With dramatic cuts to legal aid looming and new business models on the horizon, the Bar faces huge upheaval at a time when the gap between commercial and publicly-funded advocates has never been more stark. Alex Aldridge reports on the attempts to chart a course forward

'Core values' is a theme that traditionally features heavily at the Bar Council's annual conference. This year – with deep cuts looming to legal aid and huge upheaval expected with the implementation in 2011 of the Legal Services Act (LSA) – was no exception.

Speakers including Kim Hollis QC and Lord Neuberger paid customary tribute to the concept, before Mayor of London Boris Johnson took to the stage to deliver a gag-filled address. With laughter still echoing around the Hilton Metropole on Edgware Road, delegates filed out into a foyer full of stalls from upmarket wealth management and luxury goods companies.

If it wasn't for Bar Council chairman Nicholas Green QC's frank keynote speech on the impact of those legal aid cuts – which began with the line, "There's no more money" – the impression would have been of a united profession celebrating a good year.

Other indications that all isn't rosy at the Bar at the moment seeped through in the details of the event. Johnson, it emerged, was speaking without a fee to help keep costs down as a favour to his wife, Marina Wheeler, a barrister at One Crown Office Row, who was on the conference organising committee. And funds from the sponsors Mercedes-Benz and Cavanagh Wealth Management were, Hollis let slip, being used "to keep the ticket prices at the levels of last year, with very much an eye on the resources of the junior and publicly-funded Bar". The price of those tickets, ranging from £25 for barristers specialising in public work to £400 for commercial silks, gave an indication of the chasm that has opened up between the two main branches of the Bar.

The plain truth is that most senior figures at the Bar expect the profession to contract in the years ahead, a process that will place an even greater focus on the starkly-varying fortunes between the publicly-funded and commercial Bar.

How the profession manages that shift – which reflects a similar gulf that opened up between the differing branches of the solicitors profession in the 1990s – will go a long way towards defining the modern Bar. It will also test the links between the various constituencies of the profession in a way that has never happened before. There are now some senior figures at the Bar attempting to seriously address how it should adapt to these fast-changing times – but it is as yet far from apparent whether the profession as a whole has fully grasped the scale of that challenge.

One becomes two

It wasn't always this way at the Bar. In the old days there was little gap between the publicly-funded and commercial ends of the profession. The much lower numbers of barristers – in 1960 the Bar had just 2,000 members, a figure that has since swelled to around 15,000, including 12,000 self-employed barristers – fostered an atmosphere where distinctions between practice areas were far less important, with most practitioners undertaking a range of work that could span from criminal trials in the Crown Court to high-level company disputes.

"The Bar used to be a small, male-dominated, generalist profession," recalls Sir Gordon Langley, chairman of the Takeover Panel, a former High Court judge and member of leading commercial set Fountain Court Chambers. "I cut my teeth doing county court work – cases where somebody had fallen off a ladder, that sort of thing," he continues, adding that he first got into commercial work through representing the father-in-law of a partner in a well-known law firm who had been charged with going through a red light.

Things began to change in the 1980s and 1990s as increasing amounts of commercial work flowing into the City following the 1986 'Big Bang' – which saw financial markets in London de-regulated – led several chambers to focus more on this area. Alongside Fountain Court, these included Brick Court Chambers, Essex Court Chambers and One Essex Court – all now leaders in their field. Much of this happened by chance, with Fountain Court's first forays into this area, for example, down to the friendship of its former senior clerk with some solicitors at Slaughter and May and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.

Since then, these sets have thrived, more than doubling in size during the last 20 years. As they have grown, they have assumed an increasingly elite identity, with Brick Court senior clerk Ian Moyler summing up the outlook of this end of the Bar when he explains his role in terms of ensuring "that our barristers can add something that magic circle lawyers who typically instruct us may not have." As a whole the group has weathered the financial crisis remarkably well, with revenue at the top 30 commercial sets growing substantially over the last two years to now exceed £750m.

For much of the last couple of decades the publicly-funded Bar performed pretty strongly, too. But changes made by the last Government to the legal aid procurement model, which culminated in 2006 with the Carter legal aid reforms, saw the fortunes of barristers take a dramatic turn for the worse. With increasing incentives for struggling solicitors to handle advocacy work in-house, income to the public Bar has fallen dramatically over the last few years, with practitioners further hit by rates freezes – in many cases at 1997 levels – made to remedy longstanding funding deficits.

