Young Bar

Nathalie Lieven QC provides an update on this year’s Pupillage Matched Funding Scheme  

This year marks the fourth round of the Pupillage Matched Funding Scheme.  

In the second of this two-part finance guide for the self-employed Bar, the Young Barristers’ Committee looks at payment term  

Part 1 of this finance guide discussed payment terms, working with your clerks, and the steps you should take to ensure that your work is correctly billed (Counsel, July 2016, p 20).  

Perplexed over financial matters? The Young Bar Toolkit is here to help turn confusion to clarity, as the Young Barristers’ Committee explains in this two-part finance guide for the self-employed Bar  

In the early years of practice, barristers are on a steep learning curve in all respects.  

As well as being a barrister, remember you are an unpaid tax collector, says Tony Reynolds, who advises best financial practice from the start of your legal career  

HMRC has for some years targeted its compliance activity across a range of professions.  

Daniel Sternberg reports back from this year’s Young Bar Conference  

Over 150 employed and self-employed barristers and law students gathered on 17 October 2015 for the 11th Young Bar Conference.  

Pupils can follow more than one path to the Bar, advises Melissa Coutino. Split pupillages enable pupils to spend time with an employer and in chambers. They can be an attractive option for all, she believes 

Pupils need to follow a single path” is a generalisation that both some self-employed and employed barristers may be culpable of making. This is not the case. Split pupillages, whereby a pupil spends time with an employer and  with chambers, can be an attractive option. They allow chambers and an employer to share their investment risk, regulatory burden and commitment to training, while benefiting from the work of a person who is keen, bright and eager to qualify.  

A pupil gives her impression of the pupillage interview process and the insight it provides into life in chambers 

Pupillage: without a doubt the most daunting and challenging hurdle to be overcome on the long and rocky road between university and finally becoming someone’s “learned friend.” For anyone with ambitions to become a barrister the Pupillage Portal Scheme (formerly the Online Pupillage Application System (“OLPAS”)) is fraught with anxiety: either you get it right or you run the pupillage gauntlet again in 12 months time. And it was not until I started pupillage that I thought about it in any other way. Not once had I thought of the hours that it must have taken barristers at the other end to read, mark and order. It was only when I was asked, for this article, to think about the impression different chambers created to me as the interviewee—did I start to think about the whole process a little differently. 

As the pupillage interviewing season commences, a leading criminal set describes how it runs the recruitment process 

Like most chambers, our junior tenants are almost always recruited from our own pupils. Over the last 15 years, we have taken on one or more of our pupils each year. The importance to us of pupillage selection is obvious and the responsibility falls on our Pupillage Committee.