“What should we do with all the Young Lawyers?”
Leolin Price CBE QC, responds to Gerard McDermott QC article which appeared in the Easter issue of the barrister under the above heading
One of his observations was :
“Obviously the profession cannot hope to accommodate every applicant for pupillage”.
I comment on that statement because its desolate assumption, introduced by “Obviously”, is in my view unworthy of our profession. The well-educated would-be members of our profession, newly and exceptionally well qualified after completing the prescribed vocational training, are grievously ill-served by this mistaken assumption as they join the modern scramble of applications for pupillage.
I was myself lucky. In 1949 I passed Bar exams when there were only about 2000 practising barristers in England and Wales, and that number had been without significant change for more than 50 years. I had not achieved the Certificate of Honour (1st place) in the Bar exam results but had been placed (I think) 5th; and I faced with optimism (but without hope of family financial support) the prospect of pupillage and practice in spite of fears about my ability to survive what were then, predictably, very lean and mean years of practice after pupillage.
My first pupil-master was a busy common law junior, who had 4 pupils at a time and relied on them for research and discussion about the conduct of his cases. Unfortunately I was soon diagnosed as having tuberculosis and removed for about a year to a sanatorium. In that time I was kept in bed, but not seriously unwell; and Sweet & Maxwell/Stevens sent me textbook indexes to make or update. When I was released from the sanatorium the chest physician told me that, if my diagnosis had been 9 months later, new drugs would have kept me away for only 6 weeks! But by the time of my release my common law pupil-master had taken silk; said that there was no junior in his chambers with a practice suitable for pupils, and suggested that I might try Lincoln’s Inn where his friend, Cambridge rowing blue and wartime Brigadier, had settled into practice with 2 pupils at a time.
What has been said is about my personal experience but its immediate relevance is to highlight how in 1949-50 the small practising bar was making pupillage readily available for newly-qualified barristers; and at the same time those newly qualified who could not face the slow lean mean years were able to choose alternative paid employment in government, local government, commerce, university or other teaching, or in solicitors’ firms with a view to becoming solicitors.
Many years later, influenced by critics with and without experience of practice at the Bar, prescribed educational requirements and vocational training had been changed with this effect: that newly trained barristers are, and for some time have been, marvellously well-educated and equipped for practice at the Bar.
At the same time it had gradually became usual, and eventually a requirement, that pupils should be paid. This has had what I regard as an accepted but unsatisfactory reality: that a greatly increased practising Bar is making less provision than it should for pupillages to be available for our brilliant would-be barristers. This reality is also affected by modern prescriptive rules about the duties of pupil-masters and the conduct of pupillages. The modern reality includes this: that, for example, a set of chambers now has only 2 pupils at a time where previously it usually had 10.
In a relatively small set of chambers the pupillage committee was faced recently with 87 applications for pupillage. All the applicants appeared wonderfully well qualified. Reducing the number to 12 for interview and then choosing one as pupil for the following year, was a considerable exercise; and, of course, the members of the pupillage committee are themselves individually practising barristers giving up working time for this exercise.
What, in the circumstances, can be done? The competition for pupillages is unfair, unmanageable and disgraceful. A simple professional obligation that every junior counsel of 5 years’ standing should have at least one pupil at any time would, with the greatly increased practising bar, be a step towards ensuring that everyone completing the vocational training could expect to find a pupillage: a just and fair expectation for anyone whose university education and vocational training may have left him (or her) with an accumulated debt of £30,000. But how is payment during pupillage to be arranged? It could not fairly be imposed on the individual pupil-master or on chambers as a chambers expense. Scholarship or bursary funds available to the Bar Council or the Inns of Court will not easily provide the necessary funding. What is needed is a new Review: how to escape from the unfairness and injustice which we have carelessly sleepwalked into and have allowed to become what leads Gerard McDermott QC to make his statement of what seems, but ought not to be accepted as, “obvious”. What I have written here is a protest. Providing a solution, without creating new problems, is a difficult and urgent task. I do not suggest how that solution is to be achieved. I am sure that allowing the present ugly reality to continue will be bad for the Bar, the legal profession and the Law.
Leolin Price CBE QC who is responding to
10 Old Square
Lincoln’s Inn
7 April 2011