Imagine then a job interview that lasts 12 months, or 18, or 2 years, or 3 for that matter. For that is how long it took me to obtain a tenancy in chambers. On the almost endless list of ways in which criminal barristers jobs are different and weird the way we recruit must feature prominently.
If you’re not a barrister the word pupillage is very unlikely to appear much in your lexicon. If you’re aiming for the Bar it will occupy your every waking thought and most of your sleeping ones too. Every year significantly more candidates apply for pupillage than there are pupillages available. There are Pupillage Fairs, websites, Inns of Court advice sessions and a plethora of resources available to guide and advise students in the process of applying for pupillage (barrister speak for an apprenticeship/traineeship).
Apprenticeship doesn’t really do justice to the reality of the pupillage experience which is more of a knight/squire relationship than almost any job setup I can think of, although it’s not lances you’re lugging around it’s lever arch files and you’re learning to battle with wit and words not blades and a mace.
The intensely personal professional relationship that is engendered between supervisor and pupil gives way to exposure to chambers relationships with clerks, clients, solicitors and judges. And as the year or year and a half of pupillage unfurls like the Bayeux Tapestry the moment comes when the pupil is examined by the Tenancy Committee which decides whether they’re ready to spring from their chrysalis for addition to the Chambers butterfly collection.
If a job interview with complete strangers feels stressful and awkward then an interview with people who’ve become friends and colleagues and who might in moments determine that you’re ‘not one of us’ after all is a singularly daunting and excoriating prospect.
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about applying for tenancy is that chances are those determining your fate will likely never have seen you actually doing the job for which you’ve spent all those months sweating. Certainly, any half-way decent chambers will have in-house advocacy training and this may even stretch to a showdown mock trial against another chambers. But even at its most evolved and considered this is still tennis on the practice courts, cricket in the nets, battle training with blanks.
After 20 years on the job I’ve been involved in tenancy decisions where I’ve seen people move to other sets and shoot like rockets into the sky and others where people were considered a sure bet for a flourishing career at the Bar who within a year or two decided it wasn’t for them. Barristers are experts in many things but recruitment is rarely one of them and because of the oxymoronic possibility that something referred to as a tenancy actually denotes lifelong membership of a chambers the stakes are very high.
I always say to those intent on the Criminal Bar that this is a not a profession for those that can’t cope with losing. Every single barrister has seen jury verdicts and judges’ rulings go against them and if you can’t deal with that you’re in the wrong job.
Being rejected for tenancy can feel very, very personal and if it doesn’t it probably means they made the right decision. If it smarts then that’s the spur to go on and show them what you’re actually made of not what they wrongly thought you were.
