LITMIR.BIZ

       Chambers

      I’m not proud of this, but by the time I get back to my chambers, Gray’s Buildings, after a trial, I’ve usually forgotten about my client. I know that sounds callous and cold, but the brain of a barrister has a habit of jettisoning things quite quickly – it has to, otherwise we’d end up demented, our every thought haunted by the ghosts of cases long gone. Yes, okay, there are occasions when you wake up in the middle of the night, sit bolt upright and think – ‘Why didn’t I just ask that question?’ or, actually, more likely, ‘Why did I have to ask that one last stupid question?’ But usually we go to court, we do our cases, we come back from court, and somewhere in between leaving court and arriving at our next destination, the gruesome details of the last client become lost in the canopy of our minds.

      They’re funny things, chambers. They don’t really seem to belong to the modern age. Despite the desperate attempts of some of the big City sets to employ practice managers and IT consultants and PR gurus, they almost all still have a sniff of the eighteenth century about them, when a man could conduct a court case whilst simultaneously eating a hearty dinner and enjoying a flagon of ale before going on to enjoy the delights of Madame Pomfrey’s girls on Petticoat Lane.

      Gray’s Buildings is tucked down a back street and about a ten-minute walk from the City Crown Court. It has seen better days and as a building is remarkable only for its 1970s pebble-dash and a massive oak door that is painted gallows black. Next door is a sandwich shop, across the road is the Erskine Pub and next door to that is the super-duper, ultra-modern Extempar Chambers – motto ‘We Don’t Judge, We Just Care.’ Extempar Chambers is the future, or so we are told. They have about 150 members, all of whom have a First Class degree from Cambridge or come from a long line of High Court Judges. They have fifteen clerks who all appear to be former models and a liveried van to deliver briefs to your doorstep. They have corporate days out, hunting and white-water rafting, they even have a motion sensor espresso machine (whatever that is). They have contracts with multinational companies, an interactive website and a career plan for each member.

      But, surely all of that counts for nothing when you’re faced with the likes of Brian Fordyke – then, all the motion sensor espresso machines and smiley clerks in the world can’t compensate for the ability to talk and act like a normal human being.

      My chambers does not have a motto. We are what is termed a medium-sized traditional chambers. There are about 60 barristers and we are all strictly self-employed sole-trading businessmen (we are not allowed to take a wage), but we band together and pay an astronomically high percentage of our fees to our chambers to employ five clerks, two typists and one extremely bubbly Scottish girl whose role no one is quite sure of.

      I have a desk in a room and a pigeonhole and a shelf upon which I keep my red-ribboned briefs.

      My room is on the top floor down a dark and hidden corridor next to the toilet. It is home to four of us: me; Amir Saddique, a young and extremely intelligent Personal Injury (PI) and contract lawyer; Jenny Catrell-Jones, a criminal barrister in her fifties who swears like a trucker, wears frighteningly short skirts and scares the life out of most Judges; and Angus Tollman, who is a couple of years junior to me and already has a shelf bulging with cases involving serious frauds, gruesome violence and despicable sex – bastard, he probably has a red sports car as well.

      Amir rarely goes to court, his practice is what we call a paper practice, every day he sits down with a pile of briefs about people who have tripped or slipped or been in car crashes or are refusing to be bound by some contractual agreement or other. For me, I would rather sit watching grass grow than do this kind of law, but Ammie has a wonderful ability to sit quietly at his desk, which is covered in Tottenham Hotspur memorabilia, and plough methodically through them.

      Even though Amir has never been in the Crown Court in his life, I know that if I am going to moan about a case or a Judge or a jury, then he will feel my pain. He knows what it’s like to lose (though I’d wager it doesn’t happen very often to him).

      I have always been pleasantly surprised by my relationship with other members of chambers. True, there are one or two who are stuck so firmly up their own arses that they are virtually impossible to speak to, but, on the whole, most members of my chambers are sound. We provide a service to one another, a warm, yet slightly disengaged comradeship – offering a word of advice here, a friendly ear to moan to there, and a feeling of solidarity that is important.

      The names of each member of chambers appear on a copper- plated list above the black front door. We are listed in order of call, which is the date when our Inn (an ancient organisation that no one can quite remember the purpose of – more of which, later) deems that we are fit to be a barrister.

      I have long concluded that there are really two types of people who become barristers – those whose parents were barristers and judges and those of us who, when we were children, watched a TV courtroom drama, probably involving an incredibly handsome advocate or a fascinating and flawed maverick genius advocate who either managed to get himself involved in an action-packed adventure that led to him ‘solving the case’, or cross-examined someone with such supreme skill that suddenly they broke down and confessed that ‘Yes, you’re right, I did it.’ You know the ones.

      Both scenarios are of course utter nonsense: no one ever breaks down and confesses to anything under cross-examination. The best you can usually hope for is that you manage to make someone look a little bit shifty, which hardly lends itself to good TV drama – ‘In tonight’s episode of Courtroom QC, rugged maverick genius Silk, Arthur Morse QC, manages to make someone look a bit shifty.’

      As for action-packed adventure, the nearest a barrister gets is when they have to get the night bus home after the annual Christmas drinks do.

      My parents were not Judges or lawyers, they were teachers. Why did I come to the Bar? Kavanagh QC, ITV, 9pm, Thursday nights, that’s why.

      Do I regret it?

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