As chair of the Young Barristers’ Committee (YBC), one of my first tasks is to set the committee’s priorities for the year. Along with business as usual (e.g. Brexit and court reform), the YBC needs to identify key issues facing barristers in their first seven years of practice, and then to try and address those issues.
As you can imagine, this is not a straightforward task. The Bar is a vast and diverse space. We may all be ‘barristers’, but the job of a junior criminal practitioner, racing all over the country, doing trials solo from the first day of her second six will be almost unrecognisable to the junior Chancery barrister, who may not cross-examine a witness by herself until she’s put in several years as fourth, third, second and finally first junior.
The pay, the pace, the content – these key hallmarks of any profession – diverge so widely for the Bar, that one may wonder whether it is meaningful to talk about the ‘job’ or ‘life’ of a barrister at all.
It is clear that there are sector-specific issues. The woeful inadequacies in pay at the publicly funded bar quite properly continue to dominate headlines in legal news and more widely, and that issue will form one of the YBC’s three main areas of focus this year.
But it is also quite clear there are themes, interests, and threats which unite all junior barristers. Our other two priorities for the year which affect the junior bar as a whole: (i) equality, diversity and social mobility (EDSM), and (ii) wellbeing.
Equality, diversity and social mobility
This topic covers an enormous range of work, and the Bar Council has a dedicated EDSM committee, headed up by Robin Allen QC. I would like to draw attention to two particular issues on which the YBC is focusing: judicial bullying and harassment.
Judicial bullying has been in the spotlight quite significantly over the past year. This issue came to the fore in late 2017, when a criminal barrister tweeted about how some judges ‘belittle and undermine’ advocates, and how this can have a significant impact not only on justice, but on the barristers’ wellbeing.
Within minutes, other advocates came forward with their own experiences of how judicial bullying had affected them. This prompted numerous articles, discussions, and lectures, and in February this year, the Bar Council issued guidance on tackling judicial bullying.
Clearly there are a great many judges who are decent and courteous and professional. But it is equally clear that judicial bullying is a real problem which resonates with many barristers (particularly those practising in crime) and further that it is a problem which disproportionately affects women and minorities.
All bullying is unacceptable. Judicial bullying is particularly egregious, given the disparity between the status of the bully and victim, and the inevitable erosion of confidence in the rule of law which accompanies a judicial bully’s actions.
Victims of judicial bullying need to feel empowered to report these incidents in a confidential environment in which they will be taken seriously and have appropriate repercussions. The Bar Council provides guidance to barristers at wellbeingatthebar.org.uk, and also operates an equality and diversity helpline to assist. The Bar Council is also working on a system to assist barristers in reporting bullying.
Harassment is an equally prominent issue. In June 2018, the Bar Council released the findings of its ‘Third Working Lives Survey’. Over 4,000 barristers provided ‘useable’ responses to questions regarding their perceptions and experiences of harassment, bullying, and discrimination.
The findings were stark. Reports of harassment, bullying, and discrimination within the barristers’ profession, as well as reports of observing the same, had increased over the years: 21% of employed and 12% of self-employed barristers reported experiencing harassment or bullying in the two years prior to the survey, an increase of 3% at the employed Bar and 5% at the self-employed Bar.
Reports of discrimination roughly mirrored that trend: 16% of employed and 13% of self-employed respondents said they had experienced discrimination, a 4% increase at the employed Bar and 5% at the self-employed Bar.
This was also echoed by the increase in observed bullying, harassment, and discrimination: 30% of employed and 17% of self-employed barristers had observed bullying or harassment (up 9% and 8% respectively), while 20% of employed and 15% of self-employed barristers had observed discrimination (a rise of 5% and 7%).
Across seven protected characteristics (gender, age, ethnicity, religion/belief, disability, sexual orientation, pregnancy/maternity), the most common form of reported bullying/harassment was based on gender (53% – up 5% from 2013 data).
At the self-employed Bar, 50% of those reporting bullying or harassment cited another barrister or colleague as being responsible.
It’s clear that bullying, harassment, and discrimination are unacceptable behaviours. The Bar Council offers a confidential helpline, training, and support to individuals and chambers. Any barrister facing harassment or bullying should use these services. We are also working with the Bar Standards Board to ensure rules about reporting encourage chambers and others to call out and deal with unacceptable behaviour, rather than stay silent for fear of the consequences of speaking out.
