Barristers

A shortage of money and negative perceptions can still be deterrents to working class barristers  entering the profession, a seminar on diversity in the legal profession was told last week.

A supervising judge has criticised counsel who withdrew on the eve of an important consequentials hearing for not specifying the concerns they had raised about the conduct of the trial judge.

A former Bar Council chair has issued a call to arms to the profession over China’s sanctions on a London chambers, saying nobody should take on work transferred away from the set.

The London chambers sanctioned by the Chinese government last week has battened down the hatches, appearing to distance itself from the report which drew China’s ire.

Two-thirds of the reports of sexual misconduct by barristers received by the Bar Standards Board over the past two years have been referred for regulatory action, it has revealed.

The Court of Appeal has strongly criticised barristers for not realising that the transcript of a trial was incorrect because they had not paid attention to the judge’s summing-up at the time.

A barrister who co-founded a groundbreaking business that allows separating couples to obtain advice from a single legal expert at any point in the process, has won a £50,000 Women in Innovation award.

An experienced barrister who made crude sexual comments to a woman on a mini-pupillage has been suspended for six months and told not to take on pupils or mini-pupils in future.

A barrister was not liable to her instructing solicitors for the fees they claimed they lost out on as a result of her alleged negligence, the High Court has ruled.

The Bar Standards Board has admitted it is struggling to keep pace with a rising volume of incoming reports, authorisations and disciplinary cases, and is failing to meet several of its service standards.

Almost a quarter of pupil barristers say they are experiencing “some financial hardship” during the pandemic, but a lack of networking opportunities was the main problem they identified.

The Bar Standards Board has been urged to give disciplinary tribunals a clear and immediate message that they can depart from the current sanctions guidance for sexual misconduct cases.

Stonewall sought to pressure a leading chambers to remove a barrister who was highly critical of the LGBT charity’s approach to transgender rights, it has emerged.

The former Counsel General for Wales has struck out on his own as a sole practitioner and embraced direct access, saying it is “bordering on Luddite” for barristers to ignore it.

The chair of the Bar Council has dismissed as nonsense the suggestion that it had to publicly support the barrister at the centre of a racism row over his comments on Twitter.