Lawyer Monthly - December 2021 Edition

I hardly think Robert needs an introduction, but I am sure he could give us a brilliant one anyway. I am not so sure about that, but I just wanted to say, it is such a gift for us to be alongside one another here. I failed to realise until I came into this conference space just how much of a thirst there would be for connections, and especially as a legal community. Although a lot of people are moving to at-home work, one of the things you cannot replicate, especially in challenging cases, is to have the range of both professional and lived experiences alongside one another in chambers. As a short introduction, I am a barrister. I practice at 2 Hare Court, which is in many respects the most established public criminal chambers, although most of our work is regulatory and international law, which was -- by the time I accidentally stopped being a barrister -- the chief arena of my practice. And then in a rather odd meeting, having prosecuted cases internationally and advised governments, I found myself coming back to Croydon to defend in a case. That is to say nothing about Croydon or how I ended up in television or how depressed I was about the law, but I think we can all agree the architecture could be improved. I ended up writing scripts; it was a spare- time hobby. I went to sell one to a woman at ITV who looked at it, and the best thing to say is that she gave it her aggressively undivided indifference. I think she thought it was the worst thing she had ever read. As I am a defence lawyer in this country, 14 DEC 2021 WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM and having a column both in the Sun and the Evening Standard where I answer questions – and have done for six years – for people who have the least access to legal aid, with no access to power. That, I think, has been the richest privilege of all. That brings us neatly onto the topic of our talk, which is the legal aid crisis in the UK. It would be a bit remiss to begin this talk without first defining exactly what legal aid is and who it is meant for. You know, there is a legal aid crisis. We as a legal community are – and when you think about it, it is quite ironic -- shockingly bad advocates for ourselves as a legal community. We are really bad at making the case for lawyers. I want to set that up as a sort of overarching headline. So as people will be aware, legal aid was originally instigated because it was understood that democracy is meaningless unless everyone has access to justice. In criminal aid, that meant that it was a complete given that you would not be given just any lawyer, but equal and opposite firepower to the capacity the state had to bring a prosecution against you. I think this is something worth reflecting on when people are perhaps a little bit sceptical about the implications of the European Convention – the Human Rights Act, as it became. What that meant was that you were guaranteed equality of arms. That meant, of course, that anybody confronted by a criminal allegation would be entitled to a defence, means-tested or not. That became increasingly difficult to defend when people named had money. But the reality of the situation was that it was understood that you could not have a fair trial without that guarantee - that our legal landscape demands, requires and expects that in order to ensure any kind of fairness, it cannot be dependent on the capacity for an individual to pay. So, when you are talking about losing somebody’s liberty, that is criminal legal aid. And again, it seems to me that that is a very straightforward case to make, and completely undeterred by a difficult response, I went back to Croydon, sent her an email, thought nothing of it, took another brief and came back to the idea of a TV court. It normally takes years and years of various developments to produce something like this, and of course, you can imagine that various focus groups were involved. This one was just put onto television in three months. So we then move on. I was prosecuting a case in Jersey and I arrived in court with a TV crew with my name on it. We have now done 2,000 cases involving civil disputes, and from there, gifted privilege after privilege, I have had a range of extraordinary opportunities including how to dance on Strictly Come Dancing and, just this morning, presenting Good Morning Britain for the first time. But perhaps the richest gift of all has been to give a platform to the causes I care about. This includes documentaries about human rights issues, such as one with the BBC that will hopefully come next year about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, Thank you all for joining us. My name is Oliver Sullivan, and I am the editor for Lawyer Monthly. “ I have become an ambassador for Shelter, and I can tell you personally the number of cases where access to a lawyer at first instance would have resolved somebody’s problem