Clerk’s days numbered

Press, 30 December 1988, Page 16

Clerk’s days numbered

From the “Economist,” London

DOCKERS and printers were once Britain’s answers to the dodo: models of outmoded behaviour and restrictive practice that refused to evolve. Recently, the professions have earned this label, but even they are now being forced to change. One dodo remains stuck in the past: the barrister’s clerk, his very name a survival from the pre-Darwinian age. The Bar in England and Wales has around 350 senior clerks (one for each set of barristers’ “chambers” or offices) and 800 juniors. Clerks run barristers’ diaries. They fix changes in case dates or timing with court officials. They negotiate with solicitors over their barristers’ work and, especially, fees. Their biggest source of power is a hidden one: they often decide which barrister should get a brief in their chambers. They can thus make or break a young barrister’s career.

The clerks — like dockers and printers in the past — tend to be drawn from one self-perpetuat-ing social group: white, lower middle-class men, many of whose fathers or uncles have been in the same trade.

Few have any post-school qual-

ifications, let alone management training — although their association now puts training on offer, including a two-year fur-ther-education course. Not that there can be much complaint about their efficiency: they keep administrative costs low. Barristers resent the clerks’ power and restrictive practices (quite distinct from the Bar’s own, m’lud). For example, a barrister cannot practise without a clerk. But what is most resented is their money. Tradition gives a clerk a percentage of his barristers’ fees — which in extreme cases can mean the clerk picks up more than SNZ3OO,OOO a year. Some of this is changing. Some new senior clerks are accepting

lower salaries instead of fee percentages, but old ones don’t. Do not blame the clerks. They are merely defending their privileges. The blame lies with barristers, readier to grumble about the system than to incur their own clerk’s wrath by altering it. More change will come. One reason is computers. The slow spread of information technology through the English legal system will transform diary-keeping and court-case listing, and eventually catch up with lawyers’ own working practices. The second reason is more immediate. The Bar is itself under threat from a Government determined to introduce competition into white-collar trades. A green paper on the legal profession is expected soon. If barristers had to compete for business with solicitors and other advisers, they would also have to employ real business managers to develop their practices. Some think that the best way to ward off enforced change might be to break with the clerking system now. Dodos always find in the end that their days are numbered. Copyright — The Economist