Undoubtedly one of the most hotly anticipated West End debuts this year (whether libel law is your thing or not), it’s hard to resist the appeal of a production promising to reveal an insight into the celebrity lifestyle at the heart of this case.

And reveal it did. Entering the theatre, theatregoers were faced with a giant football pitch which would form our arena for the evening. The traditional courtroom setup — a judicial bench, counsels’ desks, a witness stand — had been pared down and placed midfield in anticipation of the match to come.

Two pundits presented a quick overview of key background before kick-off — who had posted what, when, and crucially, what burden of proof Vardy would have to meet to succeed in the upcoming libel trial. They explained the ambitions of the production, primarily to transform, word for word, the real Vardy v Rooney trial transcripts into a series of “match highlights”.

The trial began with a blow of the judicial whistle. Given the press interest in the case at the time, counsel for both parties must have been hyper-aware that quotable lines from the case might well make their way into the newspapers. These soundbites made for the sort of witness handling that you typically only see in dramatic legal TV and are told never to expect in reality at bar school.

A standout phrase came after Rooney’s counsel confronted Vardy with an incriminating WhatsApp where Vardy appears to suggest that her agent should leak a story — “If it looks like a leak, and sounds like a leak, and you even use the word leak, it is more likely than not to be a leak”.

Some more salacious points arising in the litigation were referenced so frequently in scenes that they became more like cheery refrains than devastating and impactful blows. Reminder from Rooney’s counsel that Vardy’s PR agent had conveniently dropped her phone in the North Sea, likely containing crucial evidence, became almost pantomime, akin to an ‘It’s behind you (in Davy Jones’ Locker)!’.

Not all courtroom content makes for good entertainment, however. The examination of both Vardy and Rooney’s experts was summed up in one line in an ‘end of day’ highlight. This was a wise decision, allowing the audience to move with ease past complex aspects of WhatsApp programming on to more dramatic evidence detailing the aftermath of Rooney’s Twitter ‘reveal post’ and the Wagatha Christie memes found on Rooney’s phone (including a Scooby Doo themed image in which Rooney as Fred unmasks Vardy as the villain).

Given that this was a real case involving real parties, producers wisely chose not to belittle or trivialise matters beyond basic commentary on what was going on in the case, with the odd football reference thrown in.

A poignant moment arose when Vardy’s counsel read out some of the horrific abuse that she received in the aftermath of Rooney’s ‘reveal post’, with the audience audibly horrified by the degree of vitriol expressed. Indeed, Vardy herself has shared publicly the effect that this extended abuse had and continues to have on her mental health.

This moment sobered up the audience and forced attendees to remember that whilst it might be fun to lambast the foreign world of ‘WAGs’ and ‘paps’, of PR agents and tipping off journalists, not all aspects of this case can be approached so light-heartedly.

Next came the verdict, where the judge moved to the centre circle of the pitch and announced the final score. Reading extracts from the judgment, which was published online in July 2022, the final line “For the reasons that I have given, the claim is dismissed” was met with whoops from the audience.

However, whilst Rooney might have been the people’s champion, Vardy had the final word. After both parties squared up to each other wordlessly before walking off-stage, ending their conflict, Vardy remained in the spotlight, slowly sliding sunglasses onto her face before sauntering away.

Ultimately, this was a fun production that one could almost consider writing off as a CPD expense, given the amount of word-for-word advocacy spouted directly from the trial transcripts that it contained. It is notable that the producers gave a nod to Advocate, the bar’s pro bono charity, in cast list flyers handed out on the night — a sensible reminder that whilst some may be able to rack up millions in costs, legal advice is not always as accessible as it should be.

4/5 stars

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Early in 1921, Katharine Armstrong, wife of a country solicitor, Herbert, was found dead following an illness. Her doctor at the time gave the cause to be natural. But over a year later, her body was exhumed, traces of arsenic identified in her body. Herbert Armstrong was arrested, tried and hanged for poisoning her, the only solicitor in England to be so executed.

Stephen Bates’ gripping tale, The Poisonous Solicitor, reveals how Armstrong went from respectable lawyer, clerk in the magistrate’s court and church warden, to being at the centre of one of the most celebrated murder trials of the time, each day recounted in newspaper reports which made their way around the world, and ultimately became a convicted murderer, hanged at Gloucester Prison on 31 May 1922, a hundred years ago to the day.

Putting aside that there’s a solicitor at its heart, Bates’ account is a perfect book for lawyers because it combines a compelling re-enactment of the trial, with all the vital ingredients of a courtroom drama, and at the same time, as it is not at all clear that Armstrong did, indeed, poison his wife, the story feels like you are reading your own whodunnit.

Described by one American newspaper as a “the greatest poison drama of the century”, it was, of all things, a conveyancing transaction that was the beginning of Armstrong’s downfall. In 1921, he had been acting for local landowners in a land dispute. A rival solicitor, Oswald Martin, acted for the opposing tenant farmers.

The issue had become protracted, and (as conveyancers will readily relate to) feelings were running very high. Armstrong and Martin had a meeting over a tea which included scones (remember: this was a hundred years ago!), one of which Armstrong was said to have proffered Martin. Later that day, the rival solicitor then became very ill, and his family accused Armstrong of attempting to poison Oswald Martin with the scone. This accusation set in motion a chain of events that led to Armstrong’s wife’s body being dug up and examined by the most eminent pathologist of his day, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, and Armstrong’s eventual arrest.

The first half of the book is a slow-burn towards Armstrong’s committal hearing, the second half, the grisly trial itself. Bates scatters seeds of doubt of Armstrong’s guilt over the course of the narrative and his account of the two-week trial portrays a “seriously flawed” process which lets those doubts flower.

Plus the court case has everything for the lawyer-reader: there is the evidence, such as the arsenic found in Armstrong’s jacket pocket which he says he was using as weedkiller for the dandelions in his garden, the testimony of servants such as the housekeeper and the nurse that cared for Katharine up to her death. We hear from the expert witnesses: the pathologist, a toxicologist, and so on. There are suspicions that one of the defence witnesses is “turned” as she changes her story between committal proceedings and the full trial.

There is a prosecuting barrister, Sir Ernest Pollock, who was also Attorney-General. This turns out to be crucial later on when there are attempts to get the murder conviction appealed to the Law Lords, (the final appeal court at the time). The person whose job it was to decide whether an appeal could go ahead was, in fact, the Attorney-General himself. There is an exasperated, hard-working defence barrister, Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, whose special mode of questioning a witness was known in legal circles as “doing a Curtis”. Pivotal in the trial is the presiding Judge Darling. Bates labels him: “the fourth lawyer on the prosecution side” because his repeated interventions always favoured the prosecution’s case.

The detail all through this book is remarkable and sometimes funny. For instance, Armstrong got a third from Cambridge and trained to become a solicitor at the firm Alsop, Stevens and Crooks. The law firm he went on to establish in Hay is still there, as is Armstrong’s swivel chair, desk and pipe. Armstrong’s own solicitor, Tom Matthews, stood by his client right to the end (no wonder then that his costs and disbursements amounted to the equivalent of £200,000. There was no such thing as legal aid) and his firm is still in Hereford to this day.

Of course, we know with terrible finality where this story ends: with the ‘Black Cap’ and the noose around Armstrong’s neck. Bates can even report the thoughts and observations of the executioner, John Ellis, who mentions the solicitor’s final days in his published memoirs, Diary of a Hangman. The Poisonous Solicitor has all the raw material the reader needs to make up their own mind as to Armstrong’s guilt; as long as they read right to the end where Bates leaves us with a fascinating twist in this Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery.

Author, Stephen Bates, is doing an online Q&A with the National Archives, where some of the documents relating to Armstrong trial are kept, on 8 June.

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For some, the UK legal system consists of courts made up of an “unelected panel of out-of-touch judges” (the Daily Mail). In this world, Britons are engaged in a war which pits “the judges versus the people” (the Daily Telegraph).

Judges have overreached themselves, the argument goes, they have become too political; they use judicial review and human rights cases as weapons to thwart government policy and the democratic will. Critics cite a never-ending stream of court decisions covering issues such as whether or not prisoners should get the vote, over the deportation of immigrants or the so-called bedroom tax, which have ended with government “defeat”.

This battle was most graphically articulated in the wake of the High Court decision in November 2016 that Brexit could not be triggered without the UK parliament passing a law to enable the Prime Minister to do so. The next day the three High Court justices appeared on the front page of the Daily Mail under the infamous headline: “Enemies of the People” (referencing the label given to so-called traitors to the Communist regime by Stalin during his purges) for “frustrating the verdict of the British public”.

Joshua Rozenberg, the Captain America of legal commentators, has decided to tackle this debate head on in his new book, adopting the infamous Daily Mail headline. From its sub-title, How Judges Shape Society, I was not sure which way Rozenberg was going to argue this. In his preface, he explains that his book will examine: “How judges make law”, and says: “it can’t be denied that the judiciary has the power to shape society.” If that is the case, surely that supports an argument that judges have gone too far and become too political?

Rozenberg demonstrates why this is not so. He does this not by detached argument but by taking the reader through a number of key cases that show how judges do change the laws and do shape our society but do this, on the whole, pretty well and divorced from party politics. When you actually get into the detail of the underlying laws and principles that, like the unseen currents of a river, direct the judges to their decisions, it does not give a picture of a league of men and a few women with a political axe to grind.

Rozenberg, who is the master of the art of making cases comprehensible, takes us through a range of landmark legal decisions such as on assisted suicide, privacy law and a Legal Cheek favourite, the ‘gay cake’ case, to make his point. Here’s just one example, a case concerning marital rape: up until 1990, the courts had found (since the restoration) that a husband could not be convicted of raping his wife. The matter came to the Court of Appeal in 1989 and they decided: “the idea that a wife by marriage consents in advance to her husband having sexual intercourse with her… is no longer acceptable.” It found the law as it was had become “anachronistic and offensive”. That case changed the law so that the marriage relationship is now irrelevant to the question of whether there has been a rape. The husband was found guilty.

