I look around the robing room and sigh. Once again, it is quiet. I silently adjust my wig. I tug my gown around my baby bump. Another barrister bursts in. She is frantic. ‘I am covering three cases, looking after a jury, and my laptop is on 4%.’ She exhales. I sympathise. I am also covering multiple cases before several judges. Emails are pinging in. The court tannoy noisily demands someone, somewhere. We have acclimatised to the daily hum of stress in our criminal courtrooms, but it is now relentless and rising. I see it in the faces of colleagues fighting fires and sense it in the tone of judges who have forgotten how it feels to firefight. I remember when this room was jammed with wigs. Old timers would greet each other, new recruits would seek advice. It used to be standing room only. Now, it is quiet.

In moments like this I ask myself: where have all the criminal barristers gone?

We are oversubscribed at entry level. We attract talent. They burst into our courtrooms and build a practice. Many soar. And then, slowly for some, suddenly for others, they start to disappear. You realise you have not seen somebody for months, then years. You google their names and ask around. The answers come: they are undertaking regulatory work, have taken judicial appointment, have gone in-house. They did an inquiry and never came back. They had a baby and, well.

When I was a rookie, the seasoned silverbacks would sagely tell me that only the strongest could hack this job. I believed them. I saw people leaving and suspected that with a little more grit, a touch more steel, they could have stayed. They could have made it. Then, experience taught me that something else was happening. These were not weak people who had buckled. They were some of our toughest advocates, and they had chosen to walk away from something they once loved.

The statistics are bleak. In the Bar Council’s Barristers’ Working Lives Survey 2023, criminal practitioners reported significantly lower overall wellbeing than any other practice area. The Criminal Bar Association says that just 2,400 full-time criminal barristers remain. The National Audit Office found that, last year, 1,436 criminal cases could not proceed when originally listed due to the absence of counsel. In 2019 that number was just 71.

If a large corporation was haemorrhaging talent from its ranks, it would conduct exit interviews. Someone would ask: what went wrong? And so, in a wildly unscientific experiment, I did that for this article. I spoke to some of those who had left, were tempted to leave, or had diversified their practice. I am grateful to each of my respondents. They will remain anonymous with only this observation from me: the criminal Bar was very lucky to have had them.

As I suspected, not many of my contributors had entered the profession with ease. They were not hobbyists. They were driven by public service and had sacrificed. Most of them liked what they found. ‘I loved it, to be honest I still do,’ one told me. Another said she thought she ‘would stay forever’. They were realistic and hardworking, with one noting, ‘it was what I was expecting – long hours, mentally draining, but I felt like I found my purpose’.

The first exit theme that emerged, unsurprisingly, was workload and remuneration. Yet the people who spoke to me were not lazy. They will forgive me, I hope, for noting that many of them had workaholic tendencies. None sought a 9-5 but they did object to ‘working for free’ at ‘shocking’ rates. One barrister dubbed it a ‘culture’ of doing extra work for nothing. Others noted that without reasonable expenses they were ‘fed up of having to pay to work’. One observed their friends and colleagues becoming ‘stressed and burdened, some to the point of illness’. One senior junior concluded ‘almost anything is healthier’ than the criminal Bar. Many cited struggles with basic payments like mortgages, childcare and holidays. A barrister who left after decades in practice observed that he had postponed his honeymoon many years ago, but had not resented it – ‘in those days you did what had to be done because you were respected and well paid’. That respect, he noted, had now evaporated. ‘As the rewards dwindled and the working conditions deteriorated, I started to dread getting up in the morning,’ he told me. Juniors were not immune from that. One remarked, ‘I don’t feel like I have a life outside of my work. I feel like this job is consuming me as a person … [i]t breaks my heart to say this because I do feel like this is my calling’.

The type of work undertaken plays a part. Time and again those involved in ‘back-to-back’ sexual offence trials – often women – cited the impact it had on them. One junior had forged a plan. She was simply not accepting ‘physically and emotionally gruelling’ sexual offences work ‘until we are properly remunerated for it’. Those involved in emotionally fraught work felt the ‘toll’ of being the ‘public face of a crumbling system’. Those who prosecuted found the particular demands placed upon them to be incredibly testing. One experienced prosecution barrister described being chased over and over again for an advice he had sent multiple times to try to save a case. He was worn down by it. He reached the stage where he would ‘physically wince’ when he saw the ‘dreaded letters CJSM’ in his inbox.

