Lawyers enter new era of KCs and Rex v. criminal prosecutions

To add to the comment, who wants to admit they have spent £40,000+ on education and that they are earning less than minimum wage? They basically do not stay in the criminal justice system and if they do, they need significant support or borrowing in the first few years and swallowed pride.

Barristers are smart and adaptable to other careers, so a brain drain and mass exodus from the younger and more junior barristers has occurred. An inverted pyramid is developing that will topple the criminal justice system if not addressed properly and soon.

The current fee increase proposals have several flaws that mean that there will be a continued brain drain on the profession. Firstly, the fee increase does not negate the years of cuts the profession has seen. Two, they do not negate the inflationary pressures we are facing since they were proposed last year before this crisis. Three, the increased fees benefits will not be felt for years as they only apply to new cases which take years to conclude and be billed. Lastly, the prices would not be competitive with other options open to barristers like corporate, family or civil law so the drain continues. That does not even include all of the problems facing the criminal justice system.

Instead of imagining the poor barrister with holes in their shoes and dirt on their face, imagine the empty chair where a barrister should be but isn’t because the profession could not compete and attract the talent it needed to provide the basic right of a fair trial to all in this country.

Dominic Raab, is that you? Or is it Alan again?

I am afraid you are the one misleading anyone reading this comments section with you rather odd superiority complex. You yourself provide inaccurate and vague stats, provide no logical justification for your arguements, and jump between points irrelevant to the issues facing junior barristers and the criminal bar at large.

“What brain drain?”

22% of junior criminal barristers have left since 2016 and 18% of criminal barristers want to leave the profession according to Criminal Bar Association who represent criminal barristers. This will lead to fewer judges to preside over future trials, fewer future KCs to deal with complex cases, fewer barristers able to train the next generation and more pressure on those who remain to deal with an ever growing backlog. The pressure all of this will create a feedback loop. Please start of this paragraph again for details.

“Law is one of the most popular degrees in the country”.

Medicine is equally if not more popular and there is still a shortage of doctors. Law is popular but not all law students go on to be barristers, let alone criminal barristers. Most become solicitors, of whom criminal solicitors are also overworked and unable and unqualified to take on the extra burden of courtroom work. Many law students also apply to become barristers in other areas of law. Some are foreign students who take their skills out of the country altogether. And then there are others who just don’t finish the course or don’t complete it to a high enough standard, in part because there is a whole other issue that many students are missold the dream of working in law and pursue it through ignorance and fantasy. Criminal law is an incredibly stressful job with huge amounts of responsibility, dealing with at times some of the nastiest people in society or the traumas that their victims have suffered, all for less than minimum wage for the first 3 years. Criminal law requires applicants to be of the highest calibre in reasoning and advocacy, as well as the resolve to stay in the profession. Many cannot take that pressure, financially and emotionally and doubly so when in combination. Make similar arguements about medicine and it is somehow justifiable, but for law it is not, why?

“There’s over 300 applicants for EACH pupillage spot at some criminal chambers.”

Which criminal chambers and pupillages? I agree that it is competitive but you speak of at best extremes and at worst lies and i cannot find anything to suggest this figure online. Not all pupillages are for criminal practice either and cover several areas of law i should add.

You could quote that 300:1 figure about a position in a warehouse. Such competition is an imbalance supply and demand. Barristers can maximum train 2 pupils at a time on 6 month rotation if they are qualified to, as well as carry out their own practice. Fewer practicing criminal barristers means fewer are able to take on pupils which means higher competition. The high number of applicants is dealt with in the above point in terms of being missold and less qualified leading a highly competitive environment. There will always be pupillages more popular than others, so like i said you are either focussing on the extreme or at worst lying about these statisitics without specifying the chambers and pupillages.

“This catastrophising of a barren world in which there’s no lawyers left to represent people because they’ve been treated so harshly is a fantasy.”

I never said no lawyers, i just said that we are heading to a world where the poorest will not see justice done as there are no legal aid criminal barristers to represent them. It is a matter of logic and looking at the statistics of those who have already left as outlined in point 1 above.

Legal aid barristers have and will continue to move partially or completely into other areas of law, or move out of law altogether at their current rate of pay and stress. The backlog of cases will grow and the poorest who are entitled to legal aid will not see justice done, but private cases will continue, creating or you may argue exacerbating a two tier society. Solicitor firms have already been refusing legal aid work as it is unecomonical, and this feeds through to the barristers who do not see the work come in.

I have seen this among 4 friends and acquaintances who have been called to the bar and got criminal pupillages in the last 3 to 4 years moving out completely or diversifying their criminal practice. They are all smart and competent, why should they continue to suffer poor remuneration for so much stress put upon them when they can earn more elsewhere for the same stress or less with the qualifications they have?

“They [I] forget to mention how much money barristers make outside of fixed court fees for work on lucrative public inquiries like Grenfell.”

You distract from the issue of junior barristers’ pay leading to their walking out from the criminal bar and show that you forget the criminal bar is more than what you see on television.

High profile public inquiry work is handled by highly experienced barristers who benefited from and practiced in a properly funded criminal justice and legal aid system. Of course they make significant sums, they highly experienced and are dealing issues of great importance in these public enquiries.

