Features

Felicity Gerry and Catarina Sjolin explain why they believe jurors should be made aware of the psychiatric effect of a sexual attack on the consistency of a victim’s evidence.

In February 2007, in Counsel, we suggested that the jury could be given a judicial direction on the psychiatric effect of a sexual attack on the consistency of a complainant’s evidence without the need for expert evidence (see “Inconsistent Victims”). Four years on, the signs are that Judges are starting to give an “experience shows” rape trauma direction. 

William Byfield, Gutteridge Chambers 

This is what we’ve come to ... no longer just having our fees cut to the bone, hitting the good and the bad alike, but being second-guessed by incompetents.

14 February 2011: 

“I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.”  
– Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Act II, Sc II), William Shakespeare 

What differences have you found between being a tax solicitor and a tax barrister?

The differences are slight. Tax solicitors receive questions from clients or fellow members of their firms resulting in meetings and notes of advice. These mirror, effectively, instructions, conferences and opinions. Solicitors are probably inclined to be more commercial because, inevitably, they are aware of the importance of a transaction and the need to find a solution rather than just giving a view.

How many barristers, walking past Temple Church on their way from court to chambers, realise that they are eyeballing one of the most historically and architecturally important medieval buildings in London? 

The Temple Church in London:
History, Architecture, Art
Edited by Robin Griffith-Jones and David Park
ISBN 9781843834984; £30
The Boydell Press (available at Temple Church) 

The Paris Bar Exchange enables up to four UK barristers to spend a month with a Parisian law firm, attend court and conduct a mock trial. Kakoly Pandé took part in last year’s exchange and she discusses what she discovered about the French justice system.  

The Paris Bar Exchange is a unique programme organised by the Pegasus Scholarship Fund every year for barristers of up to five years practice from all Inns who can speak French fluently. It consists of spending the month of September with a Parisian law firm, where you are given an opportunity to attend the French Bar School equivalent (l’école de Formation), go to court with avocats and marshalling with judges. 

From 2012, chambers will be required both to set up and contribute to a “qualifying pension arrangement” for clerical and administrative   staff. Careful preparation will prevent an adversely negative impact  on chambers’ budgets, advises Neill Millard.  

For over a year, the Bar Council has been engaging with barristers to introduce “ProcureCos”, the model procurement company which will allow sets of chambers to contract directly with those who purchase legal services. It is anticipated that in the future chambers will need to become more corporate and to offer an enhanced and robust service that will survive any future due diligence requirements that Government may introduce. 

Adam Sampson reviews the first few months of operation of the Legal Ombudsman, the new scheme which handles all consumer legal complaints. Although it is too early to predict any trends, the number of complaints made about individual barristers was very low, he says. 

The run-up to the launch of the new Legal Ombudsman (“LeO”) on 6 October 2010 (only six months ago but it feels longer) was a time of high interest and high excitement. The arrival of a lay body to replace a system of complaints handling owned and operated by lawyers themselves attracted a surprising level of media attention, including interviews on the Today Programme, Breakfast News and The One Show. Behind the scenes, recruiting, training and deploying some 300 staff largely new to handling complaints in the legal arena was a major challenge, to say nothing of sourcing and fitting out a building and designing and implementing a state-of-the-art IT system. All adrenaline; all attention. 

The Employed Barristers’ Committee represents the interests of the Employed Bar. Major David Hammond, Royal Marines, highlights the breadth of roles carried out by employed barristers.  

The Employed Barristers’ Committee (“EBC”) represents the interests of employed barristers from all sectors within the legal community in a fair, unbiased and collegiate manner. It has worked steadily – invariably out of plain sight and often without the knowledge of its existence by the very barristers it represents – to discreetly raise profile, support activities and promote opportunities for members of the Employed Bar. 

Charlotte Bailye discusses the repatriation of victims of forced marriages from Pakistan to the UK. The combined efforts of the UK’s Forced Marriage Unit and the British High Commission in Islamabad are key to success, but the UK Government must do more to assist, she argues. 

In 2008, heightened media sensitivity surrounding the practice of forced marriage helped result in the implementation of the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007. The High Court and county courts now have powers to protect victims of forced marriage through Forced Marriage Protection Orders (“FMPOs”) and can make orders which extend to conduct outside the United Kingdom. 

Does the 2010 Crown Court Benchbook, which moves away from specimen directions to ones specifically tailored to the individual case, help jurors understand the summing up – or is it still like a foreign language to them? Should trial judges abandon legal language in their speeches or are written questions to the jury the answer, asks Daphne Perry

If anyone knows how to talk to a jury, it should be the experienced barristers who now sit as judges.