Being there part 5
One of the most common occurrences of barristers not being in the right place at the right time arises from them being "cross courted". This is a particular hazard for younger junior barristers.
Imagine you are a junior barrister doing crime. You might be doing anything from two to half a dozen or more cases on a particular day. Most of them will be relatively brief: a plea in mitigation for someone pleading guilty, or dealing with the sentence of someone either committed for sentence from the magistrates or appealing against the sentence they received there. Also case management hearings, deciding directions for trial and the like.
However you will have nothing so simple as all the cases being heard in the same court. These cases might be being heard in as many as three different court rooms. (Occasionally a barrister may have to face even more court rooms, but that is a disaster waiting to happen which does not even bear thinking about). Let us assume that the listing has been reasonably sensible and that you have been given cases that you ought to be able to do (as opposed for example to having in each court the case which is first on at 10:30 a.m.). In theory you should have no problems. Unfortunately practice is usually rather different from theory.
One difficulty here is that you will not be the only barrister in that situation. Therefore whilst you're ready to go ahead, your opponent may be in another court room. Thus you will have to wait. There is often an enormous amount of jockeying for position as barristers try to influence precisely which cases are heard in which order. There is always a risk that it is the more senior ones who get their way and the more junior ones who find that they are inconvenienced.
The real problem comes when a Judge is left unable to do any work because the court has to wait for a barrister to arrive. A barrister might keep any number of courts waiting to deal with the particular case, but that doesn't really matter as long as they have other cases that they can get on with. If however you are the poor barrister who keeps having to wait for other people to finish their cases, once you have been knocked down the pecking order in more than one court you face the risk that ultimately, after you have been sitting around waiting for other people for most of the day, you will have two cases called on into different courts where in each case the Judge has nothing else left to. That is the point at which the Judge goes ballistic with you because you are not there. The fact that if the court had dealt with the cases in the original listed order you would have been fine never seems to matter.
Ultimately therefore in those situations it is a bit like musical chairs. You do not want to be the one left standing (or in this case still cross courted) when the music stops. Although cross courted refers to your being split across more than one court, it could equally well described the typical attitude of the Judge to being kept waiting as a result. To a Judge, you're still late for court even if you gave your name in the right time and took every possible step to ensure that you could be in court when the case was heard.