The book explores how our constitutional system balances judicial power with the other two branches, the executive and the legislature: compare the US, where the Supreme Court can render a law unconstitutional which means that the decision can only be reversed by changing the constitution. Parliament under the English system has the last word because it can enact correcting legislation in the light of a court decision.

Following the unpopular Article 50 decision, the government introduced an act of parliament enabling the PM to trigger Brexit. It was a democratically-elected government that brought in the Human Rights Act. If governments don’t like the fact that the Act has led to a lot of policy challenges, then “parliament is to blame”; the government could change the law (though it is worth conceding that this would not be quite such a simple thing to do due to the European Convention on Human Rights).

The book has a lucid introductory section that helps the reader to navigate the legal and constitutional webs that follow. Rozenberg also wants us to really think about the legal dilemmas that cases often raise and put ourselves in the shoes (brogues?) of the judges. So along the way he poses the questions: “What would you do? How would you decide?” Sadly, most of the time, I felt myself wholly unable to draw any sort of conclusion as to how I should grapple with freedom of expression versus freedom of religion or deciding what is in the best interests of a child with an irreversible condition. Perhaps that was the point of the exercise: to humble me in the face of these quandaries.

There’s sharp commentary here too: Rozenberg is critical of the way that the ‘Enemies of the People’ episode was handled by Liz Truss, then Lord Chancellor: “something of a political lightweight”; he is frank about the way the media covers these cases: he highlights how the Daily Mail made a point of using pictures of judges in “full-bottomed wigs that are worn only on ceremonial occasions”; and, in passing, mentions that the Daily Telegraph “used to be regarded as a serious newspaper”. (Rozenberg, in fact, resigned from his legal editorship of that particular once-serious newspaper because it had sensationalised a story he had written about the Al-Skeini Iraq War cases.)

There is an intriguing thread running through the book where Rozenberg explicitly refutes various arguments raised by former Supreme Court justice, Lord Sumption (the one with the ties), who has been the most recent, vocal and successful proponent of the ‘judicial overreach’ position, which he did in the BBC Reith lectures of 2019. Thankfully, Rozenberg gives little airtime to beliefs that what the UK needs is a US system of elected judges, because not even Lord Sumption has argued for that.

Enemies of the People? is a timely and illuminating book that will give its readers an appreciation of why judges are not the enemies of the people, and they may be “the only friends we have”.

Joshua Rozenberg is a British legal commentator and journalist. His new book, Enemies of the People?, is out now.

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One of the themes in Professor Richard Susskind’s latest book, Online Courts and the Future of Justice, is that we should transform our court system because it will improve access to justice, and that we should do so even if such transformation will be far from perfect.

Susskind argues for a radical rethink of court systems around the world because it could “help remove all manner of manifest injustices”. But his approach is pragmatic rather than ‘tech-topian’: online courts are a good idea because they are, in practical terms, useful, not because they will, by their very nature, solve the world’s problems. It is a refreshingly realistic viewpoint.

It is also the case that the change Susskind predicates is already happening: that even by the time you have finished reading the book, another example of online dispute resolution will have been launched, perhaps in Singapore, Australia or British Columbia. Even here in decrepit England, the HMCTS Digital Transformation Project is a thing. So in a way, this book, from the profession’s resident futurologist, becomes not so much an argument for change but a neat explainer for change that is already happening.

The vision that Susskind has is that court systems could be — and should be — radically, and digitally, transformed in order to save justice from the costly, complex and outdated service it is now. Starting from the premise that a court doesn’t have to be a physical space, first he suggests that we actually extend the current system by taking it ‘upstream’ so that someone with a problem or issue will enter an online court service right at the outset to work out whether or not they have a legitimate claim and whether that claim has any merit. To be clear, this process would not be fulfilled by a lawyer or even a case officer but would be done using digital pathways. This extended court: “assists users in turning an unstructured grievance into a recognisable, justiciable problem.”

Second, the court system would then contain that potential claim or dispute by offering either case officers or, over time, technology to facilitate its resolution (the success of eBay is cited here: its dispute resolution system resolves 60 million disagreements each year “without third party intervention”). This is not an alternative path but an embedded step in the court system.

Third and finally, if the dispute is not resolved, then it will need a judge. Under Susskind’s vision, this judge does not need to be in a courtroom, the parties don’t need to be present, and there doesn’t need to be a single hearing. This is how we arrive at online judging, where the hearing is “continuous” over a period of time, though we do, for now, still use a human judge.

Susskind makes it clear that he is focusing primarily on civil disputes not criminal justice, and on the more common low value disputes as opposed to complex, multi-party, multi-jurisdictional commercial cases. But if his vision is limited in one sense, it is also broad in another: he envisages that a blueprint online court system could be adopted globally in other jurisdictions where access to justice is also a significant challenge.

Online Courts, Susskind’s tenth book, which follows on from other prediction-filled publications such as The Future of Law and The End of Lawyers, is, of course, very readable. He interrogates the many issues that online justice raises such as how to ensure there is a distinction between code and law, the role and impact of artificial intelligence, and cites case studies from other countries, including China. He spends more than a quarter of the book pre-empting his critics by debunking the main objections to online courts (some of which, one suspects, are based on actual arguments he has had with individuals that he has worked with in his role as IT advisor to the judiciary).

Perhaps the concept of online courts would be more welcome than it is among the legal community if our current system was not so dire. It is hard to conceptualise a sparkling digital future when you are sitting in a courtroom with a leaking roof and WiFi that doesn’t work. Susskind makes comparisons between a well-funded digital justice system of the future (the HMCTS digital project has £1 billion at its disposal) with the decrepit courtrooms of the present: no wonder then that digital comes out on top. What if we compared what our current system would be like if it was properly invested in versus the online version of that? But Susskind, taking the pragmatic view, would argue that this is a utopian comparison because that is not a real choice anymore.

More than that, Susskind wants us to use this opportunity, this time of flux, to do something very different and potentially radical (always remembering that it doesn’t have to be perfect), that the legal profession and law schools “remain fundamentally 19th and 20th century institutions” which are “out of place and inadequate” in our new century.

There is a warning here too: if lawyers don’t read his book and get interested in, and get involved in, digital justice then they’ll miss that opportunity and they’ll be left behind.

Professor Richard Susskind OBE is the author of ten books about the future. His latest, Online Courts and the Future of Justice, is now available. He wrote his doctorate on AI and law at Oxford University in the mid-80s.

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Admin is “the office work of life” which is “a drain on our mental energy”, according to the latest self-help book to hit our shelves this year. And this one is written by a US law professor.

In her book, The Art of Life Admin: How to Do Less, Do It Better, and Live More, Elizabeth Emens, who is a professor of law at Columbia University in New York (where Amal Clooney can also be spotted in the lecture hall), writes of admin: “It is the kind of work that you can spend a whole day doing and then wonder, where did my day go?”

Lawyers are particularly well-versed in admin. A legal trends report by a software company analysed how lawyers spent their typical day and discovered that they were spending a whopping 48% of their time on admin (and thus not working on a billable matter, and not contributing to chargeable hours and targets).

Emens is actually talking about non-work admin — all those endless tasks created by the simple fact of being alive: from sorting out phone upgrades to sourcing cheap flights, from booking pilates classes to choosing energy supplier, from births to birthdays, to weddings and funerals.

Emens categorises us into four types when it comes to admin: you’re either a “super doer”, “reluctant doer”, “admin avoider” or, last but not least, an “admin denier”. Whatever your type, however, the law prof warns us that admin is bad because it “steals focus” from the bigger picture, takes our eyes off the things that really matter. There is also an “opportunity cost” in admin: for every moment we spend on admin is a moment lost doing something else. It can even “interrupt our relationships”.

The book does, of course, have suggestions and plans for how we might overcome our admin-befuddled lives inspired by real people with their own tested examples. You can get tips on how to deal with imminent stuff: “The Urgent List” is “for immediate use when you are in an admin onslaught”, as well as plan for more systemic changes. Follow “The hacks list: For when you are ready to make a system improvement.” Perhaps the oddest idea is having a sort of admin party where you go round to each other’s houses to do admin together.

Emens is not the first lawyer to branch out into social science (in the loosest sense of the word) and self-help. There is Jonathan Fields, a one-time (US) private equity lawyer at Debevoise & Plimpton who gave up his lucrative job to be a personal trainer, and so chose a subject that he must have experienced first hand: uncertainty. This became a book subtitled: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance. He has gone on to launch and run the Good Life Project in New York.

Also from the US is Susan Cain, an ex-corporate lawyer who once represented Goldman Sachs and General Electric, and who brought us the book, Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking, and how: “The loudest people have taken over even if they have nothing to say.” Part of Cain’s book was spent analysing how bad the modern workplace is for introverts, with a lot to say on the world’s conversion from private office to open plan.

Emens’ analysis of admin gives all that paperwork we do a bit of airtime: but perhaps we’ve got so much admin to do that we’ll never get round to ordering it.

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Above all, RBG reinforces the saying, ‘respect your elders’. The documentary film plays like a greatest hits to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the US Supreme Court justice who’s spent her legal career strongly advocating for gender equality and women’s rights — leaving viewers in awe and admiration.

Using a collection of interviews, public appearances and archival material, directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West map out the context surrounding Ginsburg’s legal activism. For example, at Harvard Law School, Ginsburg recalls that she, and the other eight female students in her class, were asked by the dean why their place should not have been offered to a man instead.

Similarly, Ginsburg, who studied at both Harvard and Columbia Law School, struggled to find a US law firm willing to hire a woman. By illustrating her exposure to sex discrimination, her endeavours for equal citizenship are presented as a natural progression — with Ginsburg fully vested in propelling women forward in society.

What follows is a highlights reel of Ginsburg’s legal career, spanning her time as the general counsel for American Civil Liberties Union, her seat on the US Court of Appeals DC Circuit and finally as the second woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court.

