex discrimination?

Worrier came to visit today. Asked if I was free for lunch. Naturally, the Boss obliged and off we went to Chancery Lane. She wanted my advice. It seems that a particular member of Chambers has been picking on her. It started with him asking her to do a piece of work. When she returned it, he was highly critical and then asked for it to be done again. On returning the papers for a second time, he was even more critical. The conversation went along the following lines:
“When solicitors ask for your advice, they’re not asking for ifs and buts. They want an answer. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.”
“Have you always had problems being indecisive? Is it just in your nature?”
“No. Well, maybe.”
“How are you going to cope with court? You can’t afford to dither, you know.”
“I know.”
“Maybe it’s just a girl thing and I’m not quite getting it. Is that it perhaps?”
“Er, I don’t know.”

Anyway, she thinks she’s been discriminated against sexually and wanted to know what I thought.

Now, it seemed to me that he could certainly have phrased his comments more diplomatically but if you met Worrier, you’d know that he had a point although it certainly isn’t a girl thing. However, here was an opportunity I wasn’t going to pass up to damage a fellow pupil, potentially fatally. So, I told her I was quite shocked to hear that such things went on at all. Further, she should definitely not let it lie. To do so could in fact be counter-productive as the bullying may only get worse and if it did and she had failed to respond early on, her whole account might come into question.

It was clear that this was not what Worrier wanted to hear. In fact, all she wanted was a little reassurance. However, she’d come to the wrong person for that and by the time I was finished she was ready to complain to the Bar Council. I suggested that perhaps she might instead start with the Head of Chambers to show that she was not unduly escalating matters.

She thanked me so very much for all my help.

My pleasure indeed.

Tuesday, 21 November 2006

Day 37 (week 8): Tedium

Spent a whole day drafting a schedule of damages for the Boss. I have discount rates and multipliers coming out of my ears and I can honestly say that it has utterly bored me stupid. The worst thing is that the more successful you get it seems in personal injury, the more schedules you get to do. Seems a bit topsy turvey to me. Can’t imagine why anyone would strive to do more of these things.

Monday, 20 November 2006

Day 36 (week 8): Chambers’ tea

Since I have not yet described Chambers’ tea, let me now do so. It happens every afternoon at 4.30pm on the dot. Despite the fact that we are now all on email, each member of Chambers is called by the Clerks and told that tea is being served. Probably about fifteen people turn up each afternoon and it is always quite an occasion.

As a pupil, the lesson I learned very early on was not to speak unless spoken to and even then to keep it as brief as possible. You’ve basically got a room full of egos sitting around on their own personal highs, usually after a day in court. Lets them wind down before getting back to their families. Lots of victories to report and anecdotes to regale and if anyone at all interrupts them, never mind a pupil, then woe betide. This means that after a day of jousting they are all overly polite towards each other. Lots of “No, after you”s floating around add to a very peculiar mix.

Today, BusyBody learned the same lesson the hard way. She accidentally interrupted the Head of Chambers whilst he was lamenting times past. He obviously gave her the floor, ready for an immediate put down. All she was wanting to do was to mention the case she had been on that morning and how interesting she had found it.

After an awkward silence from everyone at the end of her little whimpering monologue, the Head of Chambers then said:“And that is why, Pupils should always be seen and not heard.”

Friday, 17 November 2006

Day 35 (week 7): Client conference

Had a conference with a client today. Contrary to the usual practice of clients coming to Chambers, the Boss and I trekked off to his home in Stratford as he is in a wheelchair. In fact, he’s pretty much unable to do most things and it was very sad. For once, I was proud of the Boss. I think even he was humbled by the client’s dignity in the face of extreme suffering.

The client had fallen from about twenty feet on a building site and his employers were being sued for failing to provide safety rails. It should be a pretty clear cut case but the insurers are inevitably saying it was partly his fault. Common sense and all that. It’s an expensive case. The client was 40 years old at the time of the accident earning some £25,000 a year. Not only is he losing earnings to age 65 but he will also need full time care for the rest of his life. Apparently there are technical arguments which we will be facing on this part of the claim. Anyway, suffice it to say that potentially it’s a multi-million pound claim.

This is a legal expenses case which means that the Boss will get paid win or lose. Hopefully this might bolster the Boss’ resolve. On the journey back, he did lament the fact that we could not work for a percentage of the damages as they do in the States.

Thursday, 16 November 2006

Day 34 (week 7): Merry-go-round

Started learning about the personal injury industry today from the Boss. It seems that the food chain starts with the accident management companies chasing the client for the case. The solicitors then chase the accident management companies to pass it on. The junior barristers then chase the solicitors and then if its big enough the QCs chase the junior barristers.

