Profession

Gavin Purves explains why Counsel was established and charts its development 

Kathryn Stone OBE and Professor Karen Bryan offer advice on identifying and communicating with witnesses with learning difficulties    

John Curtis investigates the use of Shakespeare’s quotes in legal judgments 

Sam Stein QC explains why it’s time to regulate advocacy.  

Consumers are used to making decisions in all aspects of their lives based on their perception of the quality of particular goods or services. They are able to take comfort that consumer goods have been through rigorous checks and are signed off as being fit for purpose before they are sold. The consumer also believes that professionals such as accountants or financial advisers have achieved standards set by their professional bodies and undertaken regular assessments to ensure that they meet the standards expected of them, as do the firm in which they operate. 

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? 

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. 

Are your chambers’ details being used in connection with online fraud? Caroline Kean and Rachel Barber advise on protecting chambers from uninvited and unauthorised association with bogus websites 

David Wurtzel finds that the records kept in the Bar Council library contain a real treasure trove of the Bar Council’s history.  

Although the law is based on precedent, the least well known part of the Bar Council premises is its library, situated in the basement and presided over since 1994 by the librarian, the splendid Rosa Munoz. “I call myself the keeper of the memory of the Bar Council. The Bar Council is a series of committees where decisions are made,” she said before I began my trawl through some of the treasures which she has preserved, conserved and kept safe for the future—Bar Council minutes, committee papers, news, notices, Bar News, Counsel magazine, historic agreements, Royal Commission reports—in fact the whole written “memory” since the original “Bar Committee” was formed in 1883. From time to time I paused to continue my discussions with Rosa about the Spanish Civil War. Rosa was born in Spain during the Franco era (“our 40 years of shame”) and grew up in an atmosphere where history books were censored, families still stood divided, and opponents of the regime were hidden for decades in order to avoid arrest. She has lived in England since the 1960s, arguably more appreciative than the barristers she came to serve of what the rule of law really means. 

Dr Ann Brady argues that it is time to look again at local judge-directed court mediation schemes. The decision to abolish the Exeter Court Mediation Scheme and replace it with a national mediation scheme was premature, she believes