Legally minded viewers may appreciate scenes where snippets of famous Ginsburg oral arguments are projected against an empty courtroom — presented one word at a time. A striking example is when Ginsburg quoted women’s suffragette Sarah Grimké before an all-male judiciary, stating:

“I ask no favour for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”

Where this film really succeeds, however, is in revealing an intimate insight into Ginsburg’s personal life. At the heart of this film is a love story, documenting her marriage to New York tax lawyer Martin Ginsburg, who passed away in 2010. Viewers learn of their unwavering devotion to one another. For instance, when they were both at Harvard, Ginsburg cared for their child and her husband, who was diagnosed with testicular cancer, all the while taking class notes for both of them and typing her husband’s dictated assignments.

Alongside being a Supreme Court justice, Ginsburg is presented as a pop-cultural phenomenon — a role the 85-year-old fully embraces. It quickly becomes stark that ‘The Notorious RBG’, as she is often called, serves as a key inspiration for, among others, young aspiring female lawyers. Commenting on her feelings towards the nickname and her comparison to rapper legend ‘The Notorious BIG’, she cheekily responds: “Why would I feel uncomfortable? We have a lot in common.”

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It is only fair to disclose at the outset that I would happily pay money to watch Emma Thompson do the weekly shop. I should also say that Ian McEwan — who wrote the screenplay for this adaptation of his 2014 novel, The Children Act — is a writer whose sentences I find so perfect, I catch myself re-reading them many times over. Throw in Stanley Tucci, the brilliant new talent of Fionn Whitehead, and Ben Chaplain in his legal hat-trick (after BBC’s Apple Tree Yard and Nina Raine’s stage play, Consent) and my expectations were pretty high.

The Children Act does not disappoint. The protagonist — Fiona Maye — is a High Court judge in the Family Division who we meet at the beginning of a personal and professional crisis. She is in a sexless marriage with a man who loves her deeply, but from whom she has become disconnected. It is her dedication to the law that gets the blame. An emergency case comes before her. A hospital want to administer a blood transfusion to Adam — a 17-year-old, months away from legal autonomy — against his and his parent’s wishes. They, like he, are Jehovah’s Witnesses. His treating oncologist is clear: without a transfusion not only is he likely to die, but it will be a horrible, painful death. However we are also told that such a procedure would not only mean the damnation of his soul, but the rejection of Adam from his church, his family, his stability and his life.

Such cases are our judge’s bread and butter. She is required daily to focus her energies on a conveyer belt of cases so difficult that they fill newspaper headlines with the anguish of those involved. Her role, of course, is to preside over this raw emotion with cool calmness, and to attempt to apply the black and white of the law to the shades of grey before her. And that, in essence, is one of the many themes which run throughout this film. The law requires detached and cool objectivity, but it also requires humanity. When we walk into court we do so as an instrument of the system and, if we are lawyers, of our client. But underneath the costume we are, of course, human, fallible and able to be touched. The difficult art is finding this balance.

There is a scene in which Fiona Maye’s friend and colleague (he appears before her the following day on behalf of the hospital) cries defeat. He is worn out by the hopelessness of it all. The scene comes after a conversation with her husband during which Judge Maye begins to wonder whether her job may have cost her her marriage, not just because she is too busy, but because she has become emotionally detached. Listening to her friend’s outburst, we see Thompson mutely register her reaction on the edges of her face, then we see her push it aside and turn away, closing the conversation down. She cannot allow the edifice to crumble. To do so would mean she would be unable to do her job. But the next day she meets Adam and — with her personal world at sea and looking for answers as to why — she allows him in; she allows herself to be changed by him, almost as much as her eventual decision changes him.

I read McEwan’s novel when it was first published in the twilight hours of night-time new-born feeds. I was troubled by some of the plot twists, which it seems have also troubled reviewers of this film. For me, however, the screen has flattened some of these problems out. The kiss in the rain had seemed odd, as though this writer — who so often requires an undertone of sexual darkness in his work — just couldn’t help himself. Now, though, in the hands of Thompson and Whitehead, I saw another version. Through saving his life, Adam feels an intimacy with the judge that he struggles to identify. He is trying to find a way to connect to her; to make her see how she has liberated him. He is also simultaneously trying to understand why, seeing his parents tears of joy when his transfusion took place which proved their love for him, they were prepared to let him die for their church. He says to her at one point, “I am not the person I was”. She has changed him. And that is why, as a lawyer, the themes of this film are so interesting. We sail into people’s lives at crisis point, perform our professional duty, and then sail off and onto the next. Often we do not find out what happens afterwards. Our client’s lives are changed forever. But sometimes, if we let them in, so are ours.

This idea is made all the more interesting by knowing some of the detail as to how McEwan came to write the book. For those who think the idea that Judge Maye would dash off to Adam’s hospital bedside before making her decision was ridiculous, they should know that the retired court of appeal judge, Alan Ward — a friend of McEwan’s — did exactly this. In 1993, Sir Alan visited a teenage boy in the middle of a case who was, like the film’s Adam, diagnosed with aggressive leukaemia but was refusing a transfusion because his parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses (Re E (A minor) (Wardship: Medical Treatment) [1993]). Sir Alan spoke to the boy of his life, his love of football; to get, one supposes, a sense of the person whose life he was about to change — before ruling that the transfusion should take place. When the boy was well again, Sir Alan arranged for him to meet some star players of his favourite football team and watch a match from the director’s box. He told the Telegraph in a recent interview, “The light of life shone in his eyes”. Twenty years later, as he was serving as a court of appeal judge, the news reached Sir Alan that the boy, now in adulthood, had relapsed. He had refused a further transfusion. It cost him his life. It was apparently the depth with which Sir Alan felt this death that inspired McEwan to write his book.

I confess I’m not one of those barristers who avoids legal dramas for fear that the wrong book, gown or — god forbid — a gavel finds its way erroneously onto set. I love them. And in this film, I loved watching a world with which I am so familiar through the fresh prism of a stranger’s eye. I loved the quiet and careful cameos by those unseen people who make our legal system work — the hugely professional but deeply caring judge’s clerk, the smoking porter moved at hearing the judge sing. I loved being reminded how beautiful the Inns of Court are, and how strange the costumes, language and rituals seem to those who do not practise them daily. I don’t think it’s smugness on my part that I know this world so well. I think, in fact, that it reminds me how lucky I am to know it at all. For although Thompson is the star of this show, the legal system is her understudy. It is a reminder to all that underneath the costumes are people who care about those whose lives they impact. In a time when public sympathy and understanding has to be won in order to save the further destruction of legal aid, this is no bad thing.

Sarah Langford is a criminal and family law barrister and writer. Her new book, In Your Defence: Stories of Life and Law, is available to purchase now.

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Moments before being whisked away by policemen for a murder he swears he didn’t commit, Leonard Vole booms: “This is England — you don’t get convicted for things you haven’t done.”

Witness for the Prosecution, a gripping whodunnit by Agatha Christie, has the pursuit of justice at its heart. Based on her short story from 1925, the play is currently being performed in the novel surroundings of the Council Chamber of London’s iconic County Hall. It’s very, very grand.

Main character Leonard has been arrested and charged with murdering Emily French, a woman twice his age he befriended by accident. The victim, 56, was found dead in her home which she shared with her housekeeper and her eight cats, killed by a blow to the head.

The evidence against him “couldn’t be more unfortunate”, his barrister admits: the murder takes place just days after the dead woman altered her will to leave Leonard her sizeable fortune. Yet, Leonard is charming, a chirpy young car enthusiast who has fallen on hard times and who you can’t help but side with. Perhaps his defence barrister’s assistant, Greta, puts it more succinctly: “He’s far too nice, and he’s such a dish.”

Agatha Christie’s trial-based crime thriller, while entertaining us with piercing cross-examinations and lawyers going head-to-head, gives us a glimpse into the world of miscarriages of justice. Any law student with a case summary of the Guildford Four or Birmingham Six at their fingertips will appreciate this. Netflix series such as Making a Murderer and The Confession Tapes have seen a wider audience cast doubt on the criminal justice system’s truth-seeking clout.

Christie is definitely having a moment right now with a number of film and TV adaptations, including last year a US version of Murder on the Orient Express starring top-name actors like Judi Dench and Johnny Depp. The Witness for the Prosecution production is without bells and whistles: throughout the two-and-a-half hours (with a 20-minute interval) the actors remain in the same clothes. Locations, of which there are three, are denoted by actors moving furniture on and off the stage.

But what Witness for the Prosecution lacks in gaudy theatrics it makes up for in rich courtroom drama. The shadowy-faced judge’s piercing eyes; the audible gasps from the audience in (surprisingly big and comfy) seats as the play reached its climax; the chatter in the interval toilet queue about whether Leonard did it or not — moments like these make criminal law seem so glamorous, really.

We know it’s not. The grandiose County Hall on the Thames, once the headquarters of the capital’s own government, looks nothing like a more typical, haggard crown court building of today.

Wilfred, Leonard’s barrister, has a number of leisurely chats with his client, even before he’s arrested; they are a far cry from the dropped-on-your-desk-the-night-before-trial cases criminal barristers too often complain about. I wonder what Wilfred, suited and booted and sharing a stiff drink with the instructing solicitor, John, in his cleanly-furnished office, would make of today’s courts: as a result of legal aid cuts protests, murder suspects are appearing without barristers because 100 chambers are refusing new work.

So: don’t use Witness for the Prosecution as ammunition for a career in law. Take it for the fictitious delight it is, and you’re in for a treat.

The post Review: Classic courtroom drama played out on stage – it will make you want to become a criminal lawyer appeared first on Legal Cheek.

Judging by its inoffensive title and front cover, you may not think that Successful Solicitor: Get Ahead of the Game as a Junior Corporate Lawyer is full of material that was censored by the author’s firm. And yet, it is.

