‘Don’t be afraid to be who you are’ – Lucy Reed KC

I’ve been at the Bar for over 20 years, and although I wasn’t always inspired by the idea of a career as a barrister, I wouldn’t have it any other way. It is not an easy journey, either to get in or to keep it up once you are in. It is hard work. Every day. Every week. Many weekends. But I can’t imagine life without it, and no other job has come close to tempting me away.

I was the first in my family to go to university. Nobody anticipated how my career would unfold, least of all me. I was just a bright-ish comprehensive girl who the teachers didn’t select for ‘the chat’ about Oxbridge (only the boys were considered Oxbridge material). When I look back, I feel pretty proud of what I’ve packed into my first half century.

If you had asked a 20-year-old me what I thought about lawyers, I’d have wrinkled my nose in recollection of the posh, snobby law students I had met at university. I wanted to be an artist or an academic. The law students worked fiendishly hard and made sure everyone knew how very successful they were going to be – not a world I aspired to be a part of. (I did not enjoy the elitist attitudes of many of my peers at university, where those with money and connections looked down on those of us who were not the child of someone wealthy or important.)

And yet, to the surprise of everyone, including myself, by age 24 I was embarking on a law conversion course, intent on becoming a barrister. That was in essence because others had seen my skillset and repeatedly told me that I should consider a career at the Bar. Eventually those suggestions reached critical mass, compelling me to follow up on their suggestions, and I was instantly smitten, convinced I could apply my skills at the Bar to make a difference to individuals.

I didn’t need connections or an Oxbridge degree to get into the Bar or to succeed once in. I did need money, of course, and my conversion and Bar course years were funded by a combination of part-time work, some support from my parents and husband – and a lot of debt, which took many years to pay off. I wasn’t lucky enough to secure a scholarship, and vividly recall my interview for an award being hostile and weirdly focused on whether I might want to be a solicitor instead. I left with a sense of ‘not for girls like you’ that has stayed with me ever since. (Fear not, I’m confident that things have changed markedly since then, having heard many positive stories of Inns scholarship processes in more recent years.) At any rate, that interview had its silver lining. Every hint that the Bar wasn’t for an ordinary girl like me was just fuel for the fire and powered me onwards.

In 2002, after many, many excruciating interviews where I felt like a fish out of water, and surely performed terribly, I secured pupillage. There were many twists and turns along the way that led me to where I am now, a child law specialist silk. I had no desire or intention to practise in family law at all, but a quirk of circumstance outside of my control forced me into doing so. Looking back, that piece of serendipity was one of the best things that could have happened, and one of the things I have learnt is that to thrive at the Bar you must be ready to see every twist and turn as an opportunity, and to grab and run with it. Life at the Bar is inherently, often infuriatingly, unpredictable and to survive it you must embrace that.

Much of the rest of my story is a series of accidents. In 2007, when just a few years’ call I started Pink Tape, probably the first blog by a barrister. It was then considered outré and was the source of a complaint from a senior colleague and an action in defamation (both unsuccessful), but it has played a significant part in my professional and personal development and I’m still at it 17 years later.

At 34, shortly after I had my first baby and escaped from London, I wrote my first book Family Court Without a Lawyer: A Handbook for Litigants in Person. I hadn’t meant to write a book, I thought I was writing a leaflet, but it got a bit long. By 39 I was appointed a part-time judge. I hadn’t meant to get appointed, I just did the application as a dry run, fully expecting to go down in flames. It seemed rude not to accept. At 40, as a direct result of my blogging work, I co-founded The Transparency Project, which subsequently became an educational charity working to make family justice clearer. The upshot of that is I am now regularly asked to speak to judges and lawyers about transparency issues, and am the co-author of a second book, Transparency in the Family Courts. At 47 I was appointed a Recorder and a year later took silk.

It’s not all serendipity, though. Those last two appointments required a lot of hard work and bloody mindedness in the face of multiple rejections. Once again, every snub fuelled me on to pick myself up and prove them wrong about girls like me. One thing that I learned during the torture of my silk application was that it is essential for women to overcome our deeply conditioned diffidence about our achievements and to say them out loud. I still wince every time I write a little mini-biography like the one above, but know this – if you don’t blow your own trumpet when required others will not be so modest, and your talent and achievements will go unnoticed. Make a case for yourself as fearlessly as you would for your clients. But do it with grace and without exaggeration.

For a long time I thought that a point might come when I felt like I fitted in, but it never has. However, over time I’ve come to realise I don’t care that much anymore. It signifies nothing, and I just tune out the looks of bemusement when I say or do something that reveals my un-poshness. In any event, those moments are few and far between these days, because the Bar is so much more diverse, and I have grown thicker skin. Many have succeeded with more obvious or layered disadvantages than mine and those who have done so have been a part of the change that is now gathering pace. The work is not done, but there are people like you at the Bar, and they will have your back.

If truth be told, my efforts to blend in at the start of my career were pretty superficial and did not require radical steps. I wore the uniform, tamed my hair, ditched the nose ring (eventually) and (for a while) hid my tattoos and took off my wedding ring (yes, really – it was thought to reduce one’s tenancy prospects at the time). I no longer bother to hide the tattoos, in part because nobody bats an eyelid at tattoos anymore, and in part because when you reach my age you suddenly find you don’t care what people think much at all. And I suppose it’s easier to be a batty old badly tattooed woman with an established career than it was to be a slightly hippyish junior barrister who needed not to rock the boat.

Those were just trivial presentational adjustments, but I took my duty of fearlessness seriously right from the off and it has guided me in ways far broader than my advocacy in court: beyond donning the black suit uniform, I’ve always just spoken how I speak (slight west country burr I’m told), and said what I think. I pioneered legal blogging when it was really not the done thing for a barrister to do, and in doing so have spoken truth to power and put many noses out of joint. I never tried to hide my identity as a blogger, knowing attempts to be an anonymous commentator would end in disaster as I would inevitably slip up. And I never tried to maintain a false persona or to maintain a rigid boundary between professional life and real life. I just slept on anything potentially controversial before publishing and adopt the rule of thumb that I must be prepared for anything I write to be read by the Court of Appeal or my regulator. So far, so good. That authenticity has proven, I think, to be my biggest strength. If nothing else, it has probably made me resilient to the chronic pressures of the Bar, which constantly threatens to drag you into a whirlpool where you forget your family and friends and all other priorities beyond the next deadline. If you are to succeed at the Bar you must keep tight hold of your life and your sense of self – not just as a barrister, but as a partner, a parent, a friend.

So, don’t be afraid to be who you are. Being a whole, unique person, and bringing your own insight and experience to your job is your greatest asset at the Bar. That doesn’t mean you have to be different for the sake of being different. The mirror reminds me every morning that I am a pretty ordinary middle-aged woman, whatever my CV says, but that’s ok. I’m happy in my skin.

So, suck up the vast array of other lives and other perspectives that you will encounter on your travels to courtrooms across the land. Put yourself in the shoes of your clients and colleagues. Don’t discount the ordinary or weary looking among us – dig beneath the surface both of clients and colleagues. Be ready to learn from them all – by observing what they’ve been through, where their blind spots are, how they have persevered, and the choices they make. And, of course, note down their best advocacy techniques to try out in your next case. Some of them will work like a charm and others will fall flat. Because each of you is unique.