Beginnings – Part 2

Her pungent aroma, probably from a bottle worth more than I was earning in a month, wafted up the staircase and heralded her arrival.

My reaction was the result of a split second of adrenaline. I dived into the first room I could and threw myself against the wall trying not to breathe. The clicking of her heels danced past the room and into her own.

I breathed out slowly. Before I had a chance to revel in my good fortune I heard another set of footsteps. These were heavier and much quicker than the first. The door swung open with force and hit me in the face. I shut my eyes tight and waited for the shouting. There was a rustling in the room and a giggle from along the corridor before the door was shut again.

My heart was beating through my chest so hard that I worried it would be heard and give me away. I could hear murmuring and laughing coming from pupil mistress. I leaned back against the wall and tried to think. If I tried to leave, they might hear me. They may have locked the door to chambers behind them and I would need someone else to let me out. Whoever was making pupil mistress shriek like a baby seal may come back into the room. I could not rely on him failing to notice me again.

There were many complicating factors in this scenario. Pupil mistress was a married mother of two children and any hopes that I may have harboured that it was her husband in there with her were dissolved as I remembered that he was away prosecuting a murder and was not coming home this weekend.

I didn’t want to even think about how much venom would be directed my way if pupil mistress knew I was there on that Saturday morning. During the six months that I spent with her I was not invited to her home once. I frequently baby sat her two children but this was always at my own flat so that I did not get any ideas that she and I might be friends. I was nothing more than paid help to pupil mistress and she never took any risk that I may forget it.

I knew that I couldn’t risk staying in the room I was in. The wailing from the corridor reached a crescendo and I seized the moment. I removed my shoes and clutched them in my sweating palms. I inched the door open and closed my eyes as if that would in any way help with the creak of the door as I tip toed out.

It’s an unfortunate truth that the quieter you try and be, the louder you are. Fortunately pupil mistress and her learned friend were making so much noise I was able to sprint along the corridor to the nearest staircase and, cautiously walking along the very sides of the steps and clutching the rail to balance, I managed to reach the bottom and pull my shoes back on without attracting attention.

I was almost at the front door when an unfamiliar face appeared. A young man, papers clutched under his arm was strolling in with a smile on his face.

‘Hello! You must be……’,

he smiled, trying to place me.

I froze, could he be heard upstairs?

‘I’m Junior Tenant 10, JT10 for short, are you the new pupil? I’ve just got back from holiday, nice to meet you, you’re here early! That’s what we like to see but don’t push yourself too hard!’

His voice was friendly and I know he meant well but I couldn’t bear the tension that was paralysing me. He must have realised that I was stricken because eventually he stood aside to let me pass. I shook myself out of my shock and moved to the doorway. My mouth was so dry that I couldn’t bring myself to speak. I managed a dull sort of grimace in place of a smile but JT10 didn’t seem to mind.

‘We should have coffee, I can put off these papers for a while, come on.’

JT10 steered me to a nearby cafe and parked me in the window before going to the counter. I sat there feeling crusty eyed and crumpled as I waited. Pupil mistress had made her feelings about me socialising with tenants during my first six. In her view, I was not part of chambers and nor was I there to make friends. It was therefore inappropriate for me to spend time with anyone apart from her in case I acquired a ‘reputation’. She didn’t exactly specify what kind of reputation she meant but from the way she eyed me as though I was liable to pull my knickers off and jump the junior clerk on the photocopier I had a fairly good idea.

On the other hand, pupil mistress wasn’t here and nor was she behaving appropriately herself at this point in time.

JT10 was excellent company. He was warm, engaging and everything that pupil mistress was not. He spent an hour with me that morning, during which I spoke approximately ten words but that suited me fine. Apart from anything else I still had morning breath from waking up at a desk a long way from a toothbrush. I began to calm down and feel almost smug that I had gotten away with falling asleep in chambers on my first week.