Katherine Cousins, a City solicitor, had in 2013 written a fashion blog for the then-named Berwin Leighton Paisner‘s intranet during her time as a trainee. This came about, she tells us, “following a chat I’d had with a member of the graduate recruitment team that vac schemers were turning up dressed far too casually for a City law firm”.

However, she saw her efforts pulled by the firm (which has now merged and is called Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner) over concerns it was inappropriate — a fact that caught the press’s attention. Cousins continues:

“After the firm/press reaction, one of my very good friends was trying to make me feel better and said something like: ‘People write funny, controversial things every day that don’t make the national press, it was really well written. You should write more.’ I put it to one side to focus on being the least problematic trainee of all time for the rest of my TC, but it stuck with me.”

Now, five years later, Cousins’ once-censored fashion advice lives on in the pages of her 115-page debut title, which she wrote over the course of two years on her morning commutes and on weekends. It includes “all the tips, tricks, hacks and lessons I’ve learned”. But, given its backstory, it’s the fashion and beauty know-how we couldn’t help but skip to.

“Like it or not,” she says, “your clothes make an impression and you don’t want that impression to be ‘Does he understand how to use an iron?’ or ‘Nice to know she likes red bras’.”

Her blunt advice for men, then, is to punt for a “dark blue, charcoal or grey” suit — “black is only for funeral attendees and bouncers” — and smart shoes that are “not too pointy” nor worn without socks. As for shirts, “avoid checks and stripes” and remember: “Skinny ties are for Hoxton bars, not the office.”

To female lawyers, Cousins advises going for as expensive a suit as you can. Marks & Spencer and Whistles are both namechecked. But a word of warning from Cousins about ASOS and Topshop: “Outside a fashion magazine, a jungle print short suit is not office appropriate.”

Other titbits of advice for women include investing in non-VPL knickers and non-patterned hosiery. If you colour your hair be aware “roots look scruffy and unprofessional”. Oh, and: “Do not wear false eyelashes to work. You’re not a nightclub dancer.”

When you’ve got your necessarily totally-devoid-of-all-personality look down, readers can turn over the page to find competition lawyer Cousins’ advice on “how to avoid ‘associate’s belly'” caused by a toxic mix of “high billables, little sleep and canteen food for every meal”. You can combat weight gain by drinking one of your meals, moving around the office even if only to get a coffee and squeezing in workouts where you can, Cousins says.

Though advising readers who are worried about weight gain to work out is hardly revolutionary, following all the tips included in Cousins’ book, published by Buggle Publishing, at times seems quite unachievable. Being proactive when seeking work, knocking on doors, not saying no, “skipping lunch, cancelling drinks or working till midnight” — it sounds like a life many would not want to lead.

But Cousins — who studied international relations and social anthropology at St Andrews — in the first few pages of her book stresses you don’t have to be perfect to be a successful corporate lawyer. She says:

“I have cried in the toilets on multiple occasions… I’ve left my phone off for days when on holiday and I’ve read the FT for two hours and listed it as ‘business development research’ on my timesheets. I’ve also worked 80-hour weeks, finished urgent tasks from the Eurostar/my hotel room/the start line of a marathon.”

Despite this, Cousins has had a glittering career as a junior lawyer thus far. She ended up at Baker McKenzie in Brussels, Belgium, on qualification and is now a solicitor at Constantine Cannon — “I’m human. And I’m an excellent lawyer,” she says.

And sometimes even excellent lawyers have “gotten far too drunk at graduate recruitment events”. Cousins explains:

“Being a trainee can sometimes feel like being on a two-year freshers week. You are expected to participate in graduate recruitment events and these will almost certainly involve drinking large quantities of dreadful, cheap wine without any dinner.”

Making a drunken fool out of yourself and having the hangover from hell the next day, thankfully, isn’t inevitable.

Eating something filling and fatty before an event (Cousins says oily avocado on toast is “a perfect pre-gaming snack”) and going for “clean alcohols” like vodka and gin are just two of her recommendations.

“Do remember to drink some water between rounds,” she says. City lawyers are far from perfect, but: “calling in sick with a hangover [the next day] is absolutely and completely unacceptable.”

The post ‘Skinny ties are for Hoxton bars’: We review the former BLP trainee’s fashion advice so controversial the firm banned it appeared first on Legal Cheek.

When I was at school, I wanted to become a criminal lawyer. Having read The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken, I’m thrilled I didn’t.

In between going viral on Twitter and holding down a criminal law practice, The Secret Barrister (TSB) decided to write a book “to shine a light on the serious problems in the criminal justice system which we in practice see every day”. ‘Serious problems’ here is an understatement — it’s difficult to disagree with TSB’s titular contention that the law is “broken” even before his first chapter, ‘Welcome to the Criminal Courtroom’, is over. He summarises:

“[Working in criminal law] is unpredictable, irrational, adrenaline-infused mayhem every second of every day, where the only certainty is uncertainty. Hearings and trials overrun, find themselves suddenly adjourned or are listed immediately without warning, making it impossible to say with confidence what you will be doing or where you will be in four hours’ time. Your bones ache, your shoe leather disintegrates bi-monthly and your shoulder creaks from dragging your suitcase laden with papers, books, wig and gown between courts and cities.”

What follows are more than 300 pages delving deeper into the key areas in which the system is broken (i.e. all of them). Expect a slow start: the text begins with the less juicy, but still manic, magistrates’ courts (“the accident and emergency department of criminal justice”). Later, we move onto topics including the failing prison system (“an expensive way of making bad people worse”) and the “indescribably horrid” realities of criminal cases collapsing.

Someone who has traced criminal justice’s decline into cesspitdom may be left thinking ‘yes, I knew this already’ (even if ‘this’ is told in a punchier, sassier way than the language of journals and news reports). But, what steers Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken into ‘must-read for anyone thinking of joining the profession’ territory is the first part of its title: the stories.

About a third of the way into the text, we meet Amy Jackson (all names pseudonyms), a young woman domestically abused for years by ex-prisoner Rob McCulloch. Aged 22 when Rob “really lost his shit”, Amy was dragged by her hair outside of the couple’s house and repeatedly punched, suffering severe facial injuries.

It could have been an open-and-shut case, yet missing papers led to multiple adjournments and, eventually, all charges being dismissed. “I don’t know where the fault truly lay,” a blindsided TSB comments, “I just know that something, somewhere, went very, very wrong.”

We’re also introduced to Darius, a client with “crippling” learning difficulties, born to a big-drinker mum and a heroin addict dad.

Charged with robbery after grabbing a fiver from him dad’s wallet, Darius found himself lingering in the cells for two months “in conditions of the utmost inhumanity”, as no one had applied for bail for him. “When I got back to chambers I kicked a wastepaper bin across my room in boiling, impotent rage,” TSB reveals. The case was the first “to reduce me to tears”.

The human cost of the creaking system laid bare, one asks: why the hell would anyone want to work like this? A melting pot of “miserly” pupil pay, prohibitively expensive bar training courses and a job that sounds more frustrating than stubbing your toe — no wonder the profession is “deterring the brightest graduates”.

To this, TSB has a very worthy answer.

Criminal law practice, he says, is “irresistibly special”. There’s a persistence in viewing the criminal justice system as at an arm’s length away (“it’s just the underclasses who are affected”), which perhaps underpins the nonchalance towards how “close to breaking point” it is. But, anyone accused of a criminal offence, or witnesses one, or is a victim of one, has a stake in the system functioning property. “And anyone who values liberty” too. So, though working for less than £3 per hour for some cases isn’t for everyone, “what I do on a day-to-day basis [is] not just a privilege but a civic responsibility”.

This lust for justice does, indeed, underpin many barristers’ career choice. But, alongside “official stock answers”, let’s not forget “the cry for attention” and “the desperate need to be centre stage in the climatic scenes of people’s lives”, too.

This window into TSB’s psyche is pretty much all you can expect to garner from this book — which will be released this week — as to its author’s identity. We think he’s a male based somewhere South-West, but are told early on that details about the stories shared have been changed to protect the identity of the parties (and the author, we’re sure).

The anonymity may be frustrating for TSB’s fans, yet spare a thought for those closest to him. On the “gruelling” writing process, he tells us: “It requires an awful lot of patience from family and friends, not least as almost all of them have no idea what I’m doing.”

The post The Secret Barrister’s debut book is the perfect deterrent for any aspiring criminal lawyer appeared first on Legal Cheek.

Baroness Helena Kennedy, a silk at Doughty Street Chambers, is not someone I’ve ever claimed to have anything in common with. But now, having read in her foreword to Justice for Laughing Boy that she “wept when [she] read this powerful book”, I can say that I do.

The story of a young man, Connor Sparrowhawk, found dead while under the care of an NHS trust, this 2018 title is beyond your typical read-by-the-beach weepy. For starters, it’s true. And, particularly poignantly, it’s written by Sparrowhawk’s mother, Sara Ryan, who is an academic at the University of Oxford.

Justice for Laughing Boy is many things. Particularly in the first half of the book, much reads like an extended eulogy to Sparrowhawk — “a strong defender of human rights” whose passion for buses, N-Dubz, The Inbetweeners and mermaids demonstrates his quirky loveableness.

But, sadly, Justice for Laughing Boy is also a public record of Ryan’s herculean battle against the authorities following her son’s autism diagnosis.

Banned from a local primary school and faced with paediatricians’ “relentless focus on deficit”, as Sparrowhawk approached adulthood he became “uncharacteristically unhappy and anxious”, even turning violent on occasion.

Ryan tried desperately to seek effective support for her son, but grew increasingly frustrated at learning-disabled persons’ place “very much near the bottom of, or at the bottom of, the support pile”. She was faced, recurrently, with “mother-blame” as a response to her concerns; calls to crisis lines, GPs and more saw Ryan “almost gnawing on the phone in despair”. She began documenting her struggles on her blog, My Daft Life, where she was met with similar stories from the parents of other learning-disabled children.