Parents described the tension between juggling family life and criminal practice. Fathers noted they were absent ‘physically or figuratively’ from families. The work keeping them from home was ‘isolated and insular’. Many noted an impact on their marriages and children. Mothers either wanting or raising babies struggled to see how the job could fit with new responsibilities. In a story that moved me to tears, one contributor told me she felt she had to almost ‘apologise for being a mother’. After suffering a family loss and having a baby who was unwell, she navigated a testing maternity leave. On returning, she found the environment was seldom hospitable. Upon bringing her baby to chambers to collect some paperwork, she was met with: ‘I had not realised this was a nursery.’ She encountered difficulties being released from court for emergencies involving her child and when she went to a senior barrister for help, he asked her ‘where is the father in all of this?’ She was parenting alone. What struck me was how close we probably were to keeping talented mothers like her at the full-time criminal Bar. She praised a courthouse that provided her with a room to express breastmilk, and a kind colleague who gifted her an Archbold to save money. Small gestures that she remembered and had made a difference. She observed ‘there is no one more efficient than a mother of multiple children – we get the job done – why would we want to lose those women?’ Another woman noted her ‘regret’ at not being more present for her daughters: ‘My husband did all the typical “mummy” stuff’ she told me, before adding, ‘I hope they will forgive me one day.’ Those considering starting a family struggled to imagine it. One junior confessed: ‘I am at a stage in my life where I want to have a family… and partly I feel like with this job I am not sure how I would ever manage to have a child and actually be there to raise my child.’

I hope the majority of excellent judges will forgive me for including this, but the ‘final straw’, for some, involved judicial behaviour. One barrister – covering hearings as a favour to his colleagues during the pandemic – was scolded by a judge for his mode of dress over a video link. I suspect the judge did not give it a second thought. But the barrister told me: ‘Such a comment, when I was helping out, pushed me over the edge. I no longer enjoyed it, and no longer wanted to do it.’ Another junior was criticised by a Recorder for not knowing where his opponent was – despite all reasonable efforts to locate him. The Recorder berated the barrister publicly. ‘That was a moment of clarity,’ he told me, ‘I realised how ridiculous the criminal justice system was, how petty, how backward, and how unhealthy.’ I thought of them, going home that night, packing away their wigs and telling their families that enough was enough. I wondered if the judges had gone home with any inkling whatsoever that they had just changed someone’s professional path.

And yet, it was a judicial contributor who gave me hope. He noted that our dwindling numbers might represent an opportunity for overhaul. As he put it, the ‘collective willingness of barristers to work themselves into the ground leads to the burnout and rate of loss that we are currently seeing – and it has got to stop.’ He imagined us refusing to take on excessive volumes of work that could impact health and to maintain only a manageable workload. Who could, after all, argue with that? It would require a professional wellbeing protocol. There actually is one – a commendable effort by the Criminal Bar Association – but experience has taught me it is often the very first casualty of a hectic trial. I was encouraged to reflect upon some words from the very top. The foreword to the 2024 Crown Court Compendium was written by the Lady Chief Justice and includes the following. I found it notable in content and impressive in tone:

‘Judges also need to remember that advocates have lives (and obligations) outside of the trial. Judges and advocates work hard to ensure that justice is delivered fairly and efficiently, but this must not be at too great a cost; judges must keep their own welfare and the welfare of all those who work in the courts in mind when seeking to meet the challenges that exist in terms of backlogs and timeliness.’

Can I easily imagine a stressed junior citing those words to a judge when asked to stay up all night drafting? Can I imagine a woman standing up in a courtroom full of men and saying, no, she could not keep sitting late as her child’s nursery place depended on punctuality? I, perhaps tellingly, struggle to see it. We have been conditioned to sacrifice perfectly normal activities like eating, sleeping and caring for children to keep a very poorly paid show on the road. But what if someone started it? What if they did it in a busy courtroom? Would others see it and be emboldened? And what if it caught on? Now we are an endangered species, is it finally time to act?

As I finish this article, now on maternity leave from the chaos of the courtroom, my phone pings. It is a favourite solicitor with a new brief. Could I be tempted back a little early to prepare it? I glance down at my newborn, remember the contributions to this article and hesitate.

I eventually type ‘yes’ – a little slower than I might have done before.