What part of junior barristers making less than minimum wage are you not understanding? That is the issue here. You are strawmanning the argument because you cannot reconcile that barristers in their first years of practice are not paid adequately and in a timely manner with your irrational single mindedness that barristers are ironically public enemy number one. They are not. They ensure we have proper representation, that we have the right to a fair trial, that criminals are punished properly and victims see justice done. They have seen real income declines of 28% since 2006, how can you expect anyone to accept such conditions when they deal with the lives of individuals in our society?

Your vigilante tone and self procalimed heroism in your final two paragraphs is misguided. You are no one’s hero. You mislead and distract from the actual issues at hand that will lead to the collapse of a structural pillar in our society. You should be ashamed of yourself. I invite people to fact check what i have said for themselves as you suggest and see what an ignorant fool you are.

FFS, why does the Bar pretend it’s the only self-employed profession in the UK????

There are literally millions of self-employed people in the UK who have to organise their own sick pay, pension and child-care. Anyone working as a wedding planner/interior designer/tutor also waits months to be paid, puts up with pushy clients and is also taxed by the government. These aren’t crosses only criminal barristers have to bear, but for whatever reason, they certainly seem to cry the most about them???

There are self-employed people who suffered greatly in the pandemic, who missed out on government help and who too feel over-worked an under appreciated. They too attended university, have debts and aren’t ‘stupid’ or ‘fools’, even if barristers want to call them that.

Why do criminal barristers believe that their anxieties are somehow more important and greater than other self-employed people? Then they complain about organising their own pensions & sick pay (as if they had no idea beforehand that this is what self-employment involves?) but other self-employed adults somehow manage it?

Just incredible behaviour.

I should also add that the professions you mention, and very few in general, hold such responsibility for the lives of other people. Criminal barristers are on a par to doctors in terms of determining human outcomes. A hairdresser, tutor or interior designer, though perfectly respectable professions themselves serving a need in society, do not carry such a burden as to determining a person’s liberty or health outcomes. Would you want an overworked, stressed out and underpaid doctor to perform surgery on you? I doubt it, so don’t think you would want a barrister in such a state either.

I should update a statement as I didn’t actually finish it:

I have seen what my wife has been through, what our friends have been through, and the complete ignorance of people like you who push an agenda of screw the barristers because you have so little empathy and spew irrational hatred pushes me to continue fighting the legal aid lawyers corner and expose the absolute intolerance of people like you.

Do you even read what I write or argue? Just saying I am exaggerating without pointing out where with evidence or well-reasoned argument only shows your perceptions of self-grandeur, that your word is gospel. I have explained to you already why popularity of law is not the issue here and how the profession is crumbling, yet you do not or cannot counter that argument.

“What I don’t like is when members of a profession try to use their position to present a narrative that just isn’t aligned with the truth” and “If you are going to spend time seeking attention and sympathy for a cause by striking and telling the public to fend for themselves, you are likely to have ‘your truth’ dissected by the public.”

And your single-minded perception of events is truth? Just because you can only imagine more experienced barristers who have built up a practice and basically survive on multiple income streams from multiple cases worked on across the years does not mean that you are right to say that no barristers are in poverty. Read this comment chain, I explain perfectly well why poor remuneration, debt and yes poverty are forcing newer criminal barristers away from the legal aid criminal practice because crime doesn’t pay. I have seen people leave because of the pay and stress; I do not need imagination unlike you.

The Grenfell Tower inquiry is a civil law case and civil legal aid funded, whilst legal aid cuts contributed to the Grenfell Tower disaster in the first place because residents could not afford barristers to take their landlords to court over safety concerns. Criminal barristers can support lead public/civil law barristers given the scale of the inquest since they possess the necessary skills to aid the inquiry this way, but they will have been paid through civil legal aid which is not part of the strike action. If any of the work was completed through criminal legal aid, it would be subject to set fees as per the rest of the criminal legal aid system, so your points referring to Grenfell Tower barristers being well paid are redundant because they have been paid through a different system.

Diversifying is equivalent to leaving the criminal bar and legal aid work. If all criminal barristers’ sole practice was criminal legal aid and they are forced to diversify to survive and spend 25% of their time on other areas of law or privately paid work, it would be equivalent to losing 20% of the criminal legal aid practice. So, I’m afraid your Aha moment falls quite flat. My wife is only acting in her best interest, as are other criminal barristers, as is their prerogative. Their collective actions are equivalent to losing barristers to represent to poorer ends of society. This leads, as discussed above, to greater pressure on those who remain, and a spiral of workloads as criminal barristers face ever mounting pressures, whilst the backlog – already at over 450,000 across the magistrate and crown courts – exponentially increases, creating a two-tier society where poorer do not see justice done.

You do know how money and pay works, right? The more unpalatable the job, the more it needs to pay to attract and retain people. People want to have a criminal practice but cannot reconcile the stress with the pay. To say that they knew what they signed up for implies a sort of omniscience that no one can possess. Any job can give you money. Criminal barristers may want the social prestige, the fun or thrill of winning an argument or seeing justice done, all of which criminal practice offers. But none of those things themselves actually put food on the table, and like I said they have higher responsibilities than most other professions. Those financial and emotional pressures, the effects of which are not necessarily foreseeable including the constant exposure to the worst in society and living in payment limbo, breaks them much like in other public professions.