And criminal barristers look set to face increasing competition from solicitor advocates. Figures from the Solicitors Regulation Authority show that there are more than 5,000 solicitors and legal executives with higher courts rights in the UK. While the majority of those will only use these rights on occasion, a report from consultancy firm Jomati estimated that around 1,000 solicitors are making continual use of their higher courts rights. Although this figure is still dwarfed by the independent Bar, the impending squeeze on legal aid will see more solicitor firms attempt to retain criminal work in-house.

Those at the very top end of the public Bar have come through relatively unscathed – the Government's annual list of the highest earning legal aid lawyers showed 10 QCs earning more than £500,000 this year. But these days practitioners in the four-to-five-year call bracket typically get by on an average of just £25,000-£35,000 after tax. For pupil barristers in publicly-funded sets the situation is even worse, with the vast majority struggling to survive on the minimum annual pupillage award of £10,000.

The effect of this is that talented individuals are being driven away. Writing last year for Legal Week, Alex Deane, David Cameron's former chief of staff who practised as a criminal barrister from 2005 to 2009, described the Bar as "not a proper job, [but] a hobby, and a pleasant one for those with an independent income – but you simply cannot make a living from it in the first four or five years."

And this was before the massive legal aid cuts announced by the Government last week, which are expected to reduce its £2.1bn budget by £350m. The reforms amount to a huge withdrawal of public money from civil legal aid, cutting public money from most cases involving family disputes, clinical negligence, debt, education, immigration, employment, housing and welfare benefit cases. The Ministry of Justice estimates that its plans will cut the total annual earnings of legal aid providers by £144m-£154m.

Fighting back

Bar Council chairman Green says that it has been clear to him since last year that "the publicly-funded Bar just couldn't go on". But he says it took a change of government and a high-profile review of public spending to create a climate where radical measures to ensure the publicly-funded Bar's survival were deemed worthy of consideration.

"Historically there has been a great deal of reluctance from the Legal Services Commission (LSC) to reconsider the way in which it assigns work, but various recent changes – allied to our persistence – has seen this stance change," he explains.

Green's term as chair of the Bar Council marked a shift in policy, with the body attempting to drive some substantial policy responses to the challenges facing the profession. This was a break from the past for the Bar Council, which has previously tended to approach modernisation in terms of updating the image of a typical barrister as a more accessible and diverse figure – a perfectly laudable but essentially cosmetic approach.

The most significant of the measures championed by Green are two new business models, 'ProcureCo' and 'SupplyCo', which the Bar Council has designed in conjunction with City law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse. The overriding aim of both is to help the Bar get its hands on the legal aid purse strings, which are currently exclusively in the possession of solicitors.

ProcureCos, which the Bar Council launched in April, are essentially business units that allow chambers to bid collectively for work directly from the LSC, which in the past has contracted only with solicitors – largely because it wasn't possible to contract with individual barristers. Having won the work, a ProcureCo would then be free to distribute cases not only to members of the chambers operating it, but to solicitor firms – reversing the age-old practice of solicitors referring work onto barristers. Because of a ProcureCo's status as a procurement vehicle – ProcureCos don't provide legal services, rather enable them to be procured – they required no regulatory approval and chambers are free to establish them.

SupplyCos, meanwhile, take the concept a stage further – representing, broadly, a ProcureCo that can supply legal services. Under this model – which is subject to regulatory approval – barristers could go beyond instructing solicitors to actually employing them. This would enable chambers to employ teams of paralegals to conduct low-level litigation-related tasks typically handled either by in-house legal teams or law firms.

And with law schools churning out far more graduates from their Bar Professional Training Courses (approximately 1,800 a year) than there are pupillages available (around 500 annually), there would be no shortage of qualified individuals to staff such units. "Graduates could come to see SupplyCos as a route into the Bar," argues Green.

In September the Bar Standards Board (BSB) issued a consultation on the regulation of SupplyCos – plus a number of other proposals aimed at widening the remit of barristers to areas including the conduct of litigation, the service of court documents, holding client money and unrestricted direct access. The early indications are that the profession is in favour of such moves, with Green anticipating that the first SupplyCos could be up and running in 18 months to two years.

