Forget the rights and wrongs of the decision by two Tooks’ barristers to start a company charging wannabes for pupillage application advice from their head of chambers, Michael Mansfield QC. And consider how it reflects on the wider criminal Bar…
In the good old days, when publicly funded legal work was well-remunerated, barristers would never have dreamed of making money off law students. Even if they had no issue with the ethics of for-profit pupillage advice, their time would have been more profitably spent doing legal work.
Now, with fees for junior criminal barristers dipping below minimum wage levels, that’s no longer true. Yet applications for the Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC) are at their highest for years.
In this week’s podcast, College of Law GDL student Alice Christian – who was one of the first students to tweet about the £186-to-see-Michael-Mansfield event – explains to Legal Cheek trio Lucy Pether, Kevin Poulter and Alex Aldridge why, in spite of everything, she still wants to be a criminal barrister…
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