I had completed pupillage when I began as a judicial assistant to Lord Lloyd-Jones, and I will be returning to practice at 11KBW this summer. Judicial assistants are junior barristers and solicitors, as well as those coming from academia. This makes our cohort a diverse group, and everyone has a different and interesting background. We share an open plan office on the top floor, near the Justices’ rooms. It is a collaborative and fun environment to work in – and I can escape to the library (a former Crown Court before it was renovated) when I need silence to concentrate.

A typical working day broadly falls into one of two categories. When an appeal is listed to be heard, I spend most of the day in court hearing oral submissions by counsel. To prepare for a hearing, I often draft a note setting out my views on the issues on appeal and whether the appeal should be allowed. I then attend a meeting with my Justice before and after the hearing to discuss the merits of the appeal. Judicial assistants sit behind their Justice, which provides a unique perspective. I have observed that the most effective advocacy is calm and measured, and that counsel appears confident when conversing with the Justices.

On days when there are no hearings my work can vary considerably. As a judicial assistant you work across the lifecycle of appeals – from applications for permission to appeal (PTA) to the handing down of judgments. We prepare bench memos summarising the key issues in each PTA and the decisions of the courts below. We then attend panel meetings of three Justices who decide whether to grant or refuse PTA. This is an opportunity to hear the Justices’ deliberations. After the Justices have reached a decision as to whether PTA should be granted, we are invited to express our views. The exercise of forming an opinion on PTA across a range of cases, and comparing that against the decision of three Justices, is an effective way of developing good judgement and an intuition for the cases in which the final court of appeal in the UK is interested.  

Judicial assistants do not draft judgments, but we are sent iterations of draft judgments to provide comments. We may also conduct further research into points of law that are troubling our Justice. In this way, we contribute to the legal analysis in a judgment. This insight enables us to see how the parties’ written cases and oral submissions feed into a judgment. Once a judgment is finalised, judicial assistants draft the press summary. This is an exercise in punchy drafting and requires distilling the key legal principles into a clear and accessible three-page summary.

I most enjoy the diversity of cases which I work across as a judicial assistant. So far, I have worked on cases raising questions of state immunity, the Windsor Framework, freedom of speech, issue estoppel and the New York Convention. I was surprised that a significant portion of the court’s workload involves cases heard by the Privy Council. This introduces an international element to the work of a judicial assistant, as the Privy Council is the final court of appeal for many Commonwealth countries, as well as the UK’s overseas territories, Crown Dependencies, and military sovereign base areas. I have seen appeals ranging from the interpretation of the Constitution of Trinidad and Tobago to a private land dispute in Jamaica.

In short, there is no typical day in the life of being a judicial assistant at the Supreme Court. That is what makes the role engaging and unique.