By the end of our second cups of coffee I walked away feeling practically upbeat. Rather than take the train, I decided to walk back to my flat. It was a warm September morning and I could use the exercise after a week sat behind pupil mistress trying to keep as still as possible. I was two streets when pupil mistress’ best friend spotted me.

‘Helloooooo,’ she trilled, ‘walk of shame?’

Beginnings

‘Fetch me some documents from the clerks’ room?’

I didn’t even bother to answer, she knew full well I would jump to attention and be out of the room before she had even glanced up. My pupil mistress and I were struggling to get along, a problem exacerbated by us being glued to each other for at least eleven hours a day, and I took any excuse to leave her presence.

It is a strange quirk of training to be a barrister that we are required to spend a year shadowing a senior member of chambers. In our first six, we are little more than parasites as we follow them closely and are prohibited from taking any work of our own. In our second six months we are usually passed to another barrister who will supervise us as we accept our own instructions. At the end of pupillage we are voted on by the entire chambers before, hopefully, becoming tenants. As tenants we cannot be made to leave chambers and are allowed to practice as self-employed barristers for so long as we are able.

I am told that some people become close friends with their pupil supervisors. That they are invited to weddings, christenings and birthdays after becoming firm confidantes. There are pupil supervisors who relish the opportunity to support and guide young barristers into their practices and pass on what they know.

This was not my experience. My life for the next six months had been sold to a woman with less compassion than Grayling faced with the legal aid bill. She positively enjoyed watching me squirm as she picked over the carcasses of my drafting and quizzed me about the law. I learned later that a lot of the cases that she asked me to research had been invented by her to increase her opportunities to wax lyrical about my failings at chambers’ tea.

I cannot underestimate how important the opinion of your pupil supervisors is when you apply for tenancy. They are the people who supposedly know you best. The other tenants, who may never have even met the pupil, will look to them for their recommendation before voting. My pupil mistress, with her cold eyes and talent for making me cry, was my key to tenancy. She was also married to another senior tenant within the chambers and had two children with him. He was a distinguished criminal barrister who was popular within chambers but rarely seen because he was so often called away to deal with high profile cases around the country. I knew that without the support of pupil mistress I would certainly lose his vote, and therefore the support of the criminal team which constituted the majority of chambers.

It was the end of my first week in chambers and I had duly brought along biscuits for her that morning, expensively purchased and carefully chosen, to ‘celebrate’. She had smiled thinly and placed them on a high shelf in the room as she informed me that she was, ‘gluten free my dear, I’ll keep them for the children when they pop in’.

My heart had sunk at the thought of her five and three year old boys stuffing their sticky little faces with sugary treats that represented half my weekly food budget. It had, however, sunk even further as I realised that I had once again failed.

In the five days that I had been shadowing my beloved pupil mistress I had completed ‘shocking attempts’ at every piece of paperwork passed my way, made cups of tea so appallingly bad that she had poured them into her dog’s bowl (kept in chambers, another story) and worn the wrong outfit five days in a row. That is not to say that I had worn the same outfit each day, I had merely failed to select suitable clothing that met her standards of appropriate court dress.

You may think that so long as I wore a suit with no sign of the unholy trinity (cleavage, leg above the knee, colour) that I would pass muster. But you, my learned friend, would be most sadly mistaken.

‘Barristers should not, I repeat not, my silly little pupil, wear clothes that can be afforded by their clients,’ she had breathed maliciously into my ear as she seized my elbow on day one and forced me into the bathroom for a ‘chat between girls’.

Unfortunately for her, I was not a pupil that came with a trust fund as she had done. No, I had arrived in chambers, ready to be worked as a dog for twelve months and paid less than minimum wage for the pleasure, with only student debt accumulating behind me. Needless to say, couture was not high on the agenda. In fact, placed top of my to do list was ensuring that I did not turn into a miniature version of my pupil mistress.