An extremely expensive merry-go-round with the client in the middle not knowing where to turn.

Wednesday, 15 November 2006

Day 33 (week 7): Over-slept

Slept in this morning. Woke up in a panic at 9am with a sore head. Had been out until 2am the night before. Big mistake. It would be one and a half hours into Chambers and there was nothing I could do. Did I ring up and say I was ill? Or did I just tell the plain old truth?

Neither of these were going to take me very far and so I decided on a slightly bolder strategy. Phoned up the Boss and said that I was at Uxbridge County Court, taking a gamble that no-one was in the court today. Said I thought I was meant to be meeting [Blog] barrister there having had a note in my pigeon-hole about it on Friday. He said he´d ask the Clerks. Got a return phone call from one of the Clerks about five minutes later. He was clearly in a rush. Luckily Monday morning is pretty hectic and the last thing the wanted to be doing is holding an investigation into why I had ended up in Uxbridge. The clerk therefore simply apologised and suggested that I make my way back into Chambers.

Got in eventually around 1pm. Went off for lunch. Then left Chambers at 5pm. The Boss has been teaching me well.

Tuesday, 14 November 2006

Day 32 (week 7): Coroner´s Court

Had a Coroner’s hearing today. Very strange jurisdiction. A public investigation into an unusual death but with no real powers to do anything or generally to find anything of any great significance. Seems an expensive waste of time to me. Either way, this was one that not even the Boss could settle. He said beforehand,
“A successful hearing is one in which you say virtually nothing.”

And so he proved. His client was a lorry driver who had killed a motorcyclist. The only advice he gave beforehand was not to answer any questions about the accident in case he incriminated himself. The Coroner, a qualified doctor, asked all the questions and when it came to that part, he looked at the Boss and said,
“Will he be answering any further?”
The Boss shook his head.

That was the extent of his work in the Coroner’s Court. Verdict: accidental death. Back in Chambers by 3pm. Brief fee: £2,000.

Monday, 13 November 2006

Day 31 (week 7): Pomposity

Today I lost one of my friends and fellow pupils to the Bar. Met up for lunch and went to shake his hand and he corrected me.
“Barristers don’t shake hands with each other.”

You don´t say. We´d all had that pointed out on the first day of pupillage but I´d noted that it was a custom often not followed, particularly by members of the Junior Bar. Still don´t know the reason why it even exists. Perhaps it´s that they´re instruments of justice and therefore don´t partake in human courtesies. Perhaps it´s that they don´t need to shake hands as they all trust each other even without this little gesture. Really no idea save that it seems extremely pompous, particularly when the other person doesn´t reciprocate your extended hand. Happened to me with a senior barrister in Chambers and it made me feel very small indeed. Suffice it to say, that I wasn´t impressed by my friend.

"It doesn´t apply with friends, though.” I replied.
“No, it’s all of us. Same with MPs.”

It was true that MPs had the same custom but I didn´t see this as a reason for following it.

Next thing he’ll be addressing me as his learned friend across the lunch table.

Friday, 10 November 2006

Day 30 (week 6): Real barrister

Went off to court with a real barrister today. Not one like the Boss but one who actually enjoys having a fight. Who listens to his client and even has the odd professional standard up his sleeve. Straightforward personal injury trial in Wandsworth County Court. My barrister’s client tripped on a broken paving stone. Sued the council for not having mended it. It all turned on whether the council had done enough checks. The barrister on the other side made an offer at the start of the day and despite the fact my barrister was on no-win, no-fee and the offer wasn;t even that bad, he advised his client to reject the offer and to fight. He did and they eventually won. I was all up for celebrating but my barrister was professional to the end and simply went straight back to Chambers and started preparing his case for the next day.

In the meantime, the Boss set me a Skeleton Argument to do over the weekend. Trial on Monday and it should have been done by last Tuesday. True to form, he only looked at the papers this afternoon and given that he’s playing golf tomorrow there’s no chance of him getting into the case until Sunday. I therefore have to email over the Skeleton and any notes by Sunday morning at the latest.

Thursday, 9 November 2006

Day 29 (week 6): Flirt

Pretty much back to normal now. The Boss is his old arrogant self and I’m making coffees and photocopying like nobody’s business. BusyBody’s been at her worst today. Sniffing around our room under the auspices of research. Supposedly using the law reports stored in the room. The Boss said she could use Old Ruin’s desk for these purposes. It’s clear she’s checking out what’s up.

Worst of all though was that the Boss seemed to be flirting with her.