The consensus among sets that do large amounts of public work is that ProcureCos and SupplyCos probably represent their best chance of survival. "The smaller legal aid pot means many barristers will have to accept that they'll earn less. Others will probably not have enough work to justify remaining in publicly-funded practice," says Doughty Street Chambers director Robin Jackson (pictured), adding that "new business entities will be important to sets and could come to represent the only way forward".

To date, though, few chambers have set up ProcureCos, with most opting to wait until the impending legal aid cuts are finalised, the current criminal legal aid contract regime expires in just over a year's time and SupplyCos receive regulatory approval. A senior clerk at a leading set with a large public practice said: "Our ProcureCo is on the shelf and ready to go, but in common with many other sets we've decided to wait until a clearer picture has emerged about the future before we launch it."

Commercial opportunity – and solidarity

Affluent, leafy Essex Street, home to leading commercial barristers' chambers Brick Court, 39 Essex Street and Keating Chambers, wasn't the sort of place in Green's thoughts when he set about developing a new business model to help safeguard the future of the Bar. But Green and his Bar Council colleagues have since gained a zeal to persuade such sets to embrace ProcureCos and SupplyCos.

In the short term this appears to be less out of necessity and more from the Bar Council's commitment to sustaining the links – the core values – between the different branches of the profession.

Green, who set out this stall in June when he unveiled an ambitious report entitled The Future of the Bar, has given presentations to many leading commercial chambers about the potential of the new business models to translate successfully to the private sector.

He argues that ProcureCos could be especially useful to such sets in their dealings with corporate clients – which a recent survey by research company Winmark found are coming direct to the Bar in increasing volumes.

"I have had a number of conversations with major corporations that report that rule one in their procurement manual is that they will only send legal work to 'entities'," Green said during his keynote address at last month's annual Bar Council conference, adding: "in my estimation there are hundreds of millions of pounds' worth of work which the Bar could obtain, but which it is presently unable to service because of a perception by clients that we are not easy to contract with."

However, securing support from commercial sets will not be easy, with the consensus among leading clerks being that the current system mostly works fine in this respect. "We already have no problem providing services directly to our lay clients such as BP and Siemens under our current set-up. So setting up a ProcureCo wouldn't be a gainful use of chambers' resources, nor, more importantly, would it benefit those clients," says One Essex Court senior clerk Darren Burrows.

Green also suggests that ProcureCos' capacity to allow chambers to pass work that comes to them directly onto solicitors could be an advantage to commercial sets. But commercial clerks counter they can do this already, through informal referrals.

A further possibility associated with ProcureCos is that they would allow the creation of 'all star' panels of individual barristers with varying specialisms not catered for by their chambers. "A cross-set ProcureCo could bring together a leading company barrister with, say, a top tax practitioner and an expert in construction law," says Michael Todd QC, a barrister at company law set Erskine Chambers and vice chairman-elect of the Bar Council.

But senior clerks at commercial sets, which on the whole offer fairly broad expertise, think the benefits associated with such arrangements would be limited to barristers operating in very specialist areas. "In commercial cases I can see how such an arrangement could benefit the odd niche practitioner whose expertise might be sought after by a ProcureCo from another set or in distinct areas like tax, where barristers with a single speciality tend to group together in a chambers, and they might need to 'buy in' other specialist expertise from another sector," says One Essex Court's Burrows.

SupplyCos, however, would offer clearer benefits for commercial sets. By employing teams of paralegals to do the grunt work on a case, chambers would be able to reap profits from a type of activity previously reserved for solicitors. A SupplyCo might also make them more attractive to companies, which, despite increasingly using the Bar, often opt for law firms rather than chambers because of their ability to offer a one-stop-shop service. Everything Everwhere general counsel James Blendis – a big fan of the Bar and the value for money it offers – says that a major downside of working with barristers is that it means his in-house legal department has to undertake far more of the heavy lifting on, for example, basic litigation tasks than would be the case if he were instructing a law firm. A SupplyCo could remedy these issues.

Both models would potentially have other advantages. For one, they would allow members of staff like senior marketing staff or clerks to become part-owners. Potentially, this means to incentivise and motivate staff could help bring in business, build brands and make a chambers more efficient. Some have also argued that such vehicles could be used to build up large national pools of barristers rather than relying on chambers' tenants.

