Shock and Awe part 3

Despite everything I have said about ability and reputation, every barrister must realise that reputation may count for nothing. Brilliant advocates have made submissions that have fallen flat or gone down like the proverbial lead balloon. Renowned cross examiners have failed to make the slightest impression on witnesses, and have sometimes found witness scoring points off them. Tiger Woods may be a brilliant golfer, but he cannot perform to the peak of his potential every time he walks on to a golf course, and in addition on occasions the rub of the green may go against him. Advocacy and the associated skills involved in examining witnesses are no different from any other performance skill in this respect.

Most importantly, a barrister must never start to believe his own propaganda. The saying is that a barrister is only ever as good as his last case. Whilst that it is a bit of an exaggeration, it is not much of one. Recently a renowned QC had a high profile case which went badly wrong. In the immediate aftermath all lawyers could talk about was the failure of that particular case, rather than a string of successes which had gone before hand. In part this is human nature. The late Jeff Astle scored hatfuls of goals for West Brom, but the thing everyone remembers is his glaring miss of an open goal playing for England against Brazil when it seemed much harder to miss than to score.

It is also however a reflection of the competitive nature of the law. Apart from literally a handful of barristers at the very top, or those just starting out, every barrister (save for those who've either reached their "comfort zone" or have recognize that they have got as far as they are ever likely to get and there is no point wasting their energy and courting disaster trying to go further, rather they shall consolidate what they have) is subject to two pressures. One is the pressure to try and improve your practice to overtake those ahead of you (whether because they have better or more valuable or high-profile cases, or because you want to move into a particular niche of work that so far has eluded you). The other is the pressure to fend off those ambitious barristers coming up behind you who want your work. In one of David Lodge's novels set in the university English department in the fictional city of Rummidge (closely modelled on Birmingham), one of his most memorable characters is a visiting American professor called Morris Zapp, a middle-aged Jewish academic who would go jogging at about normal walking pace with a large cigar clamped firmly in his mouth. One character asked him why he tried to stay in shape. He is the person if they could hear the buzz, the noise. The person asked Mr Zapp what noise? Mr Zapp said the noise of young men in a hurry. "In a hurry to do what?" he was asked. "In a hurry to get older men like me out of the way" was his response. If you substitute young men and women in a hurry, and older men and women, that is a reasonable picture of the competitive nature of the bar. Save in this respect. Savour the outset, or the absolute pinnacle of a career, often those who have decided that this is as good as it gets, every barrister faces the twin pressures off trying to advance and trying to protect the practice you have. When you were very junior those pressures are relatively weak, they obviously increased exponentially with seniority, but they're there nonetheless.

To those who have read the Jungle book (watching the very different Disney film does not count for these purposes) you may remember that the leader of the wolf pack was Akela. In order to retain the leadership of the pack he had to be able to spring upon and kill a deer during the hunt. As he grew older and his strength out, everyone was constantly waiting for the moment when he would fail in his leap and be deposed (and killed). You do not get killed as a result of a declining practice at the Bar, but otherwise there is some relevance in the analogy