AT: I’ve seen a lot of changes in the 47 years I’ve been doing this. When I started, there was no email, no mobile phones; if a letter or information needed to move quickly, you did it by hand. I got to know London very well that way. There wasn’t really a career path back then; I was probably the first of a new breed of clerks coming into the profession. It was very much a friends-and-family business and that’s how people learned about the job.
What it’s evolved into now is a genuinely sophisticated structure. Take a set like Fountain Court – 116 members, 46 King’s Counsel. There’s a real career path today.
One of the differences between the English legal profession and India, or other overseas jurisdictions, is that we have both barristers and solicitors. The barrister is the advocate; our work comes through solicitors on behalf of their clients. I think we fortunately work much more closely and collaboratively, but we’ll be the interface between the solicitor and the barrister. The clerk is the interface between the two. Our job ranges from accepting instructions to guiding solicitors who don’t yet know who they want to work with, liaising with court officials and negotiating fees on the barristers’ behalf. That’s one of the odder arrangements in our system: barristers have no contact with, or discussion about, their own fees. That’s all done through the clerking team.
There’s a business development side too, which has grown significantly over the last 10–20 years. We have a BD team, but relationships are still central to the job. And that’s something good clerks have to be genuinely comfortable with. It’s the part I enjoy most.