The strongest proponents of alternative business structures argue that the Bar would be very strongly placed in the era of Tesco Law, given that advocacy is near-impossible to commoditise. Under this theory, models like SupplyCo would allow the barristers to gain many of the advantages of working in a law firm – while maintaining many of the benefits of the independent Bar. A survey by Baker Tilly of more than 2,000 barristers and clerks this year also found considerable interest from the Bar for a model that would allow them to conduct litigation.

However, a SupplyCo would increase a chambers' cost-base, which would drive up rates and undermine one of the Bar's current best selling points for general counsel – value for money. At the same time, it would announce to the market an intention to compete with solicitor firms. With law firms remaining the source of the vast majority of most commercial and Chancery sets' work, this would be a risky strategy – despite Green's assertion that "solicitors will accept [new business models] with a degree of resignation because they have been waiting for the Bar to wake up for years."

It is no wonder, then, that even the commercial chambers more inclined to consider setting up new business units aren't shouting from the rooftops about their plans. "I am sure that ProcureCos will also be taken up by some commercial sets – clients want their lawyers to provide greater efficiencies. This will involve barristers and solicitors working more closely on joint initiatives. However, the Bar will need to take care so as not to alienate some of its other solicitor clients," comments Thirty Nine Essex Street director of clerking David Barnes.

In the short term, what looks most likely is that the established players that make up the Bar's top commercial sets will shy away from the establishment of new business units. Aspirational chambers outside this group, on the other hand, appear much more inclined to experiment. Outer Temple Chambers very much fits this model. To date it is the only commercial chambers to establish a ProcureCo, although the civil law set 12 King's Bench Walk is also in the process of setting one up.

Outer Temple Chambers commercial director Christine Kings says that the ProcureCo has been a convenient way to ringfence the investment made by some, but not all, members of chambers into Outer Temple's international work. Setting it up has also, she adds, "enabled us to learn how companies work and familiarise ourselves with potential options with regard to structures going forward." A SupplyCo, she continues, is "an obvious next step".

The widely differing views regarding alternative business structures also illustrates the challenge for the Bar Council in achieving a united front, given the different challenges facing commercial and public barristers. Beneath superficial messages of solidarity, many at the commercial Bar are uninterested in the brave new world of Tesco Law and, indeed, a good number struggle to find much common cause with their criminal counterparts.

Diversification

Alongside new business models, the other main strategy the Bar Council is pushing is diversification. Most pressingly, Green is urging the public Bar to move into general advisory work – an implicit recognition of the fact that, even if ProcureCos and SupplyCos prove a successful way of siphoning LSC contracts away from solicitors, the shrinking legal aid purse will ultimately lead to less legal aid work for barristers.

An area of opportunity he has particularly in mind is local authority work, the relatively straightforward nature of which makes it ideal for barristers who have previously specialised in other areas to turn their hand to. And the fact that various chambers have recently won places on combined local authority 'super panels', including 26 sets on the North West Legal Consortium, illustrates local authorities' enthusiasm to consider barristers in their tenders.

Other areas, though, would appear trickier for sets traditionally specialising in legal aid work to crack. But the early indications are that this may not stop entrepreneurial chambers having a go. Earlier this year criminal set Argent Chambers established the first-ever ProcureCo to handle commercial compliance and regulatory work, an area which the set's business development manager, Steve Jones, admits Argent has no prior experience in.

While Jones is optimistic about the venture – which sees the set source work itself that it then refers to a panel of around 10 law firms – he concedes that building up a whole new practice in this way is a long-term project. "We've come at this from a standing start so it's obviously going to take time to grow," he says. "But the early indications are extremely positive."

Perhaps concerned about a potential squeeze in commercial work down the line if these kinds of projects take off, Green is urging the established commercial chambers to themselves diversify into servicing more international clients – an area which he believes is currently underexploited.

On this issue, Green wins plenty of support from the leading commercial sets, with many already having seen an increase in the amounts of international work they do over the last few years. "If anything there is a tendency to understate the opportunities here," says Brick Court's Moyler. "Historically few chambers have recognised the vast potential of international work. But that is beginning to change quite rapidly," says Barnes of Thirty Nine Essex Street, where international work now accounts for 20% of turnover – a figure it is aiming to increase to 30% over the next few years.