Criminal barristers take on private work, no one is disagreeing with that. Why should barristers subsidise a legal aid practice where they have no control over the fees with work they earn privately or elsewhere? Among them and medical professions, there is an expectation that they are somehow morally bound to expect lower pay and subsidise it from their own pocket. How is that fair? We have seen it in dentistry and doctors where people cannot get appointments and are suffering as a result because there is a shortage of medical professionals. Medical professionals are moving to private practice or abroad to better paid and better work life balanced institutions, like New Zealand. There are not enough doctors/dentists to meet demand despite oversubscription to study and they too have a payment structure that does not benefit them. It has led to a two-tier system in society with the poorer suffering the most. This is the case in criminal law too with legal aid, why is any of this good for society at large in our underfunded public systems?

Sure, everyone has some terrible clients, but I am pretty sure the vast majority of clients want the business there and the clients are not literal criminals (you must live in a middle class bubble if you do not understand what it is like dealing with such people). If said terrible client say assaults an SME, that SME would expect the criminal justice system to ensure punishment, but that isn’t happening for years, especially for those SMEs most vulnerable at the lower earning scales because of the backlog and loss of criminal legal aid practising barristers. So how do you want to explain to them that they won’t get a trial for 3 years because there are no barristers, judges or courtrooms available until then, that they will relive that trauma with no sense of closure, and that there is a real issue of keeping track of defendants and victims for that period of time so their case may be lost in the system?

The public should be scared. Cases are already being listed for years in the future because of the backlog. Those held in custody could be there for months or years waiting for trial if the government has its way and increases custody time limits, holding defendants’ lives in limbo as they await trial, or there will be (and already are) dangerous criminals being let out on bail because the backlog has led to such delay in the courts that the CTL expires. Which would you rather?

Criminal barristers do not have a problem with being self-employed themselves and all that comes with it, they have a problem with how much they are paid for legal aid work, that they have no control or influence on how much they are paid despite level of experience or hours worked, that barristers under 5 years call do not have the practice built up to sustain themselves and so move to other areas of law where they can survive.

Barristers do not want to leave “the public to fend for themselves” or even hold them to ransom. They literally do not want the slow motion car crash that is already happening that is the collapse of their profession where there will be no one left or willing to defend legal aid cases, and are showing the effects of this future in the strike action before it is too late. They are not robots, they have lives, responsibilities, and emotions yet you seem quite happy to vilify, berate and take advantage of them.

You are hellbent on conflating legal aid and private work as well as different areas of law and show yourself to be tunnel visioned, unempathetic and wilfully ignorant to the issues facing criminal barristers. You look to push an agenda that benefits literally no one except your own ego with your main strategy of “Ah but”ing and ignoring valid points raised. I could hold your face to a pile of excrement, and you would still proclaim you couldn’t smell it. By chance are you a non-practicing barrister with a chip on your shoulder given your obsession with the stats on the competitiveness of the profession? You also still refuse to acknowledge that you would not do the work of a legal aid barrister for their pay so I can only assume that you could or would not, so get off your high horse already.

Keep dreaming, you literally prove my point in your last post that you cannot form any sort of arguement and that you cannot see the mess that is right in front of you. You cry foul at the slightest uncomfortable truth that you cannot deal with and sidetrack to avoid dealing with actual issues. You are not a representative of the public nor are you some matyr. You are not the one facing the collapse of your profession and are willfully blind to the collapse of our right to a fair trial in our country. Get over yourself.

“You use lies, self grandeur and avoidance to try and push a self serving and destructive narrative that will ultimately hurt those you claim to represent and protect”

Criminal barristers were claiming 20 years ago that their side of the profession was about to ‘collapse’, but evidently there’s still plenty of work and advocates to go around. There are barristers sitting at home on strike, but apparently the real risk to society comes from people like me who know exactly how diverse a criminal barrister’s income stream really is???? Absolutely laughing.

What do people in France, Japan, Australia, Germany and other western countries do when they are accused of crimes? You do know there are other countries outside the UK? Have their justice systems ‘collapsed’ because these states pay criminal lawyers within their jurisdiction?? No? Maybe that’s a clue as to what to expect.

If anything ever ‘collapses’, it will be because barristers are choosing not to work. Funny how no former clients are coming out in support of the strike? Maybe they don’t like being told that real ‘poverty’ is to be found within their advocate in the £400 wig?

To put it further into perspective, even the charities Victim Support and Rape Crisis support the strike action because they know that the system has been failing for years! Victims were suffering long before the strikes, waiting years to have a case called and concluded so they could move on. The strikes did not cause a 60,000 case backlog in the crown courts, government cuts did.

The barristers get rid of the wigs, they get a one off £400 back in their pocket What then? We still have a failed system with newer barristers earning less than minimum wage and moving away from crime. Like I said, it adds nothing to the discussion and is just a short sighted distraction.