Features

QC competency interviews can make even the smoothest lawyers trip up, believes James Hutchinson.  

Mark* peers at me over his spectacles, a look of mild horror spreading over his face. He’s an experienced, successful Chancery counsel in his early 40s and everything I expected: smooth talking, confident and urbane. Five minutes earlier, Mark had wafted confidently into his room in chambers. This is a man who spends his life speaking in court or telling the rich and influential what they can and can’t do. And yet here he was: speechless. 

Can this year’s landmark 25th Annual Bar Conference grapple with the mounting challenges facing the Bar and reinvigorate those who feel most battle weary? Definitely, say Kim Hollis QC and Toby Craig.  

It’s fitting that the Bar Conference sees its silver Jubilee during a year of historical and potentially radical changes for the entire legal profession. When else can every individual involved in the business of the Bar come together and help influence the future of all our careers? 

Jonathan Herring claims that it is a divorce lawyer’s world 

James Roebuck reports on the recent Birmingham Aimhigher Conference “How to get to the Bar”.  

On 12 July 2010 some 80 sixth form students from schools and colleges across the West Midlands region, Cheshire and the Wirral, attended a Bar Council-Aimhigher widening participation conference entitled “How to get to the Bar”, at St Philips Chambers in Birmingham. 

David Wurtzel meets Adam Sampson, the Chief Ombudsman and Chief Executive of the Legal Ombudsman, the new scheme established by the Office of Legal Complaints to handle consumer legal complaints 

From investment management to investment madness?  

Graham Nutter, the owner of the Chateau St Jacques d’Albas vineyard in France, on why and how he got into the wine business. 

The Inns are alive with the sound of music. Vanora Bennett explores the world of the other dedicated professionals of the Inns of Court 

At about five o’clock on any day of the week, the Inns of Court will be busy with preoccupied men and women in black, trundling wheelie bags of documents back to chambers after a busy day in court. Yet even the most hurried barristers may slow and smile as they pass the honey stone of Temple Church. The sound that prompts this reaction is the pure treble voices of the Temple’s choirboys drifting out into the evening air – the other dedicated professionals of the Inns, still practising. 

A thriving music scene 

The Temple Choir – 18 boys serving an apprenticeship lasting five or six years, and 12 professional choirmen – is (in my possibly prejudiced view as the parent of a Temple choirboy) one of the most remarkable features of the thriving music scene at the Inns of Court. The CD released by the choir this summer – “The Majesty of Thy Glory” – reveals an extraordinary musical combination of poise and passion. The choir’s repertoire ranges from cantatas to Christmas carols. This might not be so astonishing if the only performers were the knowledgeable choirmen, building up their London singing careers – but it is an almost incredible achievement for the schoolboys who, whenever sighted in the flesh, dodging between long thin black-clad legs outside the church, seem to have nothing more remarkable than football or skateboards on their minds. 

Name: Lee Tyler
Position: Senior Clerk
Chambers:  2 Temple Gardens 

Desmond Browne QC discusses the rule of law in Zimbabwe today. In June 2010 Lord Steel hosted the launch at the House of Lords of “A Place in the Sun”, the report of a mission to Zimbabwe last autumn led by Mohamed Husain, the South African President of the Commonwealth Lawyers Association and myself. Accompanying us were members of the Bar Human Rights Committee (“BHRC”) (including Andrew Moran QC of Serle Court who wrote the report), and Dutch and Flemish members of Avocats Sans Frontières.  

It was not the first such report. In April 2004 five leaders of the Bar from around the world visited Zimbabwe and returned with a story of judges being driven from office or corrupted, and of a legal system subverted by the ZANU-PF government to frustrate the proper working of democracy and to cling on to power. 

Lord Justice Leveson explains the work of the new Sentencing Council