So how much do you earn?
Headline Figure
To succeed, you must work
Rich?
No one pretends that a QC or any barrister cannot make a good income. Guesstimates in newspapers are sometimes ridiculously high and at other times rather too low. There is also a tendency to fail to identify what fees actually refer to. Sometimes you will read about how much a particular lawyer received in legal aid payments in a particular year. This doesn’t make clear that although those payments came within one year they may represent work over several years.
^ TOPHeadline Figure
They also fail to identify that these payments are "gross fees". Out of that come chambers expenses and clerks' fees (which could easily total a quarter). Also all of the barrister's individual expenses (books, travel to work, accountancy fees etc) and provision for pension, illness etc (whether for holiday or illness, every day you take off is a day you don't get paid for). What a barrister actually receives is a lot less than the "headline figure".
Not that this is to suggest that barristers cannot make a decent living, or that this Christmas the Barrister's Benevolent Fund should be your charity of choice rather than assisting the starving in Africa. It is just that it seems ironic that the public often perceive barristers as at the top of the earnings league. In fact only a very small number at the top can aspire to the income of a top-level professional footballer, still less the type of money made by successful figures in the City.
^ TOPTo succeed, you must work
When I have given talks at schools to audiences largely consisting of pupils wanting to know about a career in the law, no session goes by without someone asking how much you earn. That is fair enough, (not that I ever give them a straight answer!) but a fair number seem to have drifted into the meeting motivated solely by the earnings. The one definite feature about life at the Bar is that you will never make a go at it if you're only in it for the money. As in any line of work good money is welcome, but to succeed at the Bar you really have to want to do the work. Otherwise the hours of preparation, and the white knuckle ride of appearing in court, will burden you like a curse.
^ TOPRich?
The position regarding the money was graphically illustrated to me a while ago. As an ex-president of the Cambridge Union Society, I was invited back there to take part in a balloon debate. (The idea being that the balloon is in trouble and so the passengers have to be ejected one by one) Four of five people represented different careers or professions, and the audience would vote people out of the balloon one by one, with the winner being the ultimate survivor. Anne Widdecombe MP represented the politicians, I represented the lawyers. The poster for the debate went as follows. "Anne Widdecombe MP: professional liar. Michael Booth QC: rich professional liar.". That probably summarised as well as anything the popular view of the lawyer.
As regards money however, the supreme irony was this. One of the other persons represented the "entrepreneur". According to the Sunday Times Rich list, he was worth about £300 million. No one ever bothered to describe him as rich. It seems that where money is concerned, the press or the public only want to focus on it when it concerns a lawyer.