News

THE third annual International Rule of Law Lecture was held on 9 December 2009 at Inner Temple. Judge Anthony Gubbay, a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe, will give an address entitled ‘The Progressive Erosion of the Rule of Law in an Independent Zimbabwe’. He followed the lecture with a question and answer session. With approximately two hundred in the audience, and with the 2010 Chairman of the Bar Nicholas Green QC introducing the evening, the lecture will afford a fascinating insight into the rule of law and the problems facing Zimbabwe from one of the country’s most high-profile judges. 

A new aptitude test for prospective Bar Professional Training Course students applying to start the course (previously known as the Bar Vocational Course) in 2011 is to be piloted from the beginning of February. The Bar Standards Board is appealing for current students to take part in the pilot. 

Contractual Terms Update 

UNFORTUNATELY the Ministry of Justice was not able to make a decision on accepting the amendments to the Cab Rank Rule before the end of 2009. As a result, a new application has to be made to the Legal Services Board, the new body created for the purposes of overseeing the regulation of lawyers in England and Wales, which has taken over the powers to approve such Code amendments. 

The LSC has published two documents relating to criminal Crown Court defence work—Pages of Prosecution Evidence Guidance and an Information Pack on the Advocates’ Graduated Fee Scheme. The documents are both available on the LSC website. 

At the end of 2009 the European Council adopted the Stockholm Programme, the EU’s 5-year Justice Liberty and Security work programme, to run from 2010 to 2014. http://register.consilium.europa.eu/pdf/en/09/st17/st17024.en09.pdf 

The Commission will issue a detailed implementing Action Plan by mid-2010. 

The Judicial Appointments Commission is looking for 40 Deputy Judges to sit in a fee paid capacity in the Upper Tribunal and deal with work arising from the right of appeal on asylum and immigration cases from the First-tier Tribunal. Deputy judges are expected to be available for at least 15 days per year. For more details, see the Commission’s website at www.judicialappointments.gov.uk.

Two years after publication of Lord Neuberger’s Entry to the Bar Working Party Report, the Bar Council launched “No bar to the Bar: barristers promoting social mobility”, a brochure setting out the work done by the Bar in this area and the initiatives developed since the Neuberger Report, writes Bhavna Patel. 

At an event held to mark the occasion on 2 December 2009 at Inner Temple, David Lammy MP, Minister of State for Higher Education and Intellectual Property, commended the Bar for the huge strides it has made in this area. 

Hilary Tilby discusses the dangers of using alcohol and drugs as coping mechanisms for dealing with a stressful practice and highlights the help at hand 

When you are subject to long-term stress, the result is that you feel grim – not sleeping well; unable to think clearly; losing your joie de vivre; losing confidence in your own judgement and abilities etc. Naturally, you want to feel better, so what do you do? If you are, as is likely to be the case, the normal legal personality (unable to delegate, driven, perfectionist, the A type personality) then you look for a quick fix, because, by definition, the legal personality is too busy to wait for anything to change. It must be immediate. And what has an immediate effect? Nicotine, sugar, and more potentially damaging, alcohol and drugs.     

A CPD Working Group, chaired by Derek Wood QC, has been setup to conduct a comprehensive review of the continuing education and professional development of practising barristers (in respect of both new practitioners and established practitioners). This follows reviews of the Vocational and Pupillage stages of barristers’ training, which were also chaired by Derek Wood QC. 

Lord Justice Jackson will publish the final report of his eagerly-awaited Review of Civil Litigation Costs on 14 January 2010. An advance copy will be sent to the Master of the Rolls by 31 December 2009.