Pondering a question posed on my blog this week: 'Why didn't you just take him home?' The blame stain is a persistent one. #JusticeforLB

— Sara (@sarasiobhan) January 21, 2018

In spring 2013, Sparrowhawk was moved to a short-term assessment and treatment unit run by Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust, where he would be observed and assessed over a few weeks “to work out why he was so distressed and unpredictable”. While there, Sparrowhawk lunged at a support worker, was pinned face down to the floor by four staff, and sectioned under the Mental Health Act. More than 100 days later, in July 2013, Sparrowhawk suffered an epileptic seizure while taking a bath. He had been born in a bath and had died, aged 18, in a bath, too.

Ryan was staggered by the level of negligence demonstrated by the trust, not least because her son, a diagnosed epileptic, was left unsupervised and locked in a room while bathing. It even came to the fore that a 57-year-old man had previously died in the same bath as Sparrowhawk and in the presence of some of the same staff members — and that a nurse on shift while Sparrowhawk was in the bath had being doing an online shop. “A death by indifference,” Ryan says.

Since Sparrowhawk’s death, Ryan, her family and supporters have spent years fighting their #JusticeForLB campaign, which has won Liberty’s ‘Close to Home’ award. Utilising the law effectively is perhaps one of the most vital components to Ryan and co’s mission. Yet, as Kennedy says in her foreword, Justice for Laughing Boy is a story that “lays bare the deep inequities within our legal system”.

This is perhaps most striking at the inquest into Sparrowhawk’s death. Facing seven separate legal teams on the other side, Ryan rubbishes the then Minister for Justice and Civil Liberties’ claim that inquests “are specifically designed so people without legal knowledge can easily participate” as “utter bollocks”. She continues:

“There were no wigs and gowns… but the context, the setting, the process and the enormity of the whole thing was overwhelming.”

Fortunately, and vitally, Sparrowhawk “had the very best fighting in his corner”, in the form of: Bindmans’ Charlotte Haworth Hird, Brick Court Chambers‘ Paul Bowen QC, Doughty Street’s Caoilfhionn Gallagher (now QC) and her new pupil, Keina Yoshida. (The Sparrowhawk inquest took part in the first two weeks of Yoshida’s pupillage, what an interesting case to start off with.)

Speaking to Legal Cheek, Bowen explains how this legal dream team was assembled:

“I’ve done a number of high-profile cases involving the rights of disabled people and I’d been following Sara’s blog and also on Twitter; it was through Twitter I found out Connor had died.”

Bowen, who has acted for right-to-die campaigners Debbie Purdy and Tony Nicklinson, continues:

“Given my legal background, I felt I’d be able to help so I reached out to Sara on Twitter, and Caoilfhionn did the same. It was Caoilfhionn who put the family onto INQUEST [a charity providing advice on state-related deaths], who then put them onto Bindmans. It wouldn’t have happened without Twitter.”

Ryan couldn’t speak more highly of her legal team, who “led the proceedings from start to finish with expertise and an apparently instinctive grasp of what battles were important to fight and what to leave”. Gallagher and Haworth Hird “demonstrated speed, skill and expertise in digging through tomes of case law to provide additional evidence”, while Ryan commends Bowen’s “polite, missile-like points”.

But, even with a stellar legal team, navigating the two-week jury inquest was far from easy. “From the moment Connor died, it felt like a well-oiled machine, involving the Southern Health in-house and external legal representatives, was cementing a wall of denials,” Ryan reflects. “In our two years of interactions with our legal team… they had always been brutally open about what a mountain climb we were facing in this process.”

Ryan continues to climb that mountain. Justice for Laughing Boy, which is soon to be made into a film, ends:

“I hope this much-needed conversation has started. We all have a responsibility to drag the UK out of a learning disability ‘care’ space that seems to remain aligned closer to the eugenic practices of the last century than a so-called advanced, civilised society.”

The post Oxford academic who lost her 18-year-old son while he was under NHS care shares tragic fight for justice appeared first on Legal Cheek.

A new play dramatically weaves two storylines together: the personal experiences of complex crime barrister Felicity Gerry QC, from her humble beginnings as “an Essex girl” to high-flying a international lawyer, and one of her many dramatic court cases involving a rape and murder.

The Robing Room is written as a monologue by playwright Ness Lyons — who is a former employment lawyer and currently a legal consultant — and features a hilarious account of Gerry’s interview at an Oxbridge college.

In it, she describes the two elderly male interviewers: “They sat me by a roaring fire and interrogated me about the legal principles involved in a hypothetical situation: me stealing my own umbrella. It’s a famous scenario but I didn’t know it at the time — I hadn’t had any legal training! They kept on at me, asking questions, until I lost my temper, sparking like the flames in the grate, and said: ‘You teach me the law and I’ll tell you the answer.'”

Needless to say, the play’s central character continues: “I didn’t get in.”

The play’s other story is both tragic and graphic: the true-story murder case of a woman who posted a ‘Lonely Hearts’ advertisement only to be raped and murdered by the man who answered the ad. Gerry acted for the prosecution in the case.

Lyons — who was commissioned by the First 100 Years project to write the ten-minute monologue — says that she wanted to “honour the victim in the case and her sad, tawdry death” as well as explore the “more human side of being a female barrister”.

#first100years and now @felicitygerry pic.twitter.com/BScVpJsjml

— First 100 years (@First100years) November 8, 2017

The play was recently performed at a First 100 Years event held at Simmons & Simmons in London. The First 100 Years project celebrates the 100 years since women could practise as lawyers.

Gerry, who practises at Carmelite Chambers in London and also teaches in Australia, tells Legal Cheek:

“Lyons has managed to put together my own personal experiences with what I do as a barrister. It combines my emotional story with the court’s more clinical story. Courts are forensic, they have to be; you are professional at all times and keep your emotions apart. But of course real life isn’t like that. I am not really like that. This play demonstrates that.”

After her Oxbridge debacle, Gerry went on to study law at Kingston Polytechnic (now a university) and then at the Inns of Court School of Law (as City Law School was then known).

She is keen to stress that Oxbridge “is changing”, and has been invited to speak as part of a programme at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford to encourage pupils from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds to apply there.

Gerry also believes the bar is an excellent place for anyone who wants to do things in their own way and isn’t conformist (and doesn’t have the ‘right’ background): “You can talk to anyone and be anyone at the bar. It is full of interesting people and they all bring something different. I worked out that I will never ‘fit in’ at the bar but I also worked out that you don’t have to. You can plough your own furrow.”

Lyons is looking to develop The Robing Room into a wider piece. She has also just completed another full-length play entitled Bed of Shame about a first-year law student who is desperate to fit in. She is exposed and shamed on social media at a time when the whole campus is talking about — or refusing to talk about — consent: “The play explores how far she’ll go to get retribution and poses the question ‘just what is justice anyway?'”

The post Two elderly men by a roaring fire: Top crime QC describes her Oxbridge interview in new play appeared first on Legal Cheek.

Walking up the stairs to Berwin Leighton Paisner’s London office, ready to watch a Brexit musical written by one of its EU law partners, I couldn’t help but think: “Why had no one thought of this before?”

The events of the past 18 months really have been the stuff of satire, so much so lawyer Chris Bryant admitted in a post-performance Q&A that writing the play had been “an extreme form of therapy” for him.

Having scanned coverage of ‘Brexit — The Musical’ at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, promo shots of a bumbling, bad blonde wig-wearing Boris Johnson led me to assume I was about to watch some tasteless slapstick.

Sure, there was caricature: a clueless Theresa May resorted to googling how to leave the EU, while a pathetic Michael Gove was bossed about by wife Sarah Vine. However, the show was taken up a level by its quantity of more subtle nods to the madness that is British politics. May’s cringey Mexican wave moment, Jeremy Corbyn’s awkward high-five with Emily Thornberry — the clever ‘blink and you’ll miss them’ references took the show from blatant Brexit bash to clever political satire.

Leaving the subtleties very much to one side, the highlight of any musical is of course its songs.

There are plenty of growers in the show’s tracklist so stick with them — my toe was tapping by the end of May’s “if I’m a bloody difficult woman, it’s only because I have to deal with bloody difficult men” solo. Besides, who wouldn’t want to see a dressing gown and bulldog slippers-donning Michael Gove singing “I don’t understand it — what do you mean we’ve won?” alongside a union flag underwear-clad BoJo?

Excited to see Brexit: The Musical tonight @BLPLaw ?? pic.twitter.com/WlNVnbPO4K

— Legal Cheek (@legalcheek) September 5, 2017

If that doesn’t interest you, later there’s a cross-legged Corbyn, wearing just one welly, craving the “organic wine” and “funny fags” of Glastonbury. I was particularly tickled by the waterproof festival-goers who entered the stage at this point, given that I’d been asked by BLP to decant my glass of Pimms into a plastic cup, so was feeling very festival-y myself.

At times, the jokes dragged. Watching a charismatic, yet unnervingly sexual, BoJo celebrate his accession to Foreign Secretary was hilarious for about 20 seconds, after 30 I was ready to move on. And the show won’t win any awards for its staging, either. Exposed speakers and lighting to one side, the darker hair poking out from under May’s grey wig was really bothering me.

But all this was almost entirely forgotten when the undeniable star of the show made her debut about half an hour into the hour and ten performance.

Bursting onto the stage chanting “look at my credentials,” a manically-smiling, orange blazer-wearing Andrea Leadsom entered with might in her desperate bid to knock May off her Conservative leadership race throne. Winning the Falklands War, pulling down the Berlin Wall — there’s little the virtually unknown politician hasn’t (claimed to have) done.

Aside from winning the trophy for the only person to tap dance in the show, she’s its only true Brexiter too.

Gove and Johnson admit early on that their Leave allegiances were merely a power play and that “leaving Europe will be a catastrophe”. Leadsom, by contrast, doesn’t think “you can ever trust those continentals”, having had her heart broken aged 17 by a gorgeous Italian named Alejandro. “He was shagging my best friend”, she raged, prompting roars of laughter from the audience.

