One of the big things about being a barrister is self employment and the 'flexibility' that at least in theory comes with it. Being self employed has two effects.
The first is that you work when, how and where you want, subject to the constraints of (a) getting everything that needs to be done done (more or less at least) (b) being available to your solicitors when they need to be in touch (c) the practicalities of having access to all the papers and/or textbooks etc. you need to get your work done and depending on your chambers and how archaic your clerks are (d) facetime with the clerks.
That is the upside. How flexible you want to make that will depend on your chambers resources, your own preference, and the sort of practice you have. Obviously court work happens when and where it happens - there's no flexibility there, so if you're in court 4 days a week there's only so much flex you can build in!
My approach on this end of flexibility is 'very flexible'. I rock up to chambers when I damn well feel like it (generally somewhere between 9.30 and 11, often doing some work at home before I set off, occasionally dropping an email at 10 saying I'll be on my home number/mobile/email that day). I leave chambers when I am done for the day, whether that is brain death at 4.30 or still humming with activity at 8. If I'm knocking on the door to 8pm and still have things I need done before tomorrow, my stuff gets bundled up, I hit the road, have a proper meal and then get back to it either that evening or at 5.30 the following morning.
As far as I can tell this approach has generated no complaints from either clerks or solicitors. Things go from inbox to outbox and no-one really cares how they got there. I am slowly training my clerks out of prefacing every call put through to my mobile with 'I'm sorry to disturb you but can you talk to so and so'. If I'm available on my mobile I'm available on my mobile, and I expect to be called if a call comes in. I suspect most of my solicitors aren't even aware they've been patched through to my home number.
But there is a dark side to self employment. That is the direct link between a new piece of work and a reward in the form of a nice shiny cheque attached to it. When you are self employed its really hard to say no to work. You have at the forefront of your mind the difference that one piece of work will make to your paycheck at the end of the year and unless it is patently impossible it is very tempting to say 'I'll do something else a little later' or 'I'll squeeze an extra hour out of myself tomorrow' or whatever. To any normal person £300 is a lot of money, and you can't help thinking of the treat you could give yourself with that one extra bit of work (even once Chambers and the tax man have taken their cut!). The result is the proverbial feast.
You have more work than hours in the day, everything is constantly urgent because if it isn't it gets bumped in favour of something that is, and your flexibility becomes... well... non-flexibility because you don't get everything that needs to be done done unless you work every hour god sends. That 'feast' will last as long as work flows, or, just as often, until you collapse under its weight and fry yourself. That is not healthy, and the hardest thing a barrister ever does is walk into the clerks room and say 'stop'. But that's what you should do - it's all well and good working like that for a week, or even two, but any more than that and you will start dropping balls, your clerks will start fielding chasers from solicitors constantly, you will piss people off (in and out of chambers). Clerks and (even worse) solicitors who don't know if they can trust you to do something when you say you will are bad for your practice and, in the long run, bad for your paycheck.
The flipside is famine. Nothing has ever caused me more anxiety than clearing my desk ahead of a two week holiday (for once completely clearing my desk!) and coming back to find NOTHING had come in in the meantime. I worked a couple of hours of admin, poked my head in the clerks room, said 'I'm off now, nothing to do' and went home. This went on for two weeks, with the odd little scrap coming in, being turned round within a day and the terrifying void of nothingness resuming. At this point your flexibility is enforced. You do your Christmas shopping two months early. You get your hair cut. You repaint your nails every day. And you worry. Is this a sign your career's fallen off a cliff (in my case this was a very real worry: I'd just ticked over into my 3rd year of practice, our new pupil had just become a fully fledged tenant and I thought for a horrible few weeks that I had completely failed to establish a practice before my unannounced, sudden and total weaning off unallocated work happened).
It passed. But those are the enforced peaks and troughs of self employment, and unless you are willing and flexible enough to take the benefit of the feast when it comes (without allowing it to overwhelm you) and patient and prepared enough to make it through the lean times - this just isn't the sport for you.
Wednesday, 28 November 2012
Wednesday, 21 November 2012
Two - 485 - Winning feels good
So you know all about that cab rank rule where you take on whatever comes your way. It means not irregularly you get dumped with a steaming pile of turd that there's no hope in hell of winning and the best you can hope for is minimising the damage and not making yourself (and preferably your client) look like an idiot. Sometimes your client looking like an idiot is pretty unavoidable, so you'll settle for doing your best and hoping for the understanding of the judge, who can see the patent level of cow poop you are being forced to peddle, but will not give you too hard a time knowing that you're just doing your job.
But there are other cases where you get a warm feeling as you prepare. A growing realisation that while it's far from being a slam dunk, you have a real shot at making it fly. And as you prepare your skeleton that realisation builds into a wave of euphoria as bit by bit the pieces fall into place and you see exactly where you can nail the other side's naughty bits to the wall. And you see that if you can just make this one point stick, everything else will flow and follow on from that and you might, with a following wind behind you, get over all those other hurdles.
That is the feeling I had as I prepared for my trial last week. There were weaknesses in my case. There were loopholes to exploit. There were things in my evidence I'd have to gently pad around and protect. But there was a glorious shining target on the other side's case that I could aim at, and I could poke, and I could punch a hole the size of a ten ton truck through. And once they fell down on that, the little niggles on my side would be nothing compared with the blatant falsehoods on theirs.
In theory.
In reality there were any number of things that could go wrong, and even if I rode roughshod over that part of their case, the real crux could be conceptually separated and a carefully guided judge, performing a rigorous analysis might just come to the painful conclusion that while they were lying, still my clients weren't telling (or remembering) the whole truth, or even if they were, it wasn't enough to get them what they wanted.
