Confessions of a Barrister

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Ed looked at us both, his lips thinned. He knew there was something in what we were saying, and what Johnny was doing.

After a while he turned to me. ‘What are you going to do then, Russ? You’re not thinking of leaving, are you?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll get a job as an exotic dancer in John’s hotel.’

‘Seriously,’ said Ed, ‘what would you do if you weren’t a barrister? What would you do if you could do something else?’

And that was the thing. I didn’t really want to do anything else. Okay, I am pissed off about the fact that our work was being farmed out to others, and that our pay was being cut, and that we were seen, wrongly, as immoral money-grabbing bastards who would sell our grandmothers for a brief, an acquittal and a bag of cash. I am pissed off with all of this, but – and call me a soft-centred lily-livered old whoopsie if you want – I still see it as a privilege to get up in court and represent people in their time of need. I want to be a barrister, just as I had when I’d sat down with my parents and watched, enthralled, some TV drama where a wonderfully erudite and maverick QC was winning the case against all the odds. That was still what I aspired to be.

‘Come on then,’ said Ed, repeating his question as if he was cross-examining a witness. ‘If you could do something else, what would you do?’

I took in some breath, chewed my bottom lip a bit, shrugged mournfully, then answered, ‘I dunno, maybe write, I’m not sure.’

‘Well,’ said Johnny, thankfully ignoring my suggestion of an alternative career, ‘I’m sure I can put a good word in for you at the hotel.’

I thanked Johnny for his offer of assistance, and suggested that it was my round.

Then I saw her.

Kelly Backworth.

The unsmiling, unfriendly Judas who had failed to defend me in any way to her boss when the issue of my conduct in the Porky Phi case was being discussed and had sat there, with a face as unfeeling as a wardrobe, as Mrs Murdoch and my clerk had declared me a barrister persona non grata – NIHWTLBOE.

I looked over at her. She was with a friend. And she was smiling. Oh yes, she was smiling now, great big, happy, unicorn-frolicking rainbow smiles. That was what she was doing now, away from court, away from me.

And what a smile it was – lovely glistening teeth, sparkling behind full lips that were now freed from the shackles of the Family Court and glossed by a shimmering lipstick.

I felt something shout at me from within my consciousness.

Then I walked over to the other side of the bar to where she and her friend were sitting. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. As I approached, she spotted me and, in an instant, the rainbow smile disappeared behind a cloud, the unicorns went back into their shed and the slate-grey misery that she had shown in court returned.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Hi,’ she repeated, then turned to her friend (who was smiling at me with a weird interest), ‘this is Russell Winnock,’ said Kelly, ‘he’s a barrister from Gray’s Buildings.’ I smiled at the friend, and shook her hand. ‘I’m Beverley,’ she said.

‘So,’ I said, and turned to the miserably beautiful Kelly Backworth. ‘Kelly, what happened? I thought we’d done a good job for Mrs West. Then, whoosh, I’m getting both barrels from your boss.’

Kelly looked down for a second. ‘Yes,’ she said, quietly, ‘I’m sorry about that – she can be a bit of a cow.’

‘A bit of a cow,’ I exclaimed, ‘that’s an understatement. I don’t know who would come off worse in a fight, your Mrs Murdoch or Phi, the psychopath we were representing.’

A small, barely noticeable smile flickered across Kelly’s mouth. Not rainbows, not frolicking mythical beasts, not teeth – but the hint of a smile nonetheless.

‘Seriously though,’ I continued, ‘Mrs West got a great deal, there’s every chance that if we hadn’t settled things, she’d have left court with nothing at all.’

‘But you were instructed to get an injunction,’ she said to me, her voice strong, yet friendly. And at this point, I confess, I really, really fancied Kelly Backworth.

‘We wouldn’t have got one though,’ I said. ‘You should have seen the burn mark Porky Phi had branded into Mr West’s chest.’

‘That’s the thing, Mr Winnock,’ said Kelly, ‘I didn’t see it. If you’d have shown me, I would have been able to defend you to Mrs Murdoch.’