I was not her first pupil. There were two others above me, my ‘sisters in the bar,’ who had both achieved the hallowed status of tenants in chambers and now pursued their careers in much the same way as our ‘mother’ had taught them. This translated, so far as I could tell after only five days, into being supremely rude to everyone around you but doing it with such confidence that they either handed you a brief or bowed down under the weight of your withering look. They were not yet senior members of chambers but both were achieving excellent levels of success.

When I reached the clerks’ room, the hub of chambers, I walked in delicately and tried to locate the papers as quickly as possible so as not to attract attention from the terrifying creatures that manned the phones and brokered the lives of their barristers. After a few minutes searching I had just spotted them on top of a photocopier when I heard the unmistakable coo of pupil mistress behind me, ‘and just what do you think you doing?’ she asked sweetly with only a trace of venom.

The room went silent almost immediately. Phones hung from the clerk’s fingertips as their eyes turned towards us with gleeful smiles. Barristers tried not to snigger and pretended not to be listening furiously. Pupil baiting is a sport and pupil mistress had elevated the practice to an art.

I spun on my heels, causing the papers clutched in my hands to flutter away from me and land in a heap, I tried to answer but she had not finished and would be damned if I spoke before she had, ‘pupils are not allowed in the clerks’ room. This is a very serious breach of a simple rule. Are you deliberately trying to embarrass the both of us?’

Her face was smiling. She always smiled before she went for the kill. ‘I will be reporting this to the Head of Chambers so that he is aware that I did not sanction this misconduct,’ was her parting blow. She stared me down as though daring me to contradict her before turning her gaze to the most feared creature of all, Head Clerk, and sighing, ‘don’t give this one too much to do, clearly she’s incapable of simple instructions’. Her job done, pupil mistress squeezed her ample self out of the clerks’ room and paraded back to her room.

I hastily grabbed the papers that had scattered like tumbleweed throughout the room and trying not to lift my scarlet face to meet anyone’s gaze as I scuttled through the door. To answer back would have been unthinkable. The word of my pupil mistress had more authority to me during those six months than a judgment of the Supreme Court. I placed the papers as tidily as I could upon her desk and stepped back as if to retreat.

‘Oh dear, oh deary me,’ she purred softly. ‘There are papers missing. Go back and fetch them.’

I panicked. How could I? Had I imagined the scene not less than one minute earlier?

‘Chop chop.’

I ran.

This time I almost crawled through the door, so desperate was I to draw as little attention to myself as possible. There were a few sniggers as I creeped about looking for the few papers I must have missed but my face could not blush any more. I must have been purple with humiliation. The papers were nowhere to be seen but I could not return empty handed or I would have failed once again. The watchful eyes of the head clerk were upon me as I tried to suppress my urge to hyperventilate.

Eventually I had to return to the room. Mercifully, my pupil mistress was absent and had left only the faintest trace of her acidic perfume for me to remember her by. Counting my blessings that I had a reprieve I sat down heavily in my tiny chair and tried not to hit my legs on the miniature desk I had been graciously afforded in a dark corner of the sumptuous office.

I waited. And I waited some more. I flicked through papers to try and look as though I was improving my legal mind, in desperate need of remedial assistance according to the majority of chambers, should anyone come through the door. It was already late in the afternoon on a warm September day but no one came in and the sky outside grew dark as I sat there. I should have left, but I had not been given permission to do so. Those who left early did not become tenants and the thought of tenancy, and a legal practice of my own, fuelled me throughout those long six months.

I cannot tell you how it happened. In those days I was so full of caffeine and sugar that it’s a wonder I ever managed to sleep at all. I woke up bleary eyed at five am behind a wall of books. Despite my groggy head it did not take me long to realise the severity of the situation.

