Not for the first time (and probably not for the last) our regulators express themselves in language that makes adults weep and invites satire.
Nevertheless, it is important, not only for the law but society as a whole, that the legal professions are diverse and genuinely give people of every background an equal opportunity not only of being recruited but also progressing. This will require greater effort than simply announcing (or even achieving) our personal freedom from prejudice.
At the bar, diversity and equality of opportunity will only come when the clerks’ room is a diverse place recruited on merit, in particular in those areas of law where the money is. In the Temple, a clerk’s job is essentially a London office job. For that reason, you would expect to see a majority of women and a very large percentage of people from visible ethnic minorities. What you too often see is a group of white men, as if the 1950s had never ended.
The reason for this is that barristers play little or no part in recruiting their clerks but subcontract the job to the senior clerk who is most often a white man. He chooses people like himself (often from Kent and Essex) not because he is personally a racist but because these are the only people he knows, and it has always worked fine in the past.
Changing that will require barristers to take responsibility for the recruitment of their own clerks and either explain why they recruit predominantly white men or change to join the modern world. That will only happen if individual barristers have an obligation to ensure that their recruitment is not nearly free from discrimination but results in their clerks’ room being made up in the same way as all other offices in London. Or they are ready to justify the difference.
I note from the websites that, for all their implacable opposition to discrimination, Mr Gledhill’s clerks’ room appears to comprise of 13 people, 11 of whom are white men. Lord Wolfson’s clerk’s room employs many women in good positions, but you can see it does not look rather whiter than a similar group in local government or a hospital.
I wonder if this does not demonstrate that we need action, not merely personal purity.
If we want to improve things we need to help the regulators focus on the action needed resolve these issues and not merely sneer at them.
As to these proposals from both branches’ regulatory authorities, I am with those practitioners resisting additional verbiage which very likely would result in the insinuation of subjective elements into what might then resemble more of a straitjacket than a workable set of principles. What exactly is wrong with the existing frameworks? Whatever the-as I assume- genuine aspirations of both regulatory bodies, the least hint of a lesser or less robust representation of those clients with whose views or actions we disagree would be deleterious to the irreducible tenet of access to advice and representation FOR ALL. Of course, no lawyer or advocate should be advancing illiberal, intolerant or discriminatory arguments AS THOUGH THEY HAD MERIT and no advocate should be pursuing or presenting a case as mandated by the client; s/he is in charge of strategy and their presentation. Offhand I identify only the decision of an accused as to whether or not to give evidence in her/his own cause. I can think of a number of occasions when practising when I had declined to go down avenues I had considered inappropriate, albeit desired by the client. Am I just rambling here, or do I still have it more or less right?
Not for the first time (and probably not for the last) our regulators express themselves in language that makes adults weep and invites satire.
Nevertheless, it is important, not only for the law but society as a whole, that the legal professions are diverse and genuinely give people of every background an equal opportunity not only of being recruited but also progressing. This will require greater effort than simply announcing (or even achieving) our personal freedom from prejudice.
At the bar, diversity and equality of opportunity will only come when the clerks’ room is a diverse place recruited on merit, in particular in those areas of law where the money is. In the Temple, a clerk’s job is essentially a London office job. For that reason, you would expect to see a majority of women and a very large percentage of people from visible ethnic minorities. What you too often see is a group of white men, as if the 1950s had never ended.
The reason for this is that barristers play little or no part in recruiting their clerks but subcontract the job to the senior clerk who is most often a white man. He chooses people like himself (often from Kent and Essex) not because he is personally a racist but because these are the only people he knows, and it has always worked fine in the past.
Changing that will require barristers to take responsibility for the recruitment of their own clerks and either explain why they recruit predominantly white men or change to join the modern world. That will only happen if individual barristers have an obligation to ensure that their recruitment is not nearly free from discrimination but results in their clerks’ room being made up in the same way as all other offices in London. Or they are ready to justify the difference.
I note from the websites that, for all their implacable opposition to discrimination, Mr Gledhill’s clerks’ room appears to comprise of 13 people, 11 of whom are white men. Lord Wolfson’s clerk’s room employs many women in good positions, but you can see it does not look rather whiter than a similar group in local government or a hospital.
I wonder if this does not demonstrate that we need action, not merely personal purity.
If we want to improve things we need to help the regulators focus on the action needed resolve these issues and not merely sneer at them.
As to these proposals from both branches’ regulatory authorities, I am with those practitioners resisting additional verbiage which very likely would result in the insinuation of subjective elements into what might then resemble more of a straitjacket than a workable set of principles. What exactly is wrong with the existing frameworks? Whatever the-as I assume- genuine aspirations of both regulatory bodies, the least hint of a lesser or less robust representation of those clients with whose views or actions we disagree would be deleterious to the irreducible tenet of access to advice and representation FOR ALL. Of course, no lawyer or advocate should be advancing illiberal, intolerant or discriminatory arguments AS THOUGH THEY HAD MERIT and no advocate should be pursuing or presenting a case as mandated by the client; s/he is in charge of strategy and their presentation. Offhand I identify only the decision of an accused as to whether or not to give evidence in her/his own cause. I can think of a number of occasions when practising when I had declined to go down avenues I had considered inappropriate, albeit desired by the client. Am I just rambling here, or do I still have it more or less right?