With a recent survey of international in-house counsel finding that 40% use English law to govern their contracts (by way of comparison, just 14% favoured New York law, the closest competitor) and numbers of arbitrations and mediations in London rising from 20,000 to 34,000 between 2007 and 2009, such ambitions appear realistic.

Recent rises in international work can be accounted for in large part, say barristers, by the growing number of cases arriving on these shores from emerging markets. Bar Council international committee vice chair Chantal-Aimee Doerries QC, a barrister at construction set Atkin Chambers, the first UK chambers to receive the Queen's Award for Enterprise in the International Trade category (in 2005), comments: "Increasingly we're finding a lot of work coming from emerging economies, including work related to large infrastructure projects in areas such as Eastern Europe, Russia, China and Africa. These contracts often involve a range of parties from different countries and will frequently be based on English law." But work for clients in common law, and former common law countries – a more traditional source of international work for the commercial Bar – also remains a core part of barristers' portfolios.

"Caribbean jurisdictions such as Cayman and the Bahamas, plus arbitration centres like Hong Kong and Singapore, are as important as ever – if not more so," says Ali Malek QC (pictured) of 3 Verulam Buildings. Other barristers draw attention to further types of cross-border instructions, such as expert witness appearances in US courts to advise on the English law aspects of a dispute.

To win this work, barristers and clerks are travelling to market their services more than ever before – a process which is seeing individual chambers' brands rise in prominence. In the past year Doerries has been on a host of international trips, including a Bar Council visit to Bahrain and conference speaking engagements in Hong Kong and Vancouver.

And Barnes has made recent visits to Trinidad, Beijing, Singapore, Malaysia and Dubai. Other sets have gone even further, setting up international desks, with Outer Temple Chambers, 20 Essex Street, 3 Stone Buildings and XXIV Old Buildings all recently establishing permanent international bases in the offices of law firms with which they have built links.

"Having these bases gives us a foothold in the market, helping us to build further relationships," says Outer Temple's Kings of the set's offices in New York (established in September) and Abu Dhabi (established in 2007). She adds that Outer Temple has plans to foster further links in other locations like China and parts of Africa.

Such talk is in stark contrast with the kind of chatter taking place at the many struggling chambers specialising in publicly-funded work. The Bar has proven the doubters wrong in the past, with the many forecasts made about its imminent demise over the years turning out to be wide of the mark.

And there appears little doubt that the UK will sustain a vibrant, high-quality legal profession built around advocacy – albeit with a smaller publicly-funded Bar. But it is not yet apparent that enough senior members of the Bar have woken up to the fact that substantial change is a certainty. The impact of the LSA is likely to be less disruptive to the Bar in general than to high street solicitor firms, however the introduction of new business models will by definition continue the gradual blurring between the solicitor and barrister professions that has occurred over the last 20 years.

Models like barrister-led legal disciplinary partnerships or ProcureCos – not to mention the expected introduction of entity-based regulation – look certain to take the corporatisation of the Bar to another level, as chambers take infrastructure and marketing capabilities they have built up over the last 20 years to the next stage. Despite this, the vast majority of barristers remain convinced that the Bar will continue to function as a collection of independent practitioners in a way that they see as fundamentally different from law firms.

On balance, though, the long-term forces shaping the profession largely point to the emergence of a band of entities loosely resembling leanly-run trial law firms or advocacy-based businesses, even if these co-exist alongside a sizeable band of traditional chambers operating at the upper reaches of the commercial market. The desire for a clear line to keep separating barristers from solicitors seems to be wishful thinking. A shrinking profession – and rising higher education fees – will also bring renewed pressure for the Bar as a whole to take steps to counter perceptions of elitism.

By the same token, there is still a degree of complacency from some at the commercial Bar over what it will mean for the profession's identity if their publicly-funded counterparts wither on the vine. The Bar has for decades enjoyed an extraordinary degree of political influence given its tiny size. To a considerable degree, this has been due to its proximity to criminal justice and, of course, the judiciary in general. By association commercial barristers have benefited from this. A good chunk of that clout – to say nothing of the glamour that has helped it attract the brightest and the best – would surely be affected if the criminal Bar falls into disarray. If that were to be the case it would take far more than a few sponsorship deals at Bar Council conferences to fill the missing space.

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Entry to the Bar – the problem that keeps on giving

Last year the number of pupillages fell by almost 100 to 460. But the amount of places on the Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC), which costs up to £15,750, actually increased during that period, rising marginally to 1,793.