Pupils are not necessarily granted the responsibility of owning a key to chambers. They are also, not necessarily awarded the privilege of knowing the alarm codes. Such responsibilities have to be earned. As you may have gathered, I was not doing well in this attempt. It was a Saturday morning. I was alone in chambers and I could not escape. If I so much as left the room I would set off an alarm system so expensive that an armed response unit would attend within minutes. Far more significantly, I would be the shamed pupil that set off chambers’ alarms at 5 am on a Saturday morning and brought my Head of Chambers (QC) out of bed to resolve the situation. I would be the laughing stock of the entire bar community. I would be unable to show my face in any chambers. I would be forever disgraced.

I sat rooted to my chair, freezing cold and scared witless, as I listened to the ancient building creaking around me in the darkness.

My only hope was that someone would come to chambers to work on Saturday and allow me to sneak out. This was not an unusual occurrence. Barristers in chambers are self-employed and often come to chambers at all hours of the weekend to collect papers or complete paperwork. It is also, should the relevant barrister require it, an oasis of silence and privacy away from small children, wives, husbands and mistresses of both genders. Should you ever find yourself in a relationship with a barrister that spends a large amount of time ‘doing papers’ that can only be completed in chambers on the weekend then you are right to have your suspicions. Nevertheless, this behaviour was my salvation that weekend, or so I had hoped.

At no later than 9 am I heard footsteps on the floor below. The shrill beep of the alarm as it was disengaged was my cue to swing my legs, smacking them against the desk as I did so, and stagger from the room as quickly as my feet could carry me ignoring the pins and needles stabbing with every movement. I was barely along the corridor when I realised. Pupil mistress was here.

Pupillage Survival Kit – Part 1

Know your enemy

Forewarned is forearmed. Before you start pupillage you should know the names and practice area of every barrister within your chambers. If you are in a particularly large chambers then this may not be possible. Instead, concentrate on the barristers that you are likely to encounter during your first six if you know who your pupil master is likely to be.

A tea chart

I cannot recommend this highly enough. Knowing how each member of chambers takes their tea is crucial. If necessary, prepare a spreadsheet and consult it when you are in the kitchen. This is where smartphones come into their own during pupillage! No one is above making the tea.

Silence is golden

Pupils should be seen and not heard. Actually, it’s far better if they should be seen as little as possible.

Phone a friend

You will need somebody that you can trust to take your secrets to the grave. This person should not be a member of the bar or hoping to be. There will be days when you think that you just can’t stand it any more. Make sure that when you do need to rant, your words will not come back to haunt you.

Boots the Chemist

There’s no room for sleep. Bring your stamina and, if you’re a woman, I recommend party feet and eye drops. For men, a spare shirt stashed away in chambers is always a good idea. Both genders should find a way to keep a toothbrush and relevant kit, deodorant and a hair brush in chambers.

Snacks

No one cares whether the pupil gets a lunch break. At first I survived like a forager, hunting down vending machines whenever I could when my pupil mistress wouldn’t see. I soon caught on and started hiding nuts and fruit in my bag. Men, I advise getting a man bag for this purpose if nothing else. Making sure that you’ve eaten something is vitally important when going out with chambers for drinks after work. Do not be that person who gets drunk too quickly because they’re light headed from lack of food.

Sense of humour

Pupillage is a rubbish time in anyone’s life. You are constantly sleep deprived and living on your nerves. You won’t survive if you can’t keep a sense of perspective and the ability to have a laugh when you spill tea down a tenant or turn up to the wrong court.

Looking for pupillage?

It always amazes me that people overlook the very basics of trying to enter the professional world. With that in mind, I’ve prepared a short post about some very simple rules.

Don’t forget that these are just the words of one individual barrister. I have tried to draw on the experiences of friends but, ultimately, this is the work of one person. These are my rules. They have worked for me. As I make very clear below, there is no ‘one size fits all’ and I do not guarantee that they will work for you. These are very general statements about behaviour when looking for a pupillage. There will be more specific posts in future about application forms, CVs and interviews.

Rule number 1: There is no magic formula.

