Practice Toolset

Timothy Fancourt QC and Penelope Reed QC explain how the Chancery Bar Association is helping to improve the litigant-in-person experience, a key focus of the Chancery Modernisation Review.  

The drastic cuts in legal aid funding and the inexorable rise in the cost of everything in London (lawyers’ fees for substantial litigation being apparently no exception) mean that more and more people are having to represent themselves in court. Even in a finance, business and property court like the Chancery Division. And as a result, more and more litigants in person have serious cases to argue. 

The Lord Chancellor’s attitude to public interest litigation threatens the rule of law and the constitutional separation of powers,  
writes Sir Stephen Sedley.  

In 1916 the secretary of the Anti-German Union, Sir George Makgill, brought judicial review proceedings to remove from the Privy Council two wealthy Jewish philanthropists; Sir Ernest Cassel (who had actually converted to Catholicism) and Sir Edgar Speyer, on the ground that, although both were British subjects, they were not British-born. 

The Judicial Appointments Commission was created under the provisions of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 to select judges for courts and tribunals in England and Wales and for some tribunals whose jurisdiction extends to Scotland. Selections are to be made solely on merit from a broad range of candidates.  

Each year around 5000 people put in an application for the wide range of court and tribunal roles available – many of them open only to lawyers and serving judges – but also for a myriad of specialist member roles. Around 500 or so of those aspiring applicants will be successful and receive an offer of appointment. The diversity of these selections is improving – over 50% were women in our most recent set of published diversity data for both legal and non-legal roles (April- September 2013). 

Gerard Rothschild offers guidance on the administering of oaths in an increasingly secular society.  

Authorisation to administer oaths is a privilege expressly conferred by a barrister’s practicing certificate which is often overlooked. How to administer oaths features neither in the BPTC syllabus nor in the Bar Council’s Handbook. In an increasingly secular society, yet one whose legislation appears still to attach special importance to the taking of oaths, it is incumbent on those of us entrusted to administer them to ensure due formality so that their significance is respected. This article seeks to redress the lack of guidance. 

Andy Thornton explains the role played by the Mock Trial Competition in opening up the Bar as a career for so many – and the funding issues now faced.  

It is the fourth of December and the line-up of this year’s Bar National Mock Trial final has just been announced. 2,000 students in 160 schools across the UK, helped by 300 barristers and advocates and assessed by 90 judges have been reduced to 16 teams ready for the final showdown in Cardiff Crown Court on 22 March 2014. Please come and watch. 

Anne Fairpo, from the Bar Council’s IT Panel, on cybercrime and how members of the Bar should deal with identity theft.  

From time to time, your Bar IT Panel offer practical tips on how to handle certain issues of the day. This time around it is cybercrime or as expressed in more mundane terms, identity theft. In other words, someone’s pinched all the content from my website and is using it on their own website; they are pretending to be me; what do I do? 

David Thomas QC, LLD was the country’s authority on the law and practice of sentencing. Sir David Maddison reflects upon his life and how he revolutionised the courts’ approach to sentencing.  

David Thomas’s death on 30th September, 2013 marked the passing of the pre-eminent authority on the law and practice of sentencing in the criminal courts of England and Wales. His name was and remains known to almost every practitioner, magistrate, Recorder and judge dealing with criminal cases. He will be greatly missed by his many friends and admirers in legal and academic circles. 

Francis FitzGibbon QC and Abigail Bright examine how human rights law has been articulated and interpreted by the European Courts, the United Kingdom Courts and the British Government, and the political reality of “Bringing Rights Home”.  

Our law is saturated with human rights principles. It is almost impossible to practise law of any kind without at least a passing knowledge of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA). (The practice of politics is another matter.) The Act has had a palpable impact on relations between the State and the citizen in almost every sphere of interaction. 

One year on from its launch, COMBAR’s James Leabeater offers his views on BARCO.  

Barristers need to get used to considering and evaluating credit risk. Since January 2013 barristers and solicitors have been agreeing contracts with each other. For some, not much has changed. Under the BSB’s Standard Contractual Terms, for example, the solicitor is liable to pay barristers’ fees, whether or not the lay client has paid the solicitor. The solicitor takes the credit risk. 

Rhys Taylor, a barrister at 30 Park Place, Cardiff, explains how BARCO has worked for him.  

Sitting on my desk early last year was a print out from Carol Harris, with 13 attachments relating to something called BARCO, the new Bar Council escrow account.