to consider retraining as a barrister later in life?

[RedPanda71]

There's a thread from 2011 about this, but not much since and I wonder if things have changed for the better or the worse since then.

I'd be an ancient retrainer (47!), but I do have an Oxbridge 1st (placed 7th in my year), an academic postgrad degree (distinction), an Ivy League visiting fellowship and have had a successful 20-year career in the media.

I know a few silks and am not intellectually intimidated by them, nor by the workload. But I'm (suddenly, it seems) rather old. The question is whether my age would rule me out completely. I do have some savings/assets so can contemplate giving the GDL->BPTC-?>pupillage run a go. But is this a fool's errand?

If not, does anyone know whether distance-learning or p/t GDL is considered as less valuable than a full-time one? The advantage of the former, of course, is that I could continue to earn while doing the conversion.

Be gentle with me, please!

We had just the one student over 40 during my BPTC year. Maybe 5 over 30, not very many fresh out of their undergrad, most in their late 20s.

Like you, the over 40 had a successful career and impressive academics. She put an enormous effort into each class but seemed to really struggle with the extra curriculars expected of her.

I would say it’s best to be aware of exactly what each stage entails before signing up. Doing well in your undergrad has no bearing on how you’ll perform on the BPTC and an awful lot is expected of you during that year.

If you can, attend some law fairs and speak to current BPTC students and pupils to get an insight into how things are now. The course is significantly different to what it once was when your QC pals did it as the BVC.

Barrister here. You have had good advice on this thread. My main concern were I interviewing you would be your expectations of your early years of practice - as others have said, you won’t be fast tracked into high powered work straight away just because you are older and have broader life experience - what matters is your experience as a litigator. The only circumstances in which people tend to punch above their year of call is if the previous job was directly relevant to their field of practice. Someone I know was a surgeon before becoming a barrister and as he has chosen to specialise in clinical negligence he has progressed more quickly.

My second concern would be how teachable you are. You may end up sitting with a pupil supervisor who is some years younger in age. How well would you be able to accept (sometimes quite stringent) criticism and guidance from a much younger person? More generally, how flexible will you be about developing new ways of thinking/working? think you need to be honest with yourself about this. We see a lot of older candidates on assessment and so many of them have amazing qualifications but find it hard to be adaptable, or appear patronising to younger candidates in group exercises.

Agree with all of this too.

Basically with any retraining, there's a certain amount of shit to eat at the start. Lower earnings even if just while you study, not knowing anything, being at the bottom of the pile and having to work your way up. When you're young and done nothing else, it can be less difficult to stick at it because you've not got anything better to compare it to and you don't have a nice alternative to fall back on. Whereas if you've already got a fun, better paid and generally easier life you could go back to, you will have to really want it, in order to stay motivated to have perhaps two or three goes at pupillage if you need it, keep doing the work that is objectively much less interesting and prestigious than what you have previously done in media and academia etc.

So I'm not saying don't do it, but in a way I think career changers can need even more motivation than the twentysomethings. If you have it, great.

It’s a dying profession and can be really tough to get the work (because it almost exclusively comes from solicitors). Given you age I don’t think you have to worry too much about ending up entirely redundant (I expect barristers will be an essential part of litigation for at least another 30 years). But you do have bare in mind that you’ll never making it to the top earning bracket because experience counts for so much. You may also find it hard to find a permanent position in a chambers in which case you might end up moving from pillar to post for the rest of your career. If your earnings aren’t great and you actually want to do the work then go for it but just understand that it will be different for you that it is for the people you know who were called to the bar in their twenties. Also consider how well you fit in with the legal crowd and generally how likeable you are. You livibgwill depend on your ability to get solicitors who regularly use you as well as you ability to play politics with chambers.

Also consider how well you fit in with the legal crowd and generally how likeable you are

I am dealing with a very complex multimillion pound piece of litigation atm. Client has spend hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal costs (solicitor and barrister combined). When we were looking for a QC I made suggestions and the client then literally chose from the photos they liked the look of and my advice as to how "friendly, normal and easy to get on with" I felt they were..

Obviously I'd shortlisted them first and so they were all capable of doing a good job but it really does illustrate how important these things are.

