Forget about the money. Yes, even now for the very best, or rather for the most successful (and they are not necessarily the same) there is a reasonable living to be made from advocacy, but the statistics show that you are very unlikely to be making it. What is more, the prospects for the future are exceedingly bleak
Forget about the glamour. For every hour you spend addressing a jury in a murder trial at the Bailey, you will spend a thousand doing a Plea and Case Management Hearing in Luton, or perhaps a plea in mitigation in front of an unsympathetic bench in Basildon. There is very little that is glamorous about that.
Forget about the kudos. Yes it is quite fun at first, when asked at a party, to say “Oh I’m a barrister”, but it soon wears off.
And that is assuming that you can get to the party. Sometimes, especially perhaps in your first few years you will find your social life is cut to pieces by the unexpected cases that require preparation the night before.
So why do you want to do it? All the dull days without work, or sitting around waiting to be called on by the Basildon bench are made worthwhile by the addictive rush of adrenaline that accompanies a trial. It is there at the start, unpacking your bags for the first day of a week’s rape trial. You know, or you certainly believe, that your performance over the next few days will determine whether your innocent client is able to throw his arms around you and thank you from the bottom of his heart; or whether he will spend the next five years sitting in a segregation unit with psychotic robbers and internet paedophilia addicts for company, worrying about whether his tea has been pissed in by a drug dealer.
You will calm down a bit as the trial develops. Sometimes you will come out of court and your client will say “you destroyed that witness”. Try not to believe him, but it is nice to think he is telling the truth.
Very soon it will be time for your final speech. It is an extraordinary privilege. You can speak for as long or as short as you like. Nobody will interrupt you. You can say almost anything you like. If you can make the jury laugh, so much the better: most people cannot. The one consideration is that somehow you must find something to say that will persuade the jury to give your client the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes it will go well. Many jurors will nod at your points. One or two will even carefully note down your best points. They might even smile at the lighter passages. And they will listen with stern faces as you drive home your best points. Occasionally you may even find that you are persuading yourself.
At other times it will be a disaster. Your attempts at humour will be met by blank stares, or disapproving frowns. Your best points will fall flat. You will lose the thread of your argument and wander off into irrelevance. Instead of vivid memorable rhetoric you will come up with nothing but exhausted clichés. You will commit foot in mouth errors of the sort that would make George W. Bush blush. I once ruined a perfectly adequate closing speech for the defence, with – though I say it myself – a moving peroration: “That is why,” I concluded, close to tears, “there can be other verdict in this case but one of Guilty.” The jury did not take long to agree.
So when you are in court you can never relax, never assume that the stock judicial phrase “you have said everything that could possibly be said on behalf of Mr X” is true. Nor at least when you are working, if you want to keep your advocacy up to scratch, should you ever stop worrying.
At night you must stop worrying or you won’t sleep and you may go mad.
And eventually you will start to win cases. The thought that you have played an important part in keeping your innocent client out of gaol is, make no mistake about it, a reward worth having.