The Student Room Group

What is it like to be a medical negligence barrister

What’s the difference between being a medical negligence barrister/ solicitor.
How do the roles differ for this feild in particular
It’s an example of an area where the distinction between the roles is pretty much typical. If you know the difference between a solicitor and barrister generally, you can pretty much apply them word for word for a practice area like medical negligence.

In other words, solicitors will have ongoing caseloads where they are responsible on a day to day basis for managing those cases, ensuring directions are complied with etc. The role will be largely office based, and the solicitor will be the point of contact for the client day to day. They’ll be doing things like taking initial instructions from the client, gathering evidence, taking statements, complying with directions, corresponding and negotiating with the other side, and preparing cases for trial that do go to trial. Practically speaking, most solicitors are salaried and will at least strive to work something close to office hours.

Barristers, on the other hand, will have cases that they are repeatedly instructed on, but don’t have ongoing day to day responsibilities. They’ll be involved in cases as and when solicitors instruct them to do something specific. In medical negligence it will be providing advice, possibly including a conference with the client, drafting pleadings (mostly Particulars of Claim and Defences) and attending hearings, including trials. Barristers in this area will attend court a decent amount of the time, and like most barristers, they’ll be self employed and will have no set routine.

The practice area is pretty irrelevant here in terms of choosing between the two roles, because they’re very different. Few people will enjoy both equally.

Reply 2

Solicitors could probably do some advocacy in negligence cases if the Bar council permits it. Barristers love maintaining a monopoly on legal advocacy, outdated profession and extremely elitist.
Original post by Academic007
Solicitors could probably do some advocacy in negligence cases if the Bar council permits it. Barristers love maintaining a monopoly on legal advocacy, outdated profession and extremely elitist.

I see you're back after that exchange you had in a thread in the Law forum with @Stiffy Byng, but the chip on your shoulder is as prominent as ever and your points have gotten no more accurate. Let me set you straight on a few things.

First, the Bar Council has no role in regulating solicitors, including when it comes to advocacy. Barristers have higher rights as a matter of course, but if solicitors want them they are awarded by the SRA, not the Bar Council. So no, the Bar Council does not permit solicitors to do advocacy. It has no involvement in that at all.

Second, solicitors can do advocacy without higher rights, including in interim hearings, including Pre Action Disclosure Hearings, Allocation Hearings, Application Hearings and Case Management Conferences. They can do any of these hearings if they so wish without any additional qualifications, and some do on occasion. But as I say, if they want to do trials on the Fast Track and Multi Track, they can if they obtain their Higher Rights through the SRA (not the Bar Council).

Third, nearly all instructions that barristers receive to do advocacy in clinical negligence cases come from solicitors. It is the solicitors that are actively instructing the barristers to do those hearings. The power to choose who does the advocacy in these cases lies entirely with the solicitor. If the solicitor wants to do a particular hearing themselves, they will, and no barrister has any say in it, nor does the Bar Council. The reason why they don't is because, as you have already been told, solicitors and barristers are distinct professions and tend to be good at different things. Most solicitors do not want to do advocacy, but even for those who do it is normally more in line with their business model to instruct a barrister to do hearings for them.

I know from that other thread that you once harboured ambitions to become a barrister and gave them up. I obviously do not know the detail of your situation and don't know the full reasons why you decided that the Bar wasn't for you, or why you might have thought that you didn't stand a realistic chance of obtaining pupillage. But for whatever time you were considering a career at the Bar, you clearly didn't gain much knowledge of how the profession works in practice, or how solicitors and barristers interact with each other, because your posts in this forum show massive gaps in your understanding of how the legal profession works in general. By all means hold opinions on the Bar, and by all means criticise it. But it would help if you informed yourself about these things at even a basic level, because right now all you're doing is making it clear repeatedly that you have very little idea what you're talking about.