The YBC will be meeting with junior barristers this summer to assess whether their experiences mirror these broader findings and to explore what, if any, further support is required to assist junior practitioners who face harassment, bullying, or discrimination.
Wellbeing
The law has always been a pressured profession. Whether you are safeguarding people’s livelihoods and liberty, holding public bodies to account, or setting out your solutions to commercial conflicts, barristers’ input invariably comes at the knife edge of change – and the stakes are always significant.
The internet, smartphones, and laptops give us unparalleled opportunities for more effective working. Need a case? You no longer need to trek to the library. Forgotten a document in chambers? Ask someone to scan it to you. Looking for a provision in the CPR but can’t remember where it is? Google it.
The Bar deals in information – whether it’s evidence, case law or advice. And technology has been of exceptional assistance at helping us access that information more readily.
But over the past 20 years, there has also been an explosion of information across the board. The occasional letter has been replaced by 40,000 WhatsApp messages. The carefully crafted bundle replaced by 150 emails, each of which has tens of emails embedded within it. And online resources like Westlaw mean that a 20 second search can throw up hundreds of cases each of which you now feel compelled to check to do your job diligently.
This builds on pressures historically associated with the job: developing and maintaining a good client base; doing a sterling job on every case; maintaining cash flow; cultivating good relations with other members of chambers; dealing with the particular stresses and isolation of being self-employment and chasing that elusive unicorn of the work-life balance.
Regardless of your age, seniority, personal circumstances, or practice area, the Bar can be a stressful and demanding profession. For many that is initially part of the thrill. No one comes to the modern Bar by accident. Junior barristers everywhere have that common quality – we are the sort of people who have enjoyed jumping over increasingly high hurdles. But we are also the sort who will keep trying to jump over those hurdles, ignoring the fact that we’re smacking into them until we physically can’t lift ourselves off the floor.
This is a common theme – from the magistrates’ courts to huge commercial arbitrations. Juniors of all stripes are working longer hours, with more information, unable to switch off, experiencing constant nagging feelings of agitation, exhaustion, and stress.
This was well-illustrated by the Bar Council’s 2015 ‘Wellbeing at the Bar’ survey. Approximately 2,500 barristers took part. Of those:
- More than half regularly experienced difficulty sleeping;
- More than half found it difficult to control/stop worrying at least some of the time;
- More than one-third found it difficult to control/stop worrying all or most of the time;
- One in six felt in low spirits most of the time;
- 59% felt they demonstrated unhealthy levels of perfectionism; and
- Two-thirds felt that showing signs of stress equals weakness.
These statistics speak for themselves. Wellbeing is everyone’s problem. And that isn’t really surprising given how we work. We are constantly plugged in and switched on. In part that is a response to the rest of the sector: solicitors email over papers at 17:00 for a hearing the following day; your client is in a wildly different time zone and wants a telecon.
But in an age when people work, relax, listen to music, read, and find love, all online, then the boundaries between work and life can all too easily become blurred and finding that elusive balance becomes even harder.
I don’t have all the answers. Mostly I’m just glad I don’t have all the problems either.
But it is clear to me that there are steps which barristers, clerks, practice managers, chambers, and other workplaces more generally can be taking to manage this issue:
- Recognise that wellbeing is important and something which needs to be prioritised;
- Use the Bar Council’s wellbeing hub for guidance, action plans, and helplines which you and your workplaces can and should be utilising;
- Set clear boundaries for work. The Bar Council is in the process of preparing ‘Email’ and ‘Sitting Hours’ protocols, encouraging the Bar and judiciary to adopt codes of conduct limiting the hours in which we can reasonably be expected to be in court or respond to emails;
- Be sympathetic to the wellbeing of others and wellbeing initiatives more generally; and
- Be mindful of your own wellbeing.
It is tempting to dismiss these initiatives and treat them as a sign of weakness, inconsistent with our profession. In a job where mental integrity is the ultimate prize, barristers are unlikely to want to admit a weakness which correlates to failure.
To that I would say the following: stress is real. Its effects are progressive and can be devastating. Electronic working has significant changed the working environment and the stresses to which its participants are subjected and balance and control are elusive. You don’t get to pick when you burn out, or how that burnout will impact your life, or whether you will be able to recover from it. Your mental health is too high a price to pay for any success.