And then one of my witnesses blew a hole that looked about the size of the titanic in my chronology. It's a horrible thing to come out of a trial, and know you've scored every point you hoped to, but that the other side landed some good blows too and you just have no idea which way the judge will jump.
That's why, as a judgement is delivered, and bit by bit it comes down in your favour, it still feels fantastic...
But there are other cases where you get a warm feeling as you prepare. A growing realisation that while it's far from being a slam dunk, you have a real shot at making it fly. And as you prepare your skeleton that realisation builds into a wave of euphoria as bit by bit the pieces fall into place and you see exactly where you can nail the other side's naughty bits to the wall. And you see that if you can just make this one point stick, everything else will flow and follow on from that and you might, with a following wind behind you, get over all those other hurdles.
That is the feeling I had as I prepared for my trial last week. There were weaknesses in my case. There were loopholes to exploit. There were things in my evidence I'd have to gently pad around and protect. But there was a glorious shining target on the other side's case that I could aim at, and I could poke, and I could punch a hole the size of a ten ton truck through. And once they fell down on that, the little niggles on my side would be nothing compared with the blatant falsehoods on theirs.
In theory.
In reality there were any number of things that could go wrong, and even if I rode roughshod over that part of their case, the real crux could be conceptually separated and a carefully guided judge, performing a rigorous analysis might just come to the painful conclusion that while they were lying, still my clients weren't telling (or remembering) the whole truth, or even if they were, it wasn't enough to get them what they wanted.
And then one of my witnesses blew a hole that looked about the size of the titanic in my chronology. It's a horrible thing to come out of a trial, and know you've scored every point you hoped to, but that the other side landed some good blows too and you just have no idea which way the judge will jump.
That's why, as a judgement is delivered, and bit by bit it comes down in your favour, it still feels fantastic...
Thursday, 15 November 2012
One - 503 - something for nothing
One of the curious things about being a barrister is trying to work out where to draw the line on 'aftercare' or freebie assistance. Yes yes I know a note of the hearing is included in my brief. But what about advice on next steps? I always throw that in (even if it involves legal research) because I know (and pardon the insult any solicitors who are pro-active) that with the majority of solicitors, once the hearing is done the case is forgotten about until the next time a hearing or a deadline rolls around.
If there is something constructive to be done that will require more than a couple of days ahead of the next deadline, I like to highlight it. Especially if that something is making an offer to the other side that might get the damn thing settled, or getting the client to bring in some piece of evidence they mentioned in court that could be a gamechanger.
But what happens when that solicitor you gave a pointer on next steps to calls you up (or emails you) three weeks later asking whether they're doing it right? What if they aren't and you need to spend another 20 minutes clarifying what you meant? Or what if they did that and now they need advice on how to react to a response on the other side? Just how many of these exchanges are covered in your brief fee, and at what point do you say 'you'll have to have a word with my clerks'?
For me it tends to depend on my relationship with the solicitor. If they have given me positive feedback, and show appreciation for me going the extra mile, I will continue to do so on the basis it's likely to give me brownie points. If they seem to take it for granted, well, sooner or later they're going to find little half hour charges appearing on their bills for follow up work.
The reason this came to mind today is that as I walked to work I contemplated calling a solicitor on something still in my diary for next Wednesday to confirm that it really had settled as per the draft consent order we'd finalised together last week. Since the last hearing I'd thrown in some advice on proposed terms of settlement, and tweaked the wording of the draft order produced by the other side. All in all about 45 minutes had been spent reading bits and pieces of correspondence and fiddling with terminology. The solicitor had said absolutely lovely things about how he'd appreciated my assistance by email, and I came to the conclusion that I'd tell my clerks that there'd been a half hour or so but I was content not to bill. Imagine my surprise when my clerks instead approached me and said they'd heard lovely things from said solicitor and could I give them a note of my time spent, as he wanted them to bill him for it. Talk about feeling appreciated.
If there is something constructive to be done that will require more than a couple of days ahead of the next deadline, I like to highlight it. Especially if that something is making an offer to the other side that might get the damn thing settled, or getting the client to bring in some piece of evidence they mentioned in court that could be a gamechanger.
But what happens when that solicitor you gave a pointer on next steps to calls you up (or emails you) three weeks later asking whether they're doing it right? What if they aren't and you need to spend another 20 minutes clarifying what you meant? Or what if they did that and now they need advice on how to react to a response on the other side? Just how many of these exchanges are covered in your brief fee, and at what point do you say 'you'll have to have a word with my clerks'?
For me it tends to depend on my relationship with the solicitor. If they have given me positive feedback, and show appreciation for me going the extra mile, I will continue to do so on the basis it's likely to give me brownie points. If they seem to take it for granted, well, sooner or later they're going to find little half hour charges appearing on their bills for follow up work.
The reason this came to mind today is that as I walked to work I contemplated calling a solicitor on something still in my diary for next Wednesday to confirm that it really had settled as per the draft consent order we'd finalised together last week. Since the last hearing I'd thrown in some advice on proposed terms of settlement, and tweaked the wording of the draft order produced by the other side. All in all about 45 minutes had been spent reading bits and pieces of correspondence and fiddling with terminology. The solicitor had said absolutely lovely things about how he'd appreciated my assistance by email, and I came to the conclusion that I'd tell my clerks that there'd been a half hour or so but I was content not to bill. Imagine my surprise when my clerks instead approached me and said they'd heard lovely things from said solicitor and could I give them a note of my time spent, as he wanted them to bill him for it. Talk about feeling appreciated.
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