Starter's orders part 6

Eagerness is a good quality for a pupil to have. However it is not always an unmixed blessing. The pupil has to be eager but has to ensure that that eagerness is neither offputting nor makes them overextend themselves.

When I was a pupil I remember once being sent on a directions hearing in a property case. It was a fairly simple hearing, and involved travelling to a distant court by train for about an hour and a half, attending a brief hearing, and then returning to chambers. There was nothing dramatic likely to happen, and presumably this was why everyone was content that a pupil should undertake the hearing in the first place.

The barrister whose case it was had a word with me beforehand. He was obviously a good judge of character. He said that he could tell that I was eager to get into court and make my mark. This, he explained, was not the time to do it. I was told in no uncertain terms that he did not want me to try and engineer some spectacular coup so that I could return in triumph. Whilst it might work, it might not, and it might lead to unnecessary appeals. I was not to try and engineer some form of summary application or come up with some bright idea to turn this from an ordinary directions hearing into a confrontational set piece battle. Since in the five minutes I had been looking at the papers I had been trying to identify a point which we could use to do exactly that, the barrister was obviously a shrewd judge of character. However it was his case, and he was the person who knew what he wanted. I was duly dispatched to the distant court whilst kept under a very firm leash, and I behaved myself and did not attempt anything spectacular.

Whilst there is nothing wrong in trying something spectacular, experience is a pretty useful basis for ensuring that it will work. An ambitious pupil eager to make his or her mark is probably far more likely to get it wrong than to get it right, if only through lack of experience. If a player on his debut for the England football team tries to lob the goalkeeper from the halfway line and instead hits the corner flag, it is unlikely to advance his career any more than will a flop in the court room caused through being overambitious. There is a further aspect to this analogy. Being willing to try the spectacular and the difficult can be a feature of a good barrister just as it can be a characteristic of a good football player. The trick is to do it sparingly and in circumstances where it is worthwhile, rather than attempting a dramatic flourish in circumstances where something much simpler will be equally or more effective (and as simpler be more likely to succeed). In the professions it is a good rule, as in professional sport, not to try and run before you can walk. Ambition and desire are important qualities for any barrister, and their colleagues would almost certainly prefer to have a pupil who had to be restrained from overambitious submissions, rather than have one who was not very keen at all to go to court and get stuck in.

Experience is crucial before attempting the exceedingly difficult. Otherwise a prospective barrister may be put off by the failure, just as the prospective footballer could have been by hitting the corner flag and hearing the cheers of the crowd. A full onslaught from an unimpressed Judge is no less intimidating.