If I could give one piece of advice to any aspiring barrister it would be: never annoy your clerks. Because if you do they will punish you, in a particularly snide way in which only they can. One Sunday evening not long after I was declared NIHWTLBOE, I traipsed into chambers to get my briefs, held the wad of ribbon-bound papers in my hand and cursed.
The bastard clerks.
I cursed their very existence. I cursed their families. I cursed the very air they breathed. They were clearly annoyed with me and had their revenge by giving me three cases in three different courtrooms in front of three different Judges. It’s called cross-courting.
This would teach me. They had known that.
I felt my innards groan, picked up my work for the night and trudged back home.
This is, though, a good opportunity to tell you about Judges. Because the next piece of advice I would give a young barrister is: never annoy Judges either. For they play a huge part in your life, sitting there, God-like on their bench, a gigantic and omnipotent presence in the court. From your first day as a barrister, Judges take a disproportionately significant role in your conscious thinking. As a baby barrister, one of the first questions you ask whenever you get anywhere near a court is, ‘What’s the Judge like?’ Your heart will leap if you are told that he’s ‘nice’; but, if the answer is that ‘he’s a bit of a bastard’, you feel your stress increase as a dark cloud of doubt manoeuvres itself above your very existence and you fear that most awful of things – a humiliating public bollocking.
As I made my way home that evening, I knew that with three different cases in three different courts, there was every chance that the next day, I wasn’t going to annoy not just one Judge, but three. Great.