Starter's orders part 8

Pupillage lasts for a year and you want to take holidays. At the same time you don't want to miss any opportunity to impress or to get some work of your own in. Balancing those two things can be somewhat difficult.

Pupils also tend to be somewhat wary of the clerks. The view of the clerks is likely to be that pupils should be available at all times during the holidays, even if the view is not expressed in precisely that way. (It would be interesting to see what the response would be if pupils were to suggest that all of the clerks should be available at all times during the holidays). Clerks are always an important part of assessing pupils, because whilst written work can be assessed by members, and a pupil master will often go to court to watch his or her pupil in action, much of the work which the pupil will do in court will never actually be seen by other members. Clerks are in the business of selling barristers to solicitors for work on particular cases. As part of that they will be offering barristers for cases, and discussing with the solicitors which barristers they would be happy with to work on particular cases. Even amongst barristers who would all be described as excellent, solicitors will have their preferences. Just as no two premiership managers would have the same view about players, so no two solicitors will have such a view. The difference of course is that a barrister is not joining one club, they are doing different jobs for lots of different solicitors. Clerks will get a feel for how barristers are going down with the solicitors and essentially whether they are going to be able to market that barrister to solicitors. Clerks will always be important to pupils because they are the ones who are selling the pupil into the marketplace and who will be reporting back to the pupil master.

Although the clerks are interested in what the barrister can do rather than assessing the barrister on their own idiosyncratic viewpoint, clerks want pupils to be available so that if they get any chance of selling them they can use it. Pupils have no established market and no track record. They are therefore more of a "hard sell" than an established barrister, not least because when someone is a pupil the chambers have not yet decided whether to keep them or not. When a barrister is given a tenancy, that is to some extent a public recognition of quality. Being given a pupillage is also a recognition of quality, but not quite at the same level. Holidays are when firms are shorthanded. There is more of a chance of picking things up in such circumstances.

Unfortunately pupils do not tend to have much money. Therefore if they want to get away on holiday it is easier if they book it long in advance. That of course will usually be before they know what is in the diary. The best way to go about it is to ask the pupil master what is reasonable and appropriate, get the date sorted out, get the pupil master to liaise with the clerks and then have the holiday booked. As a general rule try and avoid asking about holidays in the first two or three weeks. Pupils who want to book a holiday within a few days of arriving can tend to appear less than committed.

What pupils have to remember to do is to make sure that any papers they have on cases are fully accounted for before they go away. It will inevitably be set of papers or the brief which they have left on their desk at home which is then urgently required because of some application or sudden urgency in the matter. Making that elementary error will be remembered far more than your good performance in a dozen or so cases in the run-up to that. Pupils have seriously blotted their copybook that way

Unfortunately it often seems to be that pupils who try and avoid taking a holiday unless it is convenient who end up with the biggest mess arising. I know of one pupil who did her best to keep herself available during the holiday period. Nothing was coming in and so she booked and paid for a week away and then suddenly was offered a case for that week. She decided to take the case. Unfortunately the fee was all but swallowed up by the money she had lost paying for a holiday she never took. She probably felt under more pressure to take the case because she had originally indicated she would be available. It assisted her career to take the case, and showed how committed she was, but it seems somewhat unfair that a person who would try to always be available found herself in that position when others who had been less accommodating had no such problems.