Law and Disorder Read Free

café (not even Starbucks), chambers gets itself a bunch of dogsbodies who will do all the inconvenient bits of paperwork, not complain at having to spend two hours poring over a photocopier and offer to make coffee or tea on an hourly basis. In the meantime, my contemporaries who went off to City solicitors are dealing with multi-million pound deals and flying off delivering papers to the Middle East whilst those in banking are swanning around on training courses in places like Geneva.
    For me, I am off to Slough County Court on Monday. The glamour of the Bar. Though when I said this to my friend Claire as we sat in the library she replied,‘You should be so lucky,BabyB.I’ve spent the first week of pupillage babysitting for my pupilmistress’ two-year-old son whilst she swans off to court.’
    ‘So why do we do it?’ I asked.
    ‘Because you’re too vain to get an ordinary job,’ she replied.
    ‘Easier to fail at the Bar and go to the stage than the other way round, you mean?’
    ‘Exactly.’
    ‘Whilst of course all you want is to save the world.’
    ‘Naturally.’ She pushed a few stray strands of her brown hair out of her eyes and smiled. ‘Though quite how babysitting and coffee-making duties are going to help accomplish that I have no idea. But I’ve never asked you before. Why on earth did you choose the Bar?’
    ‘You want the truth?’
    ‘Why not.’
    ‘It’s pretty uncool.’
    ‘Go on, try me.’
    ‘To pay off the loans and credit card debts my mother’s incurred getting me this far. Get her back on her feet. Put an end to the constant worry.’
    I paused before adding quietly, ‘I want to make her proud.’
    Tuesday 10 October 2006
    Day 7 (week 2): No-win, no-fee
    TheBoss was actually stressed for once today and it was all over a no-win, no-fee agreement. Appropriately, it was a stress-at­work case which he’d assumed would settle which would have counted as a win and the fee would have followed. Except it didn’t settle and was now promising to end up in a five-day bunfight at Central London County Court starting tomorrow. The first big problem was that until last night, truth be told, TheBoss really hadn’t ever read the papers particularly carefully. It just seemed the sort of case which was going to settle. It was only late yesterday that he realised this was not so and started ploughing through the documents the other side had handed over months before. Needless to say, I received a late and rather abrupt phone call asking (i.e. instructing) me to get in early the next morning.
    So, six o’clock this morning, bleary eyed, I crawled into chambers and started delving into the disclosure. By the time TheBoss arrived at half past eight I’d made a pretty good start and had managed to highlight a couple of good reasons why the other side might not be making the offers which TheBoss had anticipated. Factors other than work to suggest why the client might be stressed, such as a marriage break-up and massive debts. These certainly weren’t fatal to the case but they were enough to get TheBoss worried. So, rather than getting any credit for spotting these points, it seems that all day I’ve been seen as the reason why TheBoss might be about to lose ‘forty grand’s worth of fees’, as he kept muttering under his breath. As if it would have been somehow better to have made these discoveries in the middle of the trial.
    With this much money at stake for TheBoss, one thing was clear. Settlement was a priority, and the quicker the better. His solicitor had even more riding on the case and so there was no resistance there. As for the client, the solicitor apparently gave him a call mentioning the difficulties that the other evidence might cause and, ‘. . . well, you do understand.’ No, the client didn’t really understand but what was he going to do, some eighteen hours before his big day in court?
    So it settled and all’s well that ends well as far as TheBoss and his beloved ‘forty