‘I wanted to be the next David Attenborough but flunked my BBC interview. I needed a Plan B. Then, one morning I was enjoying a lie-in on the sofa of a friend’s house after a party. His father told me, “You should go to the Bar because it gets you out of bed in the morning.”’ That was Sir Denis Henry, then a High Court Judge. ‘I had little idea then about the difference between barristers and solicitors, still less between different chambers, and there had been no lawyers in my family. Denis continued to be influential in my life. I’ve literally got his wig, and he had it from the widow of its owner. It now barely hangs together when I lean forward. Fortunately, I don’t have to wear it much these days.’ And some years later she married his son, Tom.

This is Patricia Robertson KC of Fountain Court Chambers, the top-rated commercial and regulatory silk, Professional Discipline Silk of the Year in the Chambers & Partners UK Bar Awards 2024. As a Modern History scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, ‘all I saw of law students was that they regularly burned the midnight oil; when I had late work to do, I knew I could go to the College law library for a sociable working atmosphere. Later, I found life at the Bar to be like a constant essay crisis, which suited my temperament.

‘My Grandparents were Scottish working class. My Grandfather repaired buses. My Mum didn’t go to university but worked her way up to quite a senior position in local government. My Dad was the first to go to university. He joined the RAF and was a genuine Top Gun. The RAF subsidised our school fees.’ Patricia boarded at St George’s School for Girls, Edinburgh. ‘Everybody thought I’d do English at university and be a novelist but I swerved to history. My school history class were the ‘History Girls’ – the first from our school to prepare for the Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams. History and law closely connect: the vast majority of cases turn on the facts. You have to construct a story for the judge that’s more convincingly consistent with them than the alternative. The Bar gives you windows into other people’s lives. We live and breathe their world, we explain it to the judge and we then move on to the next window. It’s the sort of thing I would have been doing had I been a BBC documentary maker! The dramatic aspect also attracted me to the Bar. I’d produced plays at Oxford, even put on a cabaret at Balliol. I was someone for whom composing orally was easier than writing and worrying about the placement of commas.

‘I am conscious that engines of social mobility have helped me on my way and that in many ways that’s gone backward, with students facing a burden of debt and the risk that will discourage those without family able to back them. We have to help others. My Inn [Inner] is seriously committed to social mobility, with scholarships and other awards. We all need to take personal responsibility for mentoring.’ She currently has two mentees. ‘I was so pleased when one of them got pupillage. I might say to some mentees: if you need help to fund you through this, consider going to a law firm first, and when you move to the Bar you’ll be bringing your chambers valuable experience and connections.’

Robertson was called at Inner Temple in 1988. ‘I had three pupillage interviews. I came here because Denis Henry had been here, so it was almost the only set I had heard of. I didn’t want crime or family. I wanted something that was intellectually engaging; that would not leave me in pieces. But I quickly learnt you can’t insulate yourself completely from real life: when individuals are targeted by professional regulators there is often high stress. It was Tim Dutton who encouraged me and others to get into regulatory work. He tops my list of mentors. [Tim Dutton CBE KC, former Head of Chambers and Chair of the Bar, has sadly died since the time of this interview.]

‘In my earlier years I did a lot of legal writing – casting my bread on the waters. I first wrote about internet payments when they had barely been invented. I wrote a chapter on expert witnesses, arguing they shouldn’t have immunity. The courts later agreed with me, but if that did open the floodgates none of it came in my direction!’

Silk followed in 2006. Her many successes include representing the senior partner of Leigh Day plus other partners, and the firm itself, in what was at the time the SRA’s longest and costliest prosecution before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and on appeal to the High Court in 2017-18. For six years up to 2015 she was on the Board of the Bar Standards Board (BSB), latterly as Vice Chair. ‘Should there be a single regulator of all things legal? Regulation of the Bar is of particular importance for the public interest. It needs to be done well. Regulation of advocacy and litigation requires something different from regulation of law firms providing commoditised conveyancing services, at one end of the scale, or massive M&A work at the other. It is all too easy to criticise regulators. In the current state of evolution, I am sure that the BSB remains the least-worst option. Regulation needs an ethical compass. The public perception of lawyers has never been lower, as witness the reaction of cinema audiences when the lawyer gets eaten by the T Rex in Jurassic Park. Regulators don’t spend enough time on what keeps people honest. The answer is rarely in a rule book. It lies more in membership of a community. The Inns’ role in fostering community and shared values is important. Imagine the eyes of your peers as you walk across the hall – what are they thinking about you? You want to be part of a profession that deserves respect. Comport yourself accordingly.

‘Recently I have been doing a lot of regulatory work, but the portfolio varies year on year, and next year it could easily swing back towards the broader commercial work. I do whatever comes out of the City in my fields: legal, banking, insurance, auditing, financial. It could be a commercial dispute, a professional negligence or a regulatory claim, against or for; sometimes everything comes together in the one case. In this work you are not in court week in week out – there are very long preparatory run-ups.’

Who is ‘we’ here? ‘My team. Juniors, solicitors and client. My role as leader includes ensuring constructive dialogue between all members. As Russell Crowe said in the Colosseum scene in Gladiator, ‘Whatever comes out of these gates, we’ve got a better chance of survival if we work together.’ I recognise what I’m less good at than others (manipulating Excel spreadsheets, for example) and defer to the members with strengths in those areas. I’d be toast if I didn’t. After the RAF my Dad went into civil aviation and became a leading expert in the human factors behind air accidents. They were often about disasters that would have been avoided if junior members of the team had felt able to offer challenge. We don’t get cleverer as we get older!

