Features

How have practitioners responded to the Final Report? Counsel rounds up some of the comments made on the NLJ Jackson webcast 

David Greene 

NLJ Consultant Editor & head of the litigation & dispute resolution team at Edwin Coe LLP. NLJ Jackson webcast participant 

“A lot of solicitors get their business from referral fees, agencies and management companies. If they didn’t get that business you would probably find that they would have to go out and advertise and spend the money in that way, so I don’t think it is a straight game in terms of referral fees. 

Catherine Piercy wonders whether the advocacy training provided by the BVC and the Inns will stand up in court.  

When I was born, no barrister was taught advocacy and most people—I am told—did not believe that it could be done. I am very much the product of the “new world”, having undergone the Bar Vocational Course (“BVC”), my Inn’s advocacy training during my BVC year, and most recently the pupillage course. Is it true that my years as a practitioner—should I be fortunate enough to get a tenancy—will be spent unlearning everything I have previously been taught? 

The decision in R v Barker on child witness evidence in criminal cases establishes that the competency test is the same for children and adults, write Professor Penny Cooper and David Wurtzel.  

With the decision in R v Barker [2010] EWCA Crim 4 the matter of children giving evidence in criminal trials has, so to speak, come of age. On 1 May 2009 at The Old Bailey, Baby Peter’s step-father, Stephen Barker, was convicted of the anal rape of a girl, “X”, who was less than three years’ old at the time of the offence. She was four and a half years’ old when she gave evidence. X had been living with her mother Tracey Connelly, Stephen Barker and his brother. At the age of two years and ten months X was taken into care following the unnatural death of Baby Peter. X made disclosures to her foster carer of sexual abuse by Barker and subsequently to a child psychologist who was seeing her for the purposes of care proceedings. Six months after the first allegation she was interviewed on video under “Achieving Best Evidence in Criminal Proceeding” (“the ABE interview”). The trial for anal rape of a child under 13 was postponed until after the murder trial in the Baby Peter case. X watched her ABE interview a few days before the trial; it stood as her evidence-in-chief. She was cross-examined by leading counsel for her mother and for Barker. 

Simon Chadwick highlights the issues for chambers to consider when recruiting a chief executive.  

There are 690 chambers in the UK. Of those 67 have a serving chief executive or a practice director. Due, mainly, to the simple business structure of a typical barristers’ set, the job titles differ. However both roles show a degree of overlap and in some cases the responsibilities are identical. 

Freya Newbery explains the issues surrounding career breaks for barristers and reports on the recent Bar Council “Managing Career Breaks” seminar.  

As part of its commitment to retaining women in self-employed practice, the Bar Council hosted an immensely practical half-day seminar, “Managing Career Breaks”, on 23 October 2009. The seminar provided practical guidance to both barristers beginning a break or planning to return to practice following maternity leave or a career break, and those in chambers—such as equal opportunity officers, clerks and practice managers—responsible for managing career breaks and helping returners to re-build their practices. 

Employment vetting law has been rewritten, warns Timothy Pitt-Payne 

In 2004, a woman (“L”) was employed by an employment agency that provided staff for schools. She worked as a playground assistant, supervising children during their lunchtime break. The agency applied for an enhanced criminal record certificate (“ECRC”) from the Criminal Records Bureau (“CRB”). The ECRC did not show any criminal convictions; but it disclosed that L’s son had previously been placed on the child protection register on grounds of neglect, and that he had been removed from the register after being convicted of robbery and given a custodial sentence. Soon afterwards she was told by the agency that it no longer required her services. 

Following the difficulties experienced by Cardiff Law School’s “Quality Assurance for Advocates” pilot programme what are the options available for future monitoring schemes, asks David Wurtzel.  

One of the aspects of being self-employed is that there is no one to appraise or quality assure you. The prospect that this might change for the Bar arose three and a half years ago when Lord Carter recommended, “A proportionate system of quality monitoring based on the principles of peer review and a rounded appraisal and should be developed for all advocates working in the criminal, civil and family courts”—and in the first instance, for publicly funded criminal advocates. This was sometimes referred to as the “Carter trade-off”: practitioners would receive more money and in return would institute quality assurance (“QA”). The money was indeed forthcoming but QA was not. Ironically, just when the government is likely to renege on most of the rise in fees, criminal court advocates finally do face the development of a QA programme. The details are very far from decided. 

Names: Alex Taylor and Paul Martenstyn 

Positions: Director of Clerking and Team Leader 

Chambers: Fountain Court 

Max Hardy reports on the UK’s participation in the 2009 International Moot Court.  

It sometimes seems that what lawyers contribute to the proper functioning of society is either overlooked or treated with an erosive level of cynicism. It was therefore hugely refreshing to go to The Hague where there is  a very different attitude. The city can lay claim to being the capital of international jurisprudence, being the seat of the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. It was therefore a very appropriate place to take part, on 20–21 November 2009, in the International Moot Court (“IMC”). The IMC was founded 12 years ago to coincide with the 750th anniversary of the foundation of The Hague. 

Ashutosh Khandekar on opera as a virtual experience.  

In his essay Art and Revolution, published in 1849, Richard Wagner first applied the term “Gesamtkunstwerk” to opera —a “universal art form” that draws together many facets of culture and creativity, merging them into a single expressive whole. Had he been writing a century and a half later, Wagner’s choice of word to describe opera, with its heady mix of music, drama, design and, increasingly, technology, might well have been “multimedia”.