Barristers

A criminal law barrister who groped a Bar student he was mentoring during a drunken night out has been suspended for six months.

A barrister in a long-running dispute with fellow counsel has been suspended from practice for two years after sending her a series of “obscene or seriously offensive” tweets.

The Bar Standards Board has been told that it needs to act more quickly on how it plans to educate the public about barristers after its widely criticised decision to stop funding Legal Choices.

The Bar should focus on “real inclusion” and “actionable, practical steps” to improve diversity rather than tick boxes, a black barrister and human rights activist has argued.

Barristers are generally happy with their new continuing professional development regime but are struggling to understand the concept of ‘reflection’, independent research has found.

Market forces will mean that commercial sets without a diverse gender pool at all levels will soon find themselves losing work to more gender-equal sets, according to a circuit judge researching equality.

It is about time that men and women realise that they have “no right to judge a woman’s commitment to and ability to do her job based on her appearance”, a leading QC has declared.

The pre-1992 universities achieve the best results in the centralised exams taken by students on the Bar Professional Training Course, it has emerged.

The drive towards online or virtual justice puts advocacy and professional standards at risk, delegates at the Bar Council’s annual conference heard on Saturday.

A barrister suspended last month for offensive messages on Facebook posted one that was effectively a threat to kill a member of the public, it has emerged. They were also “misogynistic”.