An evening spent watching a recently resigned David Cameron rejoicing at no longer having to mix with “normal” people (i.e. “oiks”) who drive their own Mercedes and drink prosecco can only lead one to ask: What the hell is happening in British politics? Thankfully, Bryant and co have given audiences the opportunity to laugh, not just worry, about the answer to that question — for the evening at least.

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The post I watched ‘Brexit — The Musical’ at BLP’s office and it was actually really great appeared first on Legal Cheek.

A brand new documentary following the trial of man accused of snatching £26,000 from an elderly woman’s bank account will be airing on Channel 5 this month — and students with an interest in criminal law will love it.

The Accused: An Inside Job? comes just months after the TV channel broadcasted a documentary of a similar name (advert embedded below). The first programme, The Accused, followed the story of Kenzey, a defendant charged in January 2016 with allowing physical harm to her seven-week-old daughter. Her young baby suffered what 16 medical experts concluded was a deliberate assault, leaving her brain damaged and severely disabled.

Take an unprecedented look at the criminal justice system, from the crime, right up to verdict. #TheAccused, Monday at 9pm on @Channel5_TV. pic.twitter.com/Qg5BgQoQ6V

— Channel 5 (@channel5_tv) February 2, 2017

This was, in my opinion, the best law-themed show of 2017 so far. Not least a true reflection of the tough decisions faced by criminal juries, the format of the show and the access it gave viewers was unprecedented.

To me, Kenzey radiated guilt from close to the start. Her trial by Twitter seemed to reach the same conclusion:

I have no sympathy for that girl – her priorities are clearly wrong and personally I think she deserved to be found guilty #TheAccused

— Dawn Morrison (@X88Dgm) February 6, 2017

A lot of you saying 'kids having kids' … Being young doesn't make you a bad parent & it definitely doesn't make you an abuser #theaccused

— Lucie Rayner (@lucierayner) February 6, 2017

As did the jury. The 23-year-old defendant was sentenced to prison for three-and-a-half-years; her boyfriend, who committed the assault, got 18 years.

Though Channel 5’s latest offering lacks the solemnity of a child abuse case, it has the edge over its predecessor in its ‘keeping you guessing’ qualities. The new programme follows 32-year-old Łukasz — a Polish-born personal banker accused of lifting £26,000 from a 78-year-old whose bank account he was looking after. He was charged on two counts, one of fraud by abuse of position, and one of theft.

Like in The Accused, viewers follow the defendant in the months leading up to his trial, and the access is equally fantastic. Police interviews, footage of lawyers out on the road exploring the evidence, after-court reaction from the defendant and his legal team — there was little viewers didn’t see.

But did he do it? The evidence pointed to him, something his lawyers — GT Stewart partner Greg Stewart and 33 Bedford Row’s Ravinder Saimbhi — were keen to make clear to Łukasz pre-trial. However, the defendant protested his innocence throughout the show, alleging a conspiracy.

As a viewer, at times I was sold. Intelligent and charming, Łukasz is a man with two finance-related degrees and, probably rightly, he argued that he’d be “an idiot” to allow all lines of inquiry to lead so seamlessly to him. He added:

It feels like someone is trying to make you responsible for all this, when actually you’re not. There’s still time to investigate this and to find the right person to charge with all this, but nothing has been done. It just makes me feel like no one really bothers.

Whether you buy his defence or not, the devastating impact the charges had on Łukasz were plain to see. After internal banking investigators pointed the finger at Łukasz, the police froze his bank account, he lost his job and he lost his home.

This had a huge emotional impact on the defendant, who revolted at the thought of his peers hearing about the case: “I don’t want people to think I’m the bad guy. I wouldn’t like them to see me that way.” His family — still grieving the recent loss of Łukasz’s father — was hit hard too. His younger brother, Kacper, and stepmother were forced to relocate to Dundee, Scotland, where living costs are drastically cheaper. Łukasz’s FaceTime calls with Kacper, who seemed particularly cut-up over the whole thing, are sure to tug at your heartstrings. Łukasz said before the trial:

It makes me really, really worried about myself, about my family, about my future, about everything I’ve done till now. It’s just the end of my life at some points, I really thought ‘I’m not going to be able to go through this.’

But will the jurors have as much sympathy for Łukasz as I did? You’ll have to tune in to the show, which airs 9pm Monday 31 July on Channel 5, to find out.

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Imagine being sentenced to death for a crime you didn’t commit.

It’s unimaginable, yet those sitting in the audience of ‘The Exonerated’ in Middle Temple Hall this week were quickly and eerily reminded that in the United States, for every nine people sent to death row and executed, one is exonerated. The theatre production — put on by Amicus, written by Eric Jensen and Jessica Blank — told the true stories of six of those exonerees.

The evening began with a teary-eyed introduction by barrister and Amicus patron Sophie Garner — embrace “humility, humanity and hope”, she told us. Then the eclectic cast members took their places.

I don’t use the word eclectic lightly. Even the play’s programme divided the cast members into categories. There were ‘the lawyers’: Garden Court Chambers’ Leslie Thomas QC and Doughty Street Chambers’ Tunde Okewale. While it’s true these two didn’t quite match up to ‘the actors’, they put their all into it and did a good job.

But the most eagerly awaited performances came from those that fell under ‘the exonerees’ category.

These were Sunny Jacobs and Peter Pringle. Both served time on death row — Sunny 17 years in the US and Peter 15 years in Ireland — for murders they were later acquitted of. Incredibly they are now married.

Intense performance of #TheExonerated right now @middletemple. Tears on stage and in the crowd… pic.twitter.com/MOG1UVXS3l

— Amicus (@Amicus_ALJ) May 16, 2017

Strangely Peter’s story did not feature in the play; he instead told the tale of Gary Gauger, who spent nearly three years on death row for the murder of his parents. This left the door wide open for Sunny, playing herself, to claim the starring role. Helped onto the stage from her wheelchair, she looked notably frailer than when I’d previously heard her speak at another Amicus event, but the sincerity with which she spoke was unrivalled by the other cast members.

Perched on a throne-like chair in the middle of the stage, 64-year-old Sunny recalled the execution of her then boyfriend, alongside whom she was convicted of the fatal shooting of two police officers in Florida. “The execution went wrong,” Sunny — the only woman on death row in the whole country when she was sentenced — said. His head caught fire while he was in the electric chair; smoke came out of his ears and he took ten minutes to die. “The press that were there are still writing about it today,” Sunny concluded, as the audience recoiled in horror.

Alongside Sunny’s story, a further two stood out to me.

One was that of Delbert Tibbs (played by Chris Jarman of The Book of Mormon fame), who was convicted of murdering a 27-year-old man and raping his girlfriend.

At @middletemple tonight for 'The Exonerated' – a play by @Amicus_ALJ pic.twitter.com/FUkLNbx3aX

— Katie King (@legalcheek_kk) May 16, 2017

Delbert put much of his ordeal down to poor race relations in 1970s America, but striking was his sense of hope. He recalled:

I realised if I internalised all the pain, and all the anger, and all the hurt, I’d be dead already. They’d be no need to execute me.

Equally touching was the story of Kerry Cook (Jamie Parker, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), a Texan who spent 22 years on death row for the rape and murder of a 21-year-old woman.

Kerry’s story was for me the most memorable of the six because it explored a theme the other five but touched upon: the impact death row has on its victims’ family members. The audience choked back tears as Kerry recalled how his brother “put himself on death row with me.”

Once a high-flyer, his brother turned to the bottle and ended up working at McDonald’s. He was fatally shot outside a club, after trying to break up a fight.

Though now free, Kerry blames himself for what happened to his brother, and still bears the scars of the rapes and mutilations he experienced in prison. He contently concluded: “the state of Texas executed me over 1,000 times”.

A few line fluffs and the uneventful staging couldn’t distract from the play’s fiercely emotive subject matter, and I was unsurprised by the standing ovation it received.

What was less expected was Sunny’s emotional outburst. Seconds after the play concluded, she tearfully thanked all those who came along and urged us to think hard about the soul-destroying impact being on death row can have on a person. Her impromptu monologue had a noticeable impact on her fellow cast members, most obviously actress Danielle Walters (Gavin and Stacey) who could be seen wiping her eyes throughout. Humility, humanity and hope in bucket loads.

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If legal profession red carpet events were a thing, then this would be the Oscars.

Supreme Court deputy president Lady Hale, Sir Brian Leveson of the Queen’s Bench Division, former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, and new terror laws watchdog Max Hill QC were just some of the hundreds of lawyers in attendance at Middle Temple on Sunday night.

They, and I, were there to watch the premiere of a brand new play by Alex Giles called ‘The Disappearance of Miss Bebb’. The performance followed the truly tragic story of Gwyneth Bebb (played by Call the Midwife’s Laura Main), a first-class Oxford jurisprudence graduate from Wales born into an era when women are seen as second-class citizens and are unable to join the legal profession.

Alongside three other women and with help from her lawyer Stanley Buckmaster KC (Judge John Deed’s Martin Shaw), Bebb launches a legal challenge in 1913 against the Law Society.

Lady Hale papped leaving @middletemple pic.twitter.com/Wtt1Rs0rRP

— Katie King (@legalcheek_kk) April 3, 2017

She faces adversity at every stage, both from her family (Bebb’s mother: “if you love the law so much, why don’t you just find a local solicitor and marry him?) and the courts. Her case fails at first instance, thanks to a booming shutdown from Mr Justice Joyce (Sir Brian Leveson, who is actually quite a good actor), and later on appeal.

Throughout this, Bebb’s personal life isn’t all too rosy. Her sister is being raped and abused by her boyfriend, later her husband. Things became especially hard for Bebb when the rock of the family, her father, dies suddenly.

