Features

Paul Magrath provides an overview of current guidance for Litigants in Person  

Family Courts without a Lawyer: A Handbook for Litigants in Person, by Lucy Reed (Bath Publishing, 350pp, £29)
Small Claims Procedure in the County Court, by Patricia Pearl and Andrew Goodman (Wildy, Simmonds and Hill, 309pp, £19.99)
Representing Yourself In Court: Guide to Civil Law, by Francis Manyika (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 104pp, £28.68)
A Guide to Representing Yourself in Court, The Bar Council (72pp, free)
A Guide to Bringing and Defending a Small Claim, Civil Justice Council (30pp, free). 

Paul Epstein QC and Ed Williams explain witness familiarisation – the training, judicial attitudes, and how to stay within professional boundaries  

In the recent High Court battle of the oligarchs between the late Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich the case turned on conversations several decades earlier. What the two men said and how they said it was central to Mrs Justice Gloster’s eventual judgment dismissing Mr Berezovsky’s £5bn claim. 

Registration for the controversial Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates is due to be rolled out across the country. Joshua Rozenberg looks at the history behind QASA for  Counsel, and why its introduction is so contentious.  

In a perfect world, there would be no need for regulators to impose quality controls on advocates. Indeed, there would be no need for lawyers to be regulated at all. If you were good, you would get work. If not, word would soon get around. 

There was a time when the Bar of England and Wales was small enough for that approach to be effective. In some specialist areas of the legal profession, I suspect it still is. But criminal advocacy now faces too many challenges for market forces to operate effectively. 

H.H. Judge Peter Murphy talks to Counsel about his novel, A Higher Duty  

Why write a novel about barristers?  This is really two questions in one, isn’t it? First, why write a novel at all? Second, why write a novel about barristers? 

As the Ministry of Justice sifts through responses to the Legal Aid Consultation, Toby Craig looks at some of the dissenting voices  

Eight weeks, 56 days, 1,344 hours. 80,640 minutes...you get the picture. That was how long the Ministry of Justice allowed for responses to be formulated to its deeply controversial Consultation Paper, Transforming Legal Aid . Critics say the proposals will fundamentally alter and undermine the criminal justice system in this jurisdiction alongside further and substantial changes to civil legal aid. 

A minute’s silence for the passing of the legal aid sytem 

June 10, 2013: “Nothing’s sacred to those devils.” Batman (Adam West) 

Short of bumping into the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse on the way to the Bailey, things could not feel more eschatological. Arriving, I spotted what looked like a huge number of nicotine-addicted barristers congregating on the pavement outside the entrance. Hetty Briar-Pitt, my junior, barred my entry and forced me, like a shy horse, into their ranks. It dawned on me then that this was, in fact, a minute’s silence for the passing of the legal aid system. 

The criminality underpinning the Telford and Oxford grooming trials has put child sexual exploitation in the news. Hugh Davies OBE QC and Madeleine Wolfe examine the United Kingdom’s record in protecting vulnerable children abroad from systematic sexual abuse  

No serious commentator doubts either (i) that the sexual abuse of children internationally is a substantial industry; or (ii) that the United Kingdom has positive human rights obligations to children to prevent harm from British nationals who represent a significant risk of such extra-territorial offending. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 (“SOA”) presently legislates for three forms of civil prevention order: Sexual Offences Prevention Orders (“SOPOs”); Foreign Travel Orders (“FTOs”); and Risk of Sexual Harm Orders (“RoSHOs”). A recent multi-agency ACPO commissioned review, led by one of the authors of this article, concluded that this statutory regime is failing adequately to prevent sexual harm to children both abroad and within the UK. It proposes a new form of order, specifically relating to children, better to prevent such offending. 

International child exploitation
It is intrinsically difficult to quantify the nature and scale of the industry of international child sexual exploitation. On any view of the figures they are appalling. Children are rendered little more than tradable commodities in many countries. The United Nations estimates that as many as two million children are employed in the commercial industry of sexual abuse internationally, and (for example) that 35% of Cambodia’s 55,000 commercial sex workers are under 16 years’ old; the figure for Brazil, host country for the next World Cup and Olympics, is “as high as 500,000”; ECPAT (an international NGO campaigning against child sexual exploitation and trafficking) estimates the figure in Thailand alone at between 200-250,000, including children trafficked from Burma, Laos and China specifically for that purpose. There is equivalent data for many other countries, and hundreds of thousands are trafficked internally and internationally for exploitation annually. 

Job title: Silk and Head of the Criminal Team 

New Park Court Chambers is a large and well-established set of Chambers comprising 94 barristers in Leeds and Newcastle, including 9 QCs, specialising in criminal, civil and family law.  

You are described in the leading directories as ‘an ascending star’, and were described in The Times  in connection with the Suarz/Evra case as one of the country’s leading criminal lawyers. What do you credit your success to?
Hard work and good luck. In the five years before I took silk I was fortunate to be led by a number of exceptional QCs. In particular, I was led by Robert Smith QC in a series of long cases of considerable complexity and importance. Of all of the advocates I have encountered, he has the highest standards and I learnt a great deal from him. This period was effectively a second pupillage and set me on course for my own career in silk. 

Women leave the Bar in large numbers after having children. The Bar Nursery is a first step towards addressing this problem. Kate Grange, Jess Connors and Victoria Butler-Cole examine the background.  

It’s been five years since the Bar Nursery Association was established and over that time there have been some considerable highs and lows in the campaign to establish suitable childcare facilities for members of the Bar close to the Inns of Court. 

With responses to the Ministry of Justice’s consultation paper on legal aid flowing in, Toby Craig considers the changing landscape  

The only game in town
This month’s WW will be landing on desks just as the finishing touches are being applied to a large number of responses to the Ministry of Justice’s Transforming Legal Aid  consultation paper. One could be forgiven for thinking that was the only game in town. One could also be forgiven for hoping that the various consultation responses are read with more care and attention. It hasn’t always been the case.