Leave any hopes that you can somehow guarantee yourself a pupillage at the door. Whilst you’re there, deposit the false promises that barristers have made to you during mini-pupillages. I speak from experience when I tell you that they have made the same promise to every mini-pupil before you, and they keep chattering on to everyone after you. Until a barrister actually puts their money where their mouth is and supports your application, it doesn’t mean a thing.

In the butchered words of Beyonce, don’t trust anyone who doesn’t put a wig on it.

Rule number 2: Be realistic.

I’m being cruel to be kind when I say that you should take a long, hard look at your CV and decide whether you are ready to apply. I looked at the website profiles of junior members of the chambers I was applying to. This helped me identify whether I was close to the criteria that the chambers looked for and also whether there were any areas I could improve on. There was a belief that was very popular amongst my fellow students during my bar course. It was a highly disturbing and dangerously misleading idea that has directly caused the loss of thousands of pounds and wasted entire years of people’s lives. I’m going to make sure that you don’t fall into this trap of fiction.

THE WORLD DOES NOT OWE YOU A PUPILLAGE.

This leads on to……

Rule number 3: Do not waste time.

Successful barristers are, in the main, self-employed individuals who have put in the time and effort to get where they are. A few people get there by gift or by accident but don’t worry about them for now. Make sure that your CV portrays an individual motivated towards getting the most out of life, in work and in play. Get your mini-pupillages done early. Do volunteer work whilst you’re lucky enough to have spare time. Raise money for charity in creative ways. Acquire an interesting hobby. Travel anywhere and everywhere.

Rule number 4: Big Brother is watching.

Present yourself as a professional before you get pupillage. This rule is vital but often overlooked. Chambers can and will look at your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn so don’t assume they haven’t seen that photo of you smoking a suspicious looking cigarette and the statuses about your poor little broken heart. They don’t want a pupil that will embarrass them so think twice before you post. If you’re seriously thinking about pupillage then you’re probably doing your best to meet as many barristers as possible at networking events and mini-pupillages. It goes without saying that you should behave appropriately but that’s a whole different blog: How to behave at networking events and during mini-pupillages……coming soon!

Don’t get me started on appropriate clothing. That could be a different website. I recently saw a mini pupil wearing a leather skirt to court. If that’s you, be ashamed of yourself.

Rule number 5: Don’t forget about luck.

Most barristers who have completed pupillage recently will acknowledge the role that luck has played in their success. If they don’t, they’re idiots. Applying for pupillage is heartbreaking so don’t make the mistake of believing that just because you’ve done X amount of work experience or won a particular award that you’re guaranteed a pupillage. Unless you’re completely oblivious to the world around you, you will have noticed that most of the people you’re competing with are excellent candidates for pupillage. You probably are as well.

The only bright side to this rule is that you can increase your luck. By taking advantage of opportunities you increase your chance of putting yourself in the ‘right place at the right time’. Get off your backside and apply for some more mini-pupillages. Organise a networking event and invite tenants from chambers that you want to be at. Write an article and get it published where barristers will see it.

There will always be fantastic people who do not get pupillage. I have many friends and colleagues who would make excellent barristers but unfortunately that hasn’t happened for them. If the same thing happens to you, remember it may not be your fault. It is a numbers game and someone has to lose. Just get on with planning the rest of your life and enjoy it.

One last thing…….

Sure you want to do this?

Becoming a barrister is certainly not easy. Being a barrister is a daily battle. Legal aid is gone. Solicitors refer less and less privately paid work to counsel every day. The amount of work that we are expected to do for free is astounding. You will spend most weekends at events trying to network with solicitors who will never brief you. You will give up your free time to read and prepare papers that will never reap you any financial or professional reward. Any work that does come in may be last minute and long-distance travel. This is not a profession that ties in well with any sort of personal life.

Think extremely carefully about whether or not you actually want to do this. If you do, great. If you don’t, walk away now and look for something that will genuinely make you happy in your working life. I have met many people over the years that have become so obsessed with the idea of just being a barrister that they forget to stop and think about whether it’s really for them. Don’t let that be you.

Good luck.