I don't think that age is necessarily an issue but it is a difficult profession to get into since pupillages are so limited in number - especially if you are thinking about one of the top-notch chambers which are always massively over-subscribed. I have a friend who is doing this at the moment and is about your age. He has studied fantastically hard and got excellent results but is struggling to get pupillage. He has managed to do a number of mini-pupillages direct with various chambers but the Pupillage Gateway is proving completely inflexible for someone with a different career track.

Years ago, I went out with a junior barrister and he was always skint and spent most of his early years schlepping up and down the country to do hearings in the county courts for very little return.

Interesting comment in a PP saying that it is "far and away" more interesting than being a solicitor. Having been a solicitor for some decades, I can confidently tell you that, while it might be true in some cases, it is complete and utter rubbish in others, especially now we can get higher rights of audience! As for "don't earn hugely more than solicitors" - again, not sure where that information is coming from. It depends entirely on where you work, what your specialism is and what your reputation in the market is - and that goes for both barristers and solicitors. Yes, there are some very high paying sets (generally commercial and chancery) but those are highly competitive.

If you don't need it to guarantee a high salary then go for it - I still find the area of law I work in endlessly fascinating and every day is a school day, even decades in. If you manage to get to one to the top sets with stellar earnings it will be a bonus

Another thing to bear in mind, if you take the solicitor route you can always transfer over once you’ve gained experience/clients. The solicitor route is far easier (feeling the solicitor glares at that comment). It doesn’t work the other way though, which is ridiculous.

We had a number of students on the BPTC who realised the bar wasn’t for them. Unfortunately though as they’d paid for it, they chose to endure it. They spent their time making TC applications and found the BPTC a hindrance as some firms believed it showed a lack of research and commitment to be switching over so soon.

I'm currently a pupil barrister (for context, I'm under 30.) I completed the Bar course last year, and there were very few older students in my cohort, although I think a large part of that is that the older students tend to do it part-time, rather than full-time, because they're juggling paid work and families as well, so our paths just didn't cross. If you look at the profiles of recent tenants on chambers' sites, you do see the occasional person who came to the Bar later in life - but that's almost always because they were previously a solicitor and have transferred over. I would think very, very long and hard about your chances of securing pupillage, and perhaps even more, what the life of a barrister is actually like (clue: very, very hard.) Can I ask what attracts you to the Bar? Have you had any experience through mini-pupillages or marshalling?

Unless OP would actually be happy being a solicitor, I don't know that I'd recommend it in this case. It would mean at minimum doing three years of something she's not as interested in (LPC plus TC) before being able even theoretically to be able to switch. With no guarantee of success then.

I've known people who were solicitors and became barristers who were happy with the process, but 3 years+ seems a lot to potentially sacrifice of probably 20 more years before retirement. Especially if you have something you're successful and earning a living at now.

That said OP, if you think being a solicitor advocate might suit you, that could well be a better choice than the bar.

Unless OP would actually be happy being a solicitor, I don't know that I'd recommend it in this case.

Plus getting a training contract is ridiculously difficult and many people never manage it. Those that do often have a significant amount of paralegal experience under their belt. With probable recession on the horizon it would be a strange thing to do.

for a lot of in house media business affairs roles you wouldn't need all the retraining; a number of the really senior ones are not qualified solicitors or barristers and your decades' of experience will really count. None of the great media silks I know live by media work alone by the way (& that's at silk level)

If the legal world excites you could you become an expert witness in your current field? That would still be an intellectual challenge, can be done alongside another role and can involve court appearances.

I’ve met several and they earned good money.

Matildacat makes an excellent point. I work extensively with expert witnesses and always think they have a very good gig.

Thank you all very much for giving me so much to think about!
It's kind of you to write at such length.

YY much more common now to paralegal for a bit first. Particularly outside corporate circles. In some ways I think that's no bad thing because it means you have some idea what you're doing before the training contract starts. I think a stint paralegalling before mine would've allowed me to get much more out of it then I did.

But it's more time spent doing something other than what OP wants to do, it's almost invariably poorly paid (and I say this as someone who was on the minimum wage for trainees back when that was a thing) and there's still no guarantee of anything at the end of it.

Did you retrain in the end, @RedPanda71 ?