Reply 4

Original post by Crazy Jamie
I see you're back after that exchange you had in a thread in the Law forum with @Stiffy Byng, but the chip on your shoulder is as prominent as ever and your points have gotten no more accurate. Let me set you straight on a few things.
First, the Bar Council has no role in regulating solicitors, including when it comes to advocacy. Barristers have higher rights as a matter of course, but if solicitors want them they are awarded by the SRA, not the Bar Council. So no, the Bar Council does not permit solicitors to do advocacy. It has no involvement in that at all.
Second, solicitors can do advocacy without higher rights, including in interim hearings, including Pre Action Disclosure Hearings, Allocation Hearings, Application Hearings and Case Management Conferences. They can do any of these hearings if they so wish without any additional qualifications, and some do on occasion. But as I say, if they want to do trials on the Fast Track and Multi Track, they can if they obtain their Higher Rights through the SRA (not the Bar Council).
Third, nearly all instructions that barristers receive to do advocacy in clinical negligence cases come from solicitors. It is the solicitors that are actively instructing the barristers to do those hearings. The power to choose who does the advocacy in these cases lies entirely with the solicitor. If the solicitor wants to do a particular hearing themselves, they will, and no barrister has any say in it, nor does the Bar Council. The reason why they don't is because, as you have already been told, solicitors and barristers are distinct professions and tend to be good at different things. Most solicitors do not want to do advocacy, but even for those who do it is normally more in line with their business model to instruct a barrister to do hearings for them.
I know from that other thread that you once harboured ambitions to become a barrister and gave them up. I obviously do not know the detail of your situation and don't know the full reasons why you decided that the Bar wasn't for you, or why you might have thought that you didn't stand a realistic chance of obtaining pupillage. But for whatever time you were considering a career at the Bar, you clearly didn't gain much knowledge of how the profession works in practice, or how solicitors and barristers interact with each other, because your posts in this forum show massive gaps in your understanding of how the legal profession works in general. By all means hold opinions on the Bar, and by all means criticise it. But it would help if you informed yourself about these things at even a basic level, because right now all you're doing is making it clear repeatedly that you have very little idea what you're talking about.

You are wrong it's not simply a business model but solicitor advocates are seen as an active threat to the barrister profession. Most of the work in chambers are reserved for the senior barristers and most of the selection process is extremely elitist(Oxbridge only).

The Bar council is afraid of losing it's Monopoly in advocacy. Solicitor advocates are constantly attacked by the bar council that considers them less skilled or qualified.

To add my interest in the Bar stemmed from doing internal moot competitions and having a committee role in Mooting society so I know what I'm talking about because I did research the profession.
(edited 8 months ago)

Reply 5

Original post by Academic007
You are wrong it's not simply a business model but solicitor advocates are seen as an active threat to the barrister profession. Most of the work in chambers are reserved for the senior barristers and most of the selection process is extremely elitist(Oxbridge only).
The Bar council is afraid of losing it's Monopoly in advocacy. Solicitor advocates are constantly attacked by the bar council that considers them less skilled or qualified.
To add my interest in the Bar stemmed from doing internal moot competitions and having a committee role in Mooting society so I know what I'm talking about because I did research the profession.

Crazy Jamie has carefully explained the reality, but you have ignored everything that he wrote. His knowledge is based on years of experience, not on doing some mooting, and drawing erroneous conclusions from reading stuff on the internet.

I add that the junior members of my chambers, who are inundated with work, would laugh at your suggestion that work is reserved for senior members of chambers.

You seem chippy about the Bar and about Oxbridge. You could try to be a barrister if you wanted. You might succeed, or you might not. You could have applied to Oxford or Cambridge. You might have been accepted, or you might not. Raging against imaginary injustices is plain silly.
(edited 8 months ago)

Reply 6

I add that solicitor advocates have been around since the 1990s, but not that many solicitors take that route. You appear to overlook the fact that a great many solicitors do no disputes work, and are engaged in advice and drafting about transactions. Many solicitors are very specialised and do things which few or no barristers do. As an example, securitisation work is done almost exclusively by solicitors, as is most work about pensions.

Most barristers have a practice centered on disputes, although there are a few who only advise (for example on wills, partnerships, and trusts) It's not uncommon for solicitors to switch to the Bar, and some who do so become KCs.

If your suppositions about anti-competitive behaviour were correct, the Competition and Markets Authority would have acted years ago.