‘Advocacy for me is being a trusted guide to complex material, factual and legal, and presenting it so as to make it easier for the judge. I sat for six years as a Deputy High Court Judge in the Commercial Court up to 2023. It was eye-opening. We make unrealistic demands on our judges. For example, the pre-reading in a case always takes longer than judges are told. Sitting as judge made me critical of my own advocacy. I started trying to be briefer. It paid off in a multi-hander before the Master: where others put in 25 pages, I put in 8, and we won on every point. Here’s a prosaic tip: are you helping the judge to understand in as little time as possible?

‘A lot of my work involves mediation and negotiation, where paradoxically advocacy is even more important than in court because of a need to persuade the other side to take their metaphorical fingers out of their ears and engage in the process.’

Recently Robertson was asked by the Institute of Business Ethics to sit on its Taskforce on Business Ethics and the Legal Profession. ‘Before the invasion of Ukraine, law firms were making lots of money representing oligarchs suing other oligarchs, each often accusing the other of having corruptly acquired assets belonging to the State. The Commercial Court saw a lot of that litigation, while meantime in the Admin Court and Family Court judges were struggling to deal with unrepresented litigants. After the invasion of Ukraine, there was a flight from representation of Russian clients, not necessarily based on evidence of connection with the regime, and that approach risked being unprofessional, even discriminatory. Unlike the Bar, solicitors have no professional rule that obliges them to offer representation. They have a discretion, and it is therefore important that firms are able to justify, both to those who work there and externally, how they have chosen to exercise that discretion.

‘The specific problem the Taskforce focused on is that there is a risk of corrupt money getting into the UK because the anti-money laundering rules are not aptly drafted to catch those whose control over the State is such that they are able to legitimise what amounts to asset stripping their own State – what’s termed “State capture”. The Taskforce has made recommendations to help firms in England and Wales address this risk when deciding whether to take on clients (asking ‘can the firm be satisfied as to the acceptable provenance of the client’s wealth?’ in any case where there are relevant risk factors) and more broadly has set out a principled road map for exercising their discretion whether to take on a given mandate.

‘The legal profession needs to combat the perception that it enables grand corruption and kleptocracy and that it upholds access to justice only when it is in the lawyers’ self interest to do so. All this can be implemented within the existing regulatory framework. None of this affects the Bar and the cab rank rule, as it is directed to law firms operating under the SRA’s rules, but I was probably included as the only barrister in the Taskforce to help the debate along from a personal perspective,’ she says modestly.

The publication of the Taskforce’s report was timely in more ways than one. ‘When we launched our report at the start of April it more or less coincided with Big Law getting in a tailspin about Trump, and that prompted some interesting conversations about whether we thought it a bad time to be launching an initiative like this. We concluded that, if anything, the discussion we were aiming to prompt was all the more pertinent.’

Robertson has three adult children and one grandchild. Her middle child has just completed her first year as a solicitor. Her husband, Tom, is an Emeritus professor of art, specialising in the Italian Renaissance and working and teaching mainly in Rome. ‘There was a lot of international commuting. In the end we bought a run-down fruit farm in Umbria, several hectares in size. We grow and sell about 850 types of bearded iris. Late October would find me driving our battered Range Rover down rutted roads with a ton of our olives to make into olive oil.’ She has recently taken up weaving ‘as part of a long-term strategy to stave off dementia by forcing my brain to do some rewiring. I have got more looms of different shapes and sizes in my weaving shed than are entirely decent. When weaving I can’t think about anything else. The complexity tunes out all the other noise like how to structure an argument or a skeleton.’

We conclude with a private tour round the Inner Temple Garden, passing clumps of snowdrops and some of what Robertson identifies as tiny Iris reticulata. Robertson is a highly credible, hands-on Master of the Garden. ‘I’ve got a fantastic gardening team. The vision and hard work is all theirs but I help to ensure they get their budget. One of my greatest advocacy triumphs in the last 10 years was to persuade the Inn to finance our snowdrops!’ Robertson believes the garden to be a precious resource and early on in her term as Master she made sure it is always accessible for anyone working in Inner or Middle, not just those who are Benchers. ‘Barristers have to look after their wellbeing when riding the psychological roller-coaster that is life at the Bar. Sometimes there’s too much, sometimes too little; and those Goldilocks moments when it’s just right are all too rare. I recommend walking round our beautiful garden. There are few problems that can’t be thought through in three laps. I guarantee you will feel better and make more progress than by staring at a blank screen wondering what to put on it.’ 

As Inner Temple’s Master of the Garden, Patricia has made the garden accessible for anyone working in Inner or Middle Temple, not only Benchers. ‘I recommend walking round our beautiful garden,’ she says. ‘There are few problems that can’t be thought through in three laps.’ © Patricia Robertson KC

Taskforce on Business Ethics and the Legal Profession

In 2023, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Taskforce on Business Ethics and the Legal Profession was established, hosted by the Institute of Business Ethics, to review the rules, practices and approaches used by UK law firms to determine which clients and matters to take on – specifically in relation to kleptocracy, state capture and grand corruption. Unlike the Bar, solicitors have no professional rule that obliges them to offer representation. In April 2025, after an 18-month review, the taskforce published its recommendations calling on law firms to apply an ethical decision-making framework beyond rule-based behaviour to client take-on. The guidance developed for solicitors in England and Wales can be viewed here.