The law is eventually amended in 1919 thanks to Bebb and co’s tireless campaign of “winning hearts”. A helping hand from sympathetic MP Mr Hills (Mock the Week’s Hugh Dennis) and a post-war change in attitude help speed things along. Bebb, now married to Thomas Thomson (Beauty and the Beast’s Ray Fearon), is well on her way to becoming the first woman admitted to the bar.

However, part-way through her bar studies and just months after attending a House of Commons banquet to celebrate the statutory change, Bebb dies following a difficult childbirth with her second daughter. She was 31. The women who she campaigned so tirelessly alongside shudder at the thought of Bebb being referred to as ‘A solicitor’s wife’ on her death certificate. So one, Maud Ingram (The Bill’s Melanie Gutteridge), couldn’t help but deface the certificate in “big, black letters” to read ‘barrister at law’ instead.

have on good authority (i.e. from Lady Hale) that tonight's @KalisherTrust @First100years play is "excellent" and that she has three lines

— Katie King (@legalcheek_kk) April 2, 2017

Bebb’s story is one that should be told, but the play, as I saw it, was a little rough around the edges.

The show was performed on a small stage with few props (pictured below). There was minimal movement: the actors and actresses spoke their lines into old school-style microphones, then waited patiently on chairs at the back of the stage when their character wasn’t in scene.

All the performers carried scripts, which they read from throughout the play. The actors emulated steam train noises by breathing into microphones, while pianist David Osmond was on hand to deliver other sound effects (the sounds of clinking glasses and scratching cutlery during restaurant scenes, for example). I thought the makeshift vibe was charming at first; after over two hours with no interval, it was slightly grating.

Regardless of the stripped back stage, the message was there.

Almost 100 years after the statutory change Bebb fought so tirelessly for, access to the profession is still a hot topic. It was fitting, therefore, that Sunday night’s event was a fundraiser for The Kalisher Trust, a legal charity “which supports those who aspire to become criminal barristers.” For that reason, it was easy to forgive the play’s thrown together, unrefined feel. I have to applaud the actors and actresses who performed for free, and in that I include Hale and Leveson. Neither looked out of place alongside the professionals, and they were both such good sports.

And, as is often the case when you shove a load of lawyers in a room together, giggles at the legal profession were aplenty. Perhaps the biggest laugh came when Bebb confessed she fancied becoming a barrister, not a solicitor, despite the legal challenge at this stage focusing exclusively on the Law Society. Her lawyer’s response? “If you think the Law Society is a tough nut to crack, the Bar Council is impregnable!”

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Somewhere between King’s Cross and Camden Road, nestled away in a charming building that looks surprisingly like a house from the outside, is a small theatre called the Theatro Technis.

This week, it has been showing a play about Tunji Sowande, the country’s first black head of chambers and first black judge.

Performed in its entirety by actor Tayo Aluko on a very bare stage, the 90-minute performance was watched with baited breath by an eerily quiet audience (I felt the stares as I unscrewed my water bottle, so rest assured the packet of crisps stayed firmly stowed away).

What became abundantly clear minutes into the performance was that it wasn’t really a play about law or being a lawyer at all.

Despite its website and poster (below) showing Sowande donning a wig and gown, he remained dressed in a quirky suit and bowtie throughout. The, very minimal, stage furnishings included a desk heaped with paperwork, but there was no mention of whether these piles included law books and letters, for example. With only fleeting references to his legal career made, I couldn’t help feeling the play’s title, ‘Just an Ordinary Lawyer’, didn’t quite capture its spirit.

It was a shame, because Sowande’s career story is one that should be told. Arriving in London from Nigeria in 1945 and trying to make it as a barrister during a period of racial tension and unrest, former pharmacist Sowande — who died in 1996 — had his audience hooked when he detailed his first ever pupillage interview, at Castle Mount Chambers.

“I suggest you leave English courts to English lawyers”, he was told by his bigoted interviewer. “Get on the next boat home and go establish yourself in Bongo-Bongo land.”

Clearly Sowande and other lawyers from ethnic minority backgrounds faced serious difficulties making it to the top; I wish this theme had been explored more deeply.

Eventually, Sowande secured pupillage and tenancy following a chance meeting with barrister Jeffrey Howard. He built up a successful criminal law practice and climbed the greasy pole to become head of 3 Kings Bench Walk in June 1968, the same year Martin Luther King was assassinated. The story was documented, he told the audience, in ‘The Barrister’ magazine (this was long before the days of Legal Cheek, you see.)

Once the ‘successful lawyer’ box was ticked about 50 minutes in, the rest of the play was spent for the most part discussing race relations in the 1960s and beyond. Other more personal experiences were also documented, like Sowande’s mother’s funeral and his falling out with son Tunde.

Without question, Aluko is an extraordinary talent. Theatre revellers were quick to sing his praises in an after-performance Q&A (picture below). He has command, spoke with eloquence and not once fluffed his lines.

But for me, the play would’ve benefited from two things: less singing and less cricket.

Though Aluko’s voice was powerful, the songs were too short and infrequent to rightly describe the play as a musical. The classical power ballads didn’t quite match the upbeat, funny tone of the play and I didn’t always understand their relevance to the story. It also meant there was a pianist (Horacio López Redondo) on stage throughout, who was only put to use about six times (at one point, he stood up from his instrument and was used as a coat stand).

As for the cricket, I guess that’s a matter of personal taste. Sowande is cricket-mad, wields a bat in several scenes and keeps a distinct red ball on his cluttered work desk. It didn’t float my boat, but it did prompt this comment from an audience member during the Q&A:

Cricket is a lot like social democracy: if you don’t know the rules, you don’t understand it. We had a court case this week which showed Theresa May what social democracy is — she seemed to have forgotten the rules!

Perhaps the biggest revelation came at the end of the question session when Aluko revealed he had pieced the play together by reading books on the time period and by interviewing Sowande’s family members and former chambers colleagues (two of whom were in the crowd). I think this shocked a few audience-members who had assumed he’d worked from an autobiography, and it certainly made me appreciate Aluko and his talents more. “You really captured his likeness”, one of Sowande’s old barrister pals told the thespian. Aluko looked noticeably moved.

Aluko is looking into performing the show at Inner Temple in the future. Is it worth seeing? Maybe, but only if you’re in to cricket.

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The post I went to the one-man theatre show about the UK’s first black judge and this is what I thought of it appeared first on Legal Cheek.

This week, I visited a brand new art exhibition at the Supreme Court.

Located in an underused space next to the café, PAPERWORK is a display of about thirty pieces of art — mostly prints and sculptures — all of which have been made by offenders in prison, serving community sentences or in secure psychiatric care.

A collaborative project between the Koestler Trust — a prison arts charity — and Victim Support, the exhibition focuses on works which have reimagined paper as an art medium.

Highlights include a pineapple entirely made out of paper, a print of Cara Delevingne and a flower necklace.

A number of the items are on sale to the public with the proceeds being split between the two charities behind the exhibition. Prices range from £30 to £500 — the most expensive item being an impressive paper motorbike.

Featuring alongside some of the pieces are review snippets from victims of crimes who had taken the time to study the artwork and put to paper how the piece made them feel.

The exhibition also encourages feedback from viewers, asking visitors to fill in comment cards about their favourite works, which will be passed onto the artist.

My favourite piece was a paper model of two wine glasses and a wine bottle called Girls Night Out. Not only is the artistry impressive, but I couldn’t help wondering what prompted the anonymous female prisoner from HM Prison Eastwood to make it.

To a certain extent, all the pieces made me feel this way.

Visitors are given no inkling as to who the artists are beyond their location (HM Prison Whitemoor, Hydebank Wood Prison and Young Offenders Centre, etc). Studying the artwork, I’m sure many people there wondered who was behind such craft; whether they had had a background in art before being incarcerated; what they’d done to be to sent to prison; whether and in what way did making the art help towards rehabilitation.

As I pondered these questions, other visitors came in dribs and drabs to spend their own time with the pieces. Though our highest appeal court is currently in recess and all three of the courtrooms’ cause lists look very empty, there was still a healthy buzz of people wandering around the Westminster building.

In fact — despite the hush on the legal affairs front — a member of the dedicated Supreme Court team explained to me they’re just as busy now as they are during term time, largely because they are open to all regardless of the bench’s schedule:

We are both a working court and a tourist attraction; we are all things to all people. People are more than welcome to come and visit us even when the court is in recess.

Visitors are encouraged to explore the court building, have a bite to eat and learn more about the famous appeal court in a (permanent) Supreme Court exhibition. This features information about the court, interactive videos and an example of the ceremonial robes worn by the justices. It’s definitely worth popping down to.

There’s plenty to marvel at in the Westminster-based building, not least the new art exhibition. PAPERWORK is free to visit and will run at the Supreme Court until the end of the month.

If you don’t think you’ll be able to make it down there by then, don’t worry: the court hopes this will be the first of many exciting new art exhibitions hosted between its four walls.

The post There’s a new art exhibition at the Supreme Court and all the pieces are made by prisoners appeared first on Legal Cheek.

Flack’s Last Shift by Alex Wade is a book about two law graduates who follow unconventional career paths at a heavy personal cost.

One of them, the Oxford-educated Harry Flack, is obsessed by newspapers but opts for a career in a law firm before being lured elsewhere by his passion for the written media. The other, dashing Eddie Conrad, does a GDL but then rejects the law as he dreams of becoming a great novelist. Instead he finds success as a news reporter. Eventually, both men end up working for the same national newspaper — Harry as one of its libel lawyers, Eddie as its editor.

The pair first encountered each other as young professionals in the 1990s, when Eddie caught the eye of Harry’s flighty fiancée, Helen. The fall-out from the affair changes all their lives forever, but it is only — many years later — when Harry does his final shift at The Record, on the same day that Eddie is installed as the paper’s controversial new editor, that the old love rivals get to confront each other.

The account of that crazy shift is beautifully told by Wade, himself a freelance newspaper lawyer at titles including The Times, on which The Record seems to be loosely based. It’s a world of eccentric sub-editors pouring over reams of copy in badly lit rooms, caffeine-addled ‘night lawyers’ trying to square freedom of speech with threats of libel, and stressed-out editors barking often unreasonable demands. It all seems pretty chaotic and fun.