She was right. Bloody hell. Kelly was completely right. In my enthusiasm, in my desire to sort out the case, I’d forgotten to include my instructing solicitors in the process. And that, more than anything, was why I’d been given such a roasting. I understood it now. I got it. You see it’s not all about the barrister, it’s not all about the person who stands up in court, the relationship with a solicitor is just as important, and I had neglected it.

I looked at Kelly.

‘Please,’ I mumbled, ‘call me Russ. Mr Winnock makes me sound like the maths teacher everyone hated.’

She smiled again. This time it was a definite smile. There were teeth and everything.

I thought about offering to buy them both a drink, but before the thought could become an offer, Johnny was shouting at me from the other side of the bar, ‘Oi, Winnock, are you brewing those beers or what?’

I looked at Kelly. ‘I’d better go,’ I said, and she nodded.

‘And, yes,’ I added, ‘you’re right, sorry, I should have brought you with me to see Mr West’s chest.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, ‘we had a phone call from Mrs West today, she thought you were the dog’s bollocks.’

Now my face broke into a deep grin. ‘Really?’

Kelly smiled again, ‘Yes.’

A couple of hours later, I staggered from the pub out into the cold air.

I looked up and contemplated the vastness for a few seconds, then made my way to the bus stop.

I felt sad at the fact that Johnny was leaving the Bar. I remembered us all going to lectures and stressing about assignments and trying to get jobs, and practising our speeches on each other for our mock trials and Bar Finals. I remembered how chuffed we were on the day we were called to the Bar, declared an ‘utter barrister’. Allowed to practise and call ourselves Learned, wear a wig and gown. It had all been so exciting. It had meant everything. And now Johnny had given it all up. And that somehow seemed a massive waste. I wouldn’t be giving up though – no way. I wouldn’t be giving up, because I knew I could do it, succeed, and what’s more, Mrs West knew it as well, which is why she’d said I was the dog’s bollocks.

The importance of pages (#ulink_a1a95e77-82a8-5c8d-8d1b-29c61892a868)

It is rare that a week goes by without me receiving some sort of brief involving drugs – usually involving someone selling them, or stealing people’s goods to pay for them. It strikes me that if Parliament made drugs lawful, crime would dry up and I would have to seriously think about an alternative career.

So when I picked up a new set of instructions from my pigeonhole, I wasn’t in the least bit surprised to discover a drugs case involving a man called Simon, who had the misfortune to be stopped by police with ten bags of crack cocaine hidden in his socks.

I looked at the brief and immediately noted from the index that there 49 pages of statements and 27 pages of exhibits – which means the interview, any relevant photographs or other documents. So, in total there were 76 pages of evidence – this is significant.

Why? I hear you ask. You might think that the number of pages is significant because it means that the evidence against my client is strong, or perhaps, conversely, you’re thinking that doesn’t sound like a lot of pages, or maybe you’re feeling sorry for me having to read all those pages.

Well, actually, its significance is far simpler – true the page count can reflect the strength of a case, but not always. In fact sometimes the most damning cases can be contained in a few meagre pages. Nor does the workload really bother us, we’ll read all the pages, come what may. No, the number of pages is significant because it is directly linked with how much money each case will be paid.

As I have mentioned, in the main, criminal barristers are self-employed and every barrister doing legal aid work will, at some point, wonder how much they are going to be paid for their endeavours – and the greater the number of pages, the higher the fee.

It works something like this: for the purpose of payment, each case is categorised according to what crime appears on the indictment. Murder, for example, is in the highest category as it is deemed to be the most serious offence, then comes rape, other sexual offences, complicated fraud and so on, all the way down to shoplifting and criminal damage where the cost of repair is under five thousand pounds. There is a flat fee for each of these offences, which is then increased according to the number of pages. For example a burglary with twelve pages of evidence is not going to be worth as much as a burglary with 120 pages of evidence, or a murder with 933 pages.

