Who wants to be a lawyer?
A recent survey in the newspapers showed that one in three male lawyers would discourage their children from entering the legal profession. Actually I thought that was rather a low figure. I would have expected it to be higher.
Speaking from the perspective of a barrister, everyone always discourages you from being one. You will hardly ever get a barrister who will tell you that you ought to become one. Instead they will talk about the pressure. Possibly they will mention that you're only as good as your last case. They will speak of the years of toil before you start to make real money. Criminal barristers may say that it is impossible to make real money any more. You will be told horror stories about how difficult it is to find pupillage, how difficult it is to get a place in chambers, how difficult it is to build a practice. It will be pointed out that building a practice involves hard work and long hours so that you must expect to be working most evenings. You will get a complete tale of woe from start to finish.
The reason you get all of this thrown at you, is because it is all true. Not that that stops being a barrister an absolutely brilliant and enthralling occupation. There are many things to appreciate: the adrenaline rush of submissions or cross examination; the feeling of satisfaction when you have played a case just right; the satisfaction of really having made a difference to a client's life; the buzz of just managing to comply with a deadline; the intellectual challenge and satisfaction of sorting out a knotty problem. It is just that there is a lot of pressure and hard work that goes into achieving these things. Unless you can cope with those, you will never get near to experiencing or enjoying the good aspects of the profession.
Imagine someone who wanted to be a boxer. They would like the idea of the roar of the crowd, the status of being a champion, the money from the big title fight. All those are perfectly understandable, but if you could not put up with the relentless training and dieting and a long hard road through poorly paid fights before you got to the big time then you would have no chance of success and would be wasting your time. Similarly no one who was ever just in love with the glamorous idea of being a barrister would ever be happy doing it. I know lots of barristers who are very happy with their work, but that is because they understood what was coming when they started, but wanted to do it nonetheless.
If you are really determined to be a barrister, if you are prepared to learn and to work and to improve, then no words of caution will ever put you off. If you are not ready, then the words of caution will save you a lot of heartache. As far as barristers are concerned I suspect that many of them would discourage their children from becoming barristers in the same way that to some extent they would discourage anyone. Those who are really suited to it will plough on regardless. Only those who are suited to it should ever consider it. Therefore, insofar as the survey considers the position of barristers, I'm surprised that the percentage who would discourage their children is not even higher.