Barred from the Bar - strait is the gate and narrow the way to pupillage

The Bar is not for everyone and not everyone is for the Bar. Ostensibly it should be heartening that there is such a profusion of candidates for pupillage but sometimes when I see the metaphorical queue round the block I feel like one of those soldiers in a war movie trudging dead eyed from the front line past springy recruits straight out of basic training.

It is a grim reality of many mini-pupillages at the Criminal Bar that as much time is spent in warning off as in pointing the way. A useful maxim for any barrister, as for anyone wanting to walk through life with clear eyes, is cui bono. In the case of the BPTC providers the answer is simple: they do. Every year they recruit vastly more students than will ever win pupillages.

For many of those students it's not just that they aren't in the race they aren't even in the stadium. And whose job is it to tell them that? The answer is it's ours. In the sift. When there are 100 applications per place there are going to be many, many disappointed people. A proper chambers will have a marking scheme (I am very much in favour of that scheme being made available to applicants) and a proper chambers should be ready to provide a rejected candidate with the result of that scheme. 

But nobody can or should expect fully fleshed career advice from that exercise. The barristers marking those applications are doing it for free in whatever time they can carve out of their practices and their domestic lives. Applying for pupillage is a very stressful experience which, at the time, may well be the most stressful experience of a candidate's life. However its stresses are but a fraction of those that bear down on you in the cells of the Old Bailey advising a client looking at decades in prison or prosecuting a multi-handed case against Silks on the war-path.

When you apply to join a criminal chambers imagine you are looking to step on board a ship in a storm from which the last lifeboats were cut away some time ago. The interview panel sitting opposite you is not screaming in your face because they've been weathering that storm for a long time and because they are professionals and because the ship isn't going anywhere without new crew. But don't be fooled by the languid elegance of the Inns of Court or anything you've ever seen on television. The Criminal Bar was in crisis BEFORE Covid turned up, God knows what it's going to look like in the aftermath.

Learning to overcome the sting of rejection in applying for pupillage is in fact a key learning experience for practice where every day someone is telling you in public that you are wrong on the facts, wrong on the law and where every case has a loser. Few boast about this on their chambers websites or in public but many barristers and judges endured multiple refusals on their way to practice. It took me three attempts to obtain a tenancy.

However saying it's a tough job for tough people is no answer. Resilience can be learnt, it can be taught and it can be fostered. Likewise nobody is immune from mental health setbacks and suffering a bout of mental illness is no disqualification from the job at all. Indeed it is likely to make for a more empathetic practitioner given the family circumstances of so many of our clients.

If you think a chambers that has rejected you is falling short don't be shy about saying so. However think carefully whether the solution is expensive and difficult or free and easy. If the former there's your answer if the latter perhaps, in missing out, you didn't miss out after all.