The result of this vast discrepancy – the norm for some time now – is a huge backlog of unsuccessful pupillage seekers going back several years. Nicholas Green QC estimates that this means around 4,000 BPTC graduates are fighting it out for those 460 pupillages on offer.

The upside of this brutal tournament is that the Bar is able to hand pick "alpha class" practitioners, as Green (pictured) puts it. Such choice may also help to explain the impressively diverse make up of pupils these days. The most recent figures (2008) show 21% to be from ethnic minority backgrounds – an amount far higher than the equivalent 8% figure for UK society in general (though some would argue that this diversity has largely been achieved by recruiting ethnic minorities from highly privileged backgrounds).

The downside of having so many people chasing so few positions – and paying so much in course fees in the process – is that it raises questions of ethics. "Morally I have real qualms about a system of education which encourages universities to educate more and more law students," said Green in his Bar council conference address. "These students leave university with substantial debts, often exceeding £30,000. They then invest further in professional training only to find that the door into the profession is very small and the waiting room massively overcrowded." For a profession that trades on its high ethical standards, this is a concern.

But the blocking last year of a compulsory aptitude test to gain entry to the BPTC by the Office of Fair Trading on competition grounds means that the current situation is unlikely to change – although it may be eased by the imminent introduction of a voluntary aptitude test.

As such, the outcome of the recently announced joint review of legal education by the Bar Standards Board (BSB), Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Institute of Legal Executives Professional Standards will be closely watched.

Despite the qualms expressed by Green, he is alive to the possibilities for cheap labour the ever-increasing pool of BPTC graduates without pupillages offer. He suggests that forward-thinking sets could employ them to assist in basic litigation tasks through a SupplyCo, one of the new business units the Bar Council has created (and is currently waiting for regulatory approval on). "If entity regulation and direct access are introduced by the BSB, as is likely, then chambers can use corporate vehicles to employ providers of reserved and indeed non-reserved legal services," he says, pointing to the potential a "burgeoning band of paralegals" offer in this respect.

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Legal disciplinary partnerships – don't all rush at once

On 1 April this year the Bar Standards Board (BSB) relaxed its rules preventing barristers from entering law firm partnerships – removing the final hurdle to barristers forming legal disciplinary partnerships (LDPs) with solicitors and non-lawyers. But while it is still early days, so far there has been no stampede of senior barristers rushing away from the Bar to join law firms.

Indeed, the only related move to date in the City legal world has been James Corbett QC's departure from Serle Court Chambers in April to become a partner at the London arm of US trial law firm Kobre & Kim, which became an LDP in June. Corbett, who practised at the Bar for 33 years, believes that more barristers will follow him from the Bar now that law firms can offer the additional carrot of partnership. "The right law firms can offer a barrister a range of things: a new challenge, greater security and now partnership without the burden of re-qualifying as a solicitor. It's an appealing package," he says.

But others believe the incentives for commercial barristers to join a law firm remain very limited. "The Bar is still the best place to be if you're a top advocate because you make more money and don't have any conflict issues," says one litigation partner at a leading City law firm, repeating a common view.

Perhaps one factor that could change this dynamic are plans announced last week by the Ministry of Justice to allow contingency fees, a model of litigation funding that allows lawyers to claim a portion of damages as a success fee. In theory such a move could open up huge earnings for claimant lawyers – though any reform could be years away.

There has been more activity involving law firms using the rule change to promote employed barristers. Penningtons, for example, immediately took advantage of it to make up Nicole Curtis, who was called to the Bar in 1992 and was a member of 1 Paper Buildings until joining the firm's professional regulation team in 2003. And Mills & Reeve acted similarly in June when it promoted barrister Richard Sykes, the head of the firm's public law and regulatory team, to its partnership in May. Meanwhile, Stephenson Harwood made barrister Sara George a partner upon her arrival from Allen & Overy last month – George having previously been a prosecutor with the Financial Services Authority and the Serious Fraud Office.

The vast majority of UK top 50 law firms, however, have not adopted LDP structures, with some, like Bird & Bird, having considered converting but actively deciding against it. For now, luring barristers doesn't appear to be high up their agenda.

For more, see:

• A serious man – the Bar makes a real attempt to modernise
• A vision for the future: the Bar in 10 years' time