If the matter goes to trial, then the fee is increased with the payment of a further amount of money for each day of the trial – which are known as refreshers (apart from day two, which, bizarrely, we do for free!).

Now, don’t get me wrong, nearly all criminal barristers will take whatever case comes their way, and do their very best, but, because of the way we are paid, a lucrative case would be a rape trial lasting many weeks, with hundreds of pages of evidence, whilst a less financially attractive case would be a theft which goes to trial, lasting two days, with 26 pages of evidence; which is, alas, more common for most jobbing junior barristers.

There is also something called a cracked trial. This is when someone pleads guilty on the day of trial or shortly before, which is worth more than if the person pleads guilty at the earliest opportunity.

The practical implication of all this is that, very often, barristers who are doing the job honestly and professionally will find themselves advising against their own financial self-interest.

Take the following couple of examples.

I was instructed to defend a Polish chap whose family had been involved in a feud with another Polish family. There were over 700 pages on the brief and the trial was listed to last for five weeks – it would have been worth a few bob to say the least.

On the morning of the first day, my client, whose name was Jan Koszlak – a very nice man as it happens, if you put to one side his penchant for attacking people who crossed him with a Samurai sword – came to me and asked if he should plead guilty to the charge. As he said it my heart groaned, or rather, my bank balance groaned. I knew that a plea on day one of the trial would cost me a few thousand quid. I also knew that it was a trial that we could win, but that would by no means be guaranteed.

If I was thinking in a selfish way, I would have said, no, you should definitely run a trial. But I couldn’t do that, it wouldn’t have been right. So instead I said to Jan, ‘Well, if you plead now, you’ll get a little bit of credit, not much, but it will still be a lesser sentence than if you run a trial and lose. It is,’ I said, ‘up to you.’

Jan weighed this up, looked at me carefully, and asked, ‘What would you do?’ A question many defendants ask, and all barristers hate.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, which is the honest response. ‘It would be easy for me to say run the trial, but I’m not the one facing the porridge.’

‘Will I win?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘I have no idea. As soon as a case goes before a jury, it will have a life of its own.’

‘What are the odds?’ he asked (another question which all barristers hate), and I answered the way I always do, which is the only safe way to answer: ‘About 50-50.’

He nodded to himself, and then said slowly, ‘Okay, I’ll plead guilty. I can’t take the risk of longer time in jail.’

I smiled and told him he was probably doing the wisest thing, but inside I was screaming, ‘You’ve just cost me thousands of bloody pounds!’

Another time, I was sent to represent a man who was accused of grooming teenage girls for the purposes of sex. My client, Ron, was a 42-year-old welder living with his mother, who had been posing on Facebook, and various other social media websites, as Kyle, a sixteen-year-old school boy with Boy Band hair and a detailed understanding of teenager-speak (WTF, OMG, LMFAO etc., you know the stuff).

Kyle was rumbled when he made the mistake of trying to chat up Cindy, who wasn’t, as she claimed, a fourteen-year-old, slightly experienced little minx, with a keen interest in One Direction, push-up bras and lads with tattoos, but actually Detective Constable Steve Parker, a 36-year-old father of two who played blind-side flanker for Redbridge RFC Second team and listened to Radio 2. DC Parker was part of Operation Cinderella, a ‘honey-trap’ police operation. For two weeks he had coquettishly responded to all of ‘Kyle’s’, or should I say Ron’s, questions about what underwear she was wearing and if she liked to ‘swallow’, before enough evidence was amassed to arrest and charge him.

It wasn’t actually my case; I had been asked to cover it for another member of chambers. The hearing was simply to fix a new date for a trial. I hadn’t read all the papers – just enough to give me a flavour of the charge, and see that there were hundreds of pages of exhibits to cover all the conversations that had gone on – it was, without doubt, a lucrative brief.

When I arrived, Ron was in tears. ‘I just want to plead guilty,’ he told me. ‘I can’t take any more.’

‘Okay,’ I said carefully, ‘do you accept what you are accused of doing?’