Features

Bar Musical Society, Middle Temple Hall, November 2016  

It has been a fine tradition of the Middle Temple to put on a concert for children towards Christmas every year.  

Mel Nebhrajani started out at the Bar but was soon hooked on a career where law and politics collide. Here she talks to Grania Langdon-Down about how the ‘diversity story’ should be about the resilience, insight and talent of BAME lawyers – not ‘powerless victims’  

Q How did you find life at the Chancery Bar as a young, female and Asian lawyer? 

Don’t be intimidated by e-working: the advantages are manifold and anyone can get up to speed with a few hours’ practice, writes Paul Hart in this how-to guide  

Oh, the irony, you may think, as we sit on the boundary between the old world and the new.  

Teatro Technis, London, 11-22 January
Written and performed by Tayo Aluko, with live piano accompaniment. Directed by Amanda Huxtable. Designed by Emma Williams  

Research suggests lawyers need to engage more with their personal morality, but what makes a virtuous professional? Mary Cowe considers the development of practical wisdom at the Bar  

During my undergraduate law degree, Lawyer’s Ethics was an optional paper assessed via a two- rather than three-hour exam, and described as a ‘half-course’: cue much hilarity from philosophy student friends about the obvious dearth of ethical proscriptions on lawyers, if there was so little to study it couldn’t fill a whole module. 

With an encyclopaedic knowledge of criminal law, intellectual rigour and practitioner focus, Professor David Ormerod QC is driving ambitious law reform. David Wurtzel meets the universally respected Law Commissioner  

I met with Professor David Ormerod QC, one of the four Law Commissioners, in a tiny room in the Ministry of Justice building. 

With the formal process of disengagement about to begin, Mark Hatcher examines the challenges faced in converting a huge corpus of EU law and delivering Brexit  

Brexit continues to dominate life at Westminster.  

Dermot Feenan explores the place of compassion in legal practice  

The Family Law Bar Association obituary of Sir Nicholas Wall, formerly President of the Family Division, stated Sir Nicholas was a compassionate judge who ‘thought and cared deeply about the outcome of his cases’ – a reminder that justice and compassion are not seen to be necessarily incompatible. There are many reasons why compassion has a role to play in practice. 

Benchmark your budding best practice: putting mental health firmly on the chambers agenda is the right thing to do and benefits the bottom line