Barristers

Commercial pressures on barristers are causing high risk behaviours that are detectable in complaints received by the Bar Standards Board, an assessment of future regulatory dangers has revealed. It also highlighted what it claimed were indications that senior barristers were abusing their position of power over women, pupils, and junior barristers.

Barristers have a vital role in helping clients and witnesses understand the legal system but their own “distinct and tribal culture” is a barrier to doing so, a Bar Standards Board report has found. This culture was also seen as a barrier to improving diversity at the Bar.

The Bar Standards Board has received the green light to license alternative business structures. The approval from the Legal Services Board needs to be confirmed by the Ministry of Justice. The BSB’s initial focus will be on “low-risk, advocacy focused ABSs”.

The Legal Director, a legal consultancy which provides in-house lawyers to businesses on a contract basis, has become the first firm regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority to use the Bar Council’s third-party escrow account, BARCO.

Plans by the Bar Standards Board to introduce a more flexible, outcomes-focused CPD scheme have met with widespread opposition from barristers. Only two of the proposals in its latest consultation received a positive response from individual barristers, while the Chancery Bar Association and Inns of Court expressed concerns

The battle for the future of legal regulation is set to move into high gear next week with publication of the government consultation on making regulators such as the Solicitors Regulation Authority and Bar Standards Board fully independent of the representative bodies which technically oversee them.

A barrister who gained a pupillage by lying about her age, faking references and falsely claiming she had been an assistant district attorney in New York has been disbarred. Her scheme began to fall apart when a clerk at the chambers became suspicious that she was not 29 – she was actually in her late 40s.

The test aimed at weeding out students with little chance of passing the Bar professional training course has so far failed to achieve its objective because the pass mark has been set too low, the Bar Standards Board revealed yesterday.

The Ministry of Justice has given its strongest indication yet that, once the legal regulators become independent, lawyers will no longer be compelled to make a financial contribution to their representative bodies.

Barristers specialising in professional negligence are more likely than colleagues in any other area of law to generate complaints, a report by the Bar Standards Board has found. The research found that ethnicity did not have an impact on complaints, but gender did, with men more likely to be complained about.