The two main branches of the legal profession complement one another. In a properly organised solicitor/barrister team on a big case, you might find Silk, Junior, Partner, Associate, and Trainee, everyone with an efficient role to play.

Every High Street firm of solicitors has available to it the entire resources of the Bar if a client walks in with a case outside the firm's usual experience. I've been led by David Pannick KC in cases in which we were instructed by Joe High Street and Co acting for Mr and Mrs Scroggins, as well as in cases instructed by Herbert Smith acting for Global Megagreed PLC . Not every case needs Lord Pannick, and the small High Street firm can extend its coverage by instructing junior barristers to cover the firm's work in county courts, magistrates' courts, and tribunals.

In those common law jurisdictions where the legal profession is fused, there are still disputes lawyers who work mainly on referrals from other lawyers. For example, a law firm in New Mexico might fly in a big name trial lawyer from New York to handle an important case. Some of the leading US trial lawyers are Silks in all but name.

The current system survives because it works, not because it is propped up by Spanish Customs.
(edited 8 months ago)
Original post by Academic007
You are wrong it's not simply a business model but solicitor advocates are seen as an active threat to the barrister profession. Most of the work in chambers are reserved for the senior barristers and most of the selection process is extremely elitist(Oxbridge only).

The Bar council is afraid of losing it's Monopoly in advocacy. Solicitor advocates are constantly attacked by the bar council that considers them less skilled or qualified.

To add my interest in the Bar stemmed from doing internal moot competitions and having a committee role in Mooting society so I know what I'm talking about because I did research the profession.

As much as I am happy to engage in debate on the internet, it is important to recognise when there is inequality of arms, and when one person is speaking with significantly more authority than the other. I am not wrong, and the reason I am not wrong is because I am an actual practising barrister who is speaking from a position of experience and expertise. You are a recent student who is engaging in this debate by googling newspaper articles to support your position, the most relevant of which are over ten years old.

You simply do not know what you are talking about. You are starting from your conclusion and then working backwards which, it has to be said, is not a great trait in a prospective lawyer. I can only repeat that if solicitors wished to do more advocacy they absolutely could, because the decision as to whether or not to instruct a barrister to do a hearing lies with them. They rarely do their own advocacy in areas such as medical negligence and personal injury, but it is much more common for solicitors to do their own advocacy in other practice areas such as employment, family and crime. If you had even read the articles that you'd linked to, you'd realise that the historic issues that the Bar had with solicitor advocates were actually mostly in crime, and specifically HCAs doing cases in the Crown Court. That is competition that has existed since 1992 and, frankly, the competition from HCAs really isn't talked about as often these days, as criminal practitioners generally have other problems. But even if it was a big problem, it simply doesn't apply to other areas of practice in the same way. Again, if you actually understood these issues rather than trying to reverse engineer your arguments, you would know this.

As for Bar recruitment and practice, again, every single thing you have said is inaccurate. The majority of pupils do not come from Oxbridge, which is something you could have actually researched if you were minded to, because pupillage statistics are published annually and freely available. The point about work being reserved for senior members is simply nonsensical and shows so much ignorance that I struggle to know where to start with it. Most Chambers have a lot of work, and more than enough to go around for all members. More junior members, unsurprisingly, do more junior work, whilst the more senior members do the more significant work. That is so obvious that I'm surprised I even need to write it, but there we are. It's very much that sort of conversation. Moreover, work is not allocated by barristers, but by the clerks. Again, a very basic point about how things work in practice that you seem to not understand.

You can say all you like that you know what you're talking about, but you absolutely do not. My tendency would normally be to not engage in any sort of detail with nonsense like this, but I am aware that these forums are read by students and others who are looking for information about a prospective career. So I think it's quite important to take the time rebut things like this properly, as otherwise there's a risk that students who are reading a thread like this at some point in future might actually think that there's any truth at all in the utter nonsense that you're writing.

Reply 8

Well said.

Academic 007, being angry and chippy won't get you anywhere. Why not take the time to learn about the legal careers you may be interested in?

If you remain stubbornly convinced that it's all a racket, there are plenty of other careers you could try for.

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