Lawyer Monthly - December 2021 Edition

18 DEC 2021 WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM pupillage applications doing as much pro bono work as possible. Nowadays, especially with young trainees, they often get ring-fenced into high-profile work or high-value work; they specialise extremely early on. But when I first started doing legal aid at the turn of the century, what that meant was that I would be doing five cases in the morning and two trials in the afternoon. So those threads of humanity that weave themselves into the tapestry of your experience, the range of complex problems that you meet, the interface with client groups that have their own nuanced issues from across a range of communities, make you a much better problem solver and lawyer. Above all else they compel you to find language that can turn complex problems into readily available answers that an ordinary person can understand. If you as a lawyer are not able to communicate the law so that everybody can understand, then you are a bad lawyer. That is another of the key issues of the legal aid crisis: how do we attract more young lawyers to pro bono work, away from potentially more high-profile cases? How do we sell pro bono work to them? Well, by making it easier and better for them to do. I do not criticise the young people – I have had to rethink the advice I give to some, and I hate it. If you look at my chambers, there might be 400 applicants and three places, and the amount of debt that our students are in... it is completely indefensible. The way we attract young lawyers to do work is by saying “We, as a corporate community, are going to support you in that work”. We make it a requirement, as I say, of getting pupillage in the first place or getting a training contract. We make the training colleges work alongside us as they sometimes do, not just encouraging people to volunteer. It seems to me that they could be and should be (and in some places they already are) volunteering within those colleges as well. I would like to go back to what you were saying about why lawyers ought to be proud for making such a difference in individuals’ lives. Looking at the wider issue, then, of legal aid in this country and how it has now become so restricted in access as to create entire legal aid deserts – areas of the country where there is no legal aid provider – what would you suggest we do to address this? Well, we need to be innovative. One of the privileges of doing Judge Rinder, other than the technical law, has been to learn and to hear the lived experiences of people outside of London, and from a range of complex backgrounds. Precisely as you say, there are whole areas of our country where, for millions of people within a broad range of communities, of every complexion, there are legal aid deserts. And what those communities have in common is exactly as you suggest: that lack of access to power. We need to be innovative in this way. Firstly. it is not just about funding. It seems to me that some firms are doing it – Slaughter and May, and various others as well. They are growing their pro bono departments. But they only get referrals, and they have a number of criteria before they take certain cases. It certainly seems to me that, as part of one of the seats that you do as a trainee solicitor, there should be a paid requirement for you to do pro bono work, precisely because a lot of the advice that you can give is about telling somebody they do not have a legal case. That in and of itself is a critical starting point, and it is just the opportunity to help somebody that lacks the capacity to touch the face of power. That is the first thing. Secondly, it seems to me that, again, it should be a requirement to train at the bar, but it needs to be funded alongside those firms. There should be a part of your capacity to continue to work and to continue to be regulated, alongside which there should be some element of doing pro bono, and it should be proportionate to the outcome that you have as a firm as part of our giving back as a community. Now, I want to be clear: lots of firms are doing that work. But where there are deserts, we need to be pressuring and finding funding wherever we can to go to those places and make sure they have that advice. The good news is that when you speak to MPs of both sides – of course they are politicians, so they are not going to be honest with you – but when you make this case, they will agree. All of them. In fact, it was recently found by the bi-partisan Westminster Commission on Legal Aid that there is a greater need to address legal aid deserts by training and recruiting more pro bono solicitors. Yes. And it makes people better lawyers as well. I think that really matters. My wonderful mentoree, who I am so proud of, just got pupillage. One of the things that she did is that she spent a good portion of her time leading up to her “ Young people are not necessarily the answer. They need great role models. They need people in firms that have got well-funded pro bono units.