Such charms were what drew Harry away from his smart Holborn law firm as a junior associate into a career path that bears more than a passing resemblance to that of the book’s author. But in real life Wade has forged a portfolio career as a lawyer (he trained at Carter-Ruck before moving into newspaper work), journalist (he regularly writes for publications including The Times and Legal Cheek) and writer (Flack’s Last Shift is his fourth book, following surfing odyssey Surf Nation, surfing short story collection Amazing Surfing Stories, and white collar boxing-themed memoir Wrecking Machine). His fictional creation Harry, in contrast, is defined almost entirely by his job behind the scenes at The Record and withdraws into a solitary life. Permanently scarred by the break-up of his engagement, it’s an existence of someone who never quite had the courage to fully commit to anything.

Eddie, too, in his own way gets life wrong. Although he is successful in his ascent of the newspaper career ladder, the climb leaves him jaded and cold — as he becomes the classic cynical tabloid hack. With his literary dreams having faded, his youthful good looks give way to an expanding waistline and a penchant for dyeing his greying hair. He has basically become a poor man’s Piers Morgan.

Accordingly, Flack’s Last Shift is a useful blueprint for how not to live your life. Even though a career in the dying industry of newspapers would not appeal to most of today’s law graduates, it’s not hard to imagine Harry and Eddie’s modern equivalents working away at BuzzFeed or some other trendy media company. And the long term prognosis for such individuals may, despite the seeming sexiness of the job, not be so great, it seems. Think twice before you leave the comfortable confines of private practice is certainly one message that lawyer readers could take from the book.

If there is any hope offered in this often dark novel, it’s through the character of Maya Berlin, a newly qualified barrister at a leading London media law chambers who shadows Harry during his final shift as part of her plan to build a defamation practice. Unlike her boss for the evening, Berlin has no plans to devote herself entirely to newspaper lawyering. Nor, despite her various shows of Eddie-style initiative and get-up-and-go, does she seem sufficiently ungrounded to lose her soul to ambition.

Instead, operating from the slightly removed perspective of the bar, Berlin looks set to lead a much more balanced and happier life than the two older men. Still, she will never get to experience Fleet Street in its magnificent pre-internet and social media heyday — and for that all Harry and Eddie’s problems seem almost worthwhile.

Flack’s Last Shift by Alex Wade is published by Blue Mark Books and is available on Amazon.

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This weekend, following a chance meeting with the show’s producer outside a pub in Oxford Street, I went to watch an acclaimed court-based improv show called ‘This Is Your Trial’.

Described rather aptly on its website as “Judge Judy meets Whose Line Is It Anyway”, the show promises to be a unique experience for its viewers.

And that really is the show’s strongest selling point. Its format was very different to comedy shows I’ve seen in the past.

For starters, there weren’t really any ‘viewers’ at all. Everyone — in some way or another — was a part of the show.

This is how it worked. On entry to the cheap and cheerful pub venue, audience members had to accuse their companions with a ‘crime’ of their choosing. We then handed our accusations back to the court clerk (played by acclaimed comedian Tim FitzHigham (picture below)). He had the chance to take a look over the accusations, pick out his favourites, and put these audience members on trial.

And what’s a trial without lawyers? Dressed in fancy dress wigs and robes throughout the show were Deborah Frances-White, Ed Coleman and Thom Tuck, playing the prosecutor, defence counsel and judge respectively.

My friend was nominated as the court artist, and the rest of the audience made up the jury, who had to determine the defendant’s guilt or innocence at the end of the fictitious trial.

What became clear straight away was that the subject matter of the trials wasn’t criminal at all.

One audience member, for example, was accused of murdering shoes and wearing the corpse of the shoes he’d murdered. This turned from a fairly dubious accusation — the defendant just had a couple of small holes in the side of his shoes — to a hatchet job courtesy of his accuser (his girlfriend), who seemed very embarrassed when she had to give evidence. The audience agreed his scruffy shoes weren’t all that bad, and he was acquitted.

Another trial concerned a best man’s speech, one that had apparently offended the accuser’s family. To me, this was slightly better. After a lengthy testimony exploring the specific expletives used and the family members offended — plus a shaky defence of along the lines that “swearing is just what the defendant does” — he was overwhelmingly found not guilty.

At the end, it was patriarchy’s turn to be put on trial. In fact, it was the clerk representing the concept using the pseudonym Patrick Arkey. Embedded below is a short clip of the prosecution’s case.

This Is Your Trial

A video posted by Legal Cheek (@legalcheek) on Jun 6, 2016 at 6:19am PDT

Turning to my friend when we left the venue, we both agreed that the show would appeal to lawyers. The set-up, though silly, is reasonably true to criminal law process. It pokes fun at the adversarial system and exposes the funny side of what is often a humourless area of law.

And complimenting this unique set-up were the comedians. All four of them are well-respected in the industry, and were very likeable, confident and funny throughout. Highlights from them include defence counsel quipping to his client “let’s get you off on a technicality!”, and a number of interjections from the clerk about by-laws.

It was their input that led the show and kept it flowing, but the real risk lies with the audience. The level of entertainment hinged on their participation and — given that the show’s format wasn’t really made clear until we were in the thick of it — a few of us came across a little embarrassed and uncomfortable when called upon by the comedians.

If you’re going to go to the show, commit to it. If the thought of being grilled by four experienced comedians in cheap wigs fills you with dread, then it’s probably not one for you.

The post Review: My experience being a jury member at a comedy criminal trial appeared first on Legal Cheek.

Three lucky students had the once in a lifetime chance to practice their advocacy skills in front of two of the country’s top judges last Thursday — and it’s safe to say that judges have very high standards.

This was all part of the Supreme Court Judgment Review, a project hosted by social mobility charity Big Voice London — the same guys that brought us the Model Law Commission.

The whole point of the programme was to give the 35 student participants, all state school educated, the chance to think analytically about the law. After a two hour workshop, the A-level students were tasked with writing a 1,200 word report on whether they agreed with the outcome of one of three recent Supreme Court decisions: Evans, Rhodes and Roberts.

It goes without saying that these are hardly run of the mill cases. Speaking to Victoria Anderson — the charity’s director — during the event, even she admitted that the judgments, especially in the Evans case, are “really, really complex”, and she was impressed that the students were able to grapple with these meaty legal issues — as was I.

The best entrants — as picked by Anderson and co — had their chance to play barrister, and present their arguments to a packed out courtroom in none other than the Supreme Court. Lord Justice Vos — a Court of Appeal judge — and Mrs Justice Asplin — a High Court judge — were tasked with the unenviable job of picking a winner.

It’s difficult to do anything but commend the finalists — Kyieron Clarke, Charlotte Llewellyn and Andrew Wolckenhaar — who all had a good stab at incredibly difficult case law, and were very brave to put their legal knowledge and advocacy skills out on the table for two of the profession’s biggest names to see.

That’s why it came as a surprise to me that the trio were given such a grilling by Vos and Asplin after their presentations. All three were faced with pretty challenging, off the cuff questions about their respective cases.

Speaking to the first presenter, Andrew, after the event, he told me that the questions came as a total surprise. I was particularly taken aback that at the end of Charlotte’s presentation — which was heavily focused around the Article 10 issues raised by the case of Rhodes — Vos questioned her about the case’s Article 8 implications. If my 16 year-old self were put on the spot in this way I would have had no idea what Article 8 was.

All three did incredibly well to hold their nerve, but in the end it was Kyieron that stole the show. A young, black teenager himself, Kyieron drew on anecdotal evidence from his personal experiences of stop and search policy when discussing the human rights implications of the Roberts decision. Maybe this is frowned upon in legal practice — as Vos was all too quick to point out — but from a viewer’s perspective it made his argument much easier to listen to and much more persuasive.

He rightly won, but when it came to announcing this, the judges went about it in — what I thought was — the most gut-churning, cringiest way possible.

Vos and Asplin decided to score each presentation publically out of 10 based on four categories — legal accuracy, cogency, written presentation and oral presentation — giving each finalist an overall score out of 40.

And they didn’t go easy on them, even the winner. I jotted down phrases like “not brilliant”, “woolly” and “you didn’t handle that well”. Lowlights included a snarky remark about one student’s presenting style being “undesirable” and getting “boring very quickly”.

The highest mark scored was a nine, and that went to Kyieron for his cogency. He was then was told that his presentation was “the only one that packed a punch” — which I’m sure delighted the other two finalists. And though I’m not all too sure that he meant it in this way, Vos seemed to suggest that Charlotte and Andrew had taken the easy way out by agreeing with the Supreme Court, and made an interesting comment about him — as a Court of Appeal judge — liking it when people take aim at the Supreme Court.

Far more resilient than I was at their age, the finalists seemed to brush off the criticism and were in good spirits after the event. Kyieron — the overall winner with a score of 30 — told me that he’d only had limited time to prepare his presentation because of illness and exams, and that he felt very nervous about the whole experience. The aspiring criminology undergrad was really surprised that he’d won, and was feeling chuffed about the new addition to his CV.

Speaking to the runners up, they were extremely positive about the whole thing too. Andrew, who came in third place, was particularly sturdy. When I asked if he regretted picking what me and Anderson thought was the toughest case, he told me that he had “no regrets”, and that he felt ready to grapple with tough legal problems in the future.

The achievements of these young, bright students shouldn’t be glossed over: they crafted their own legal arguments and put together a 10 minute long presentation, on legal issues even practising lawyers would struggle to understand — and I think Vos might have forgotten that. His unduly harsh comments could really have shaken up the finalists. But — at least from the impression I got — they all took it on the chin, and that’s testament to them and the brilliant Big Voice London team.

If Vos got anything at all right on that evening, it was when he said this:

There simply are not enough organisations out there doing work like this.

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