Life as a Commercial Junior

Hello and welcome to this Brick Court Chamber's podcast. I'm Tony Singler and today I'm going to be speaking to two Brick Court juniors, Sophie Shaw and Van Shah's Jane, about practice at the commercial bar. Sophie was called to the bar in 2015 and has worked on a number of high profile cases, including Manchester Building Society and Grant Fountain, a professional negligence case which went to the Supreme Court on the so-called Samco Principle, and more recently the claim brought by the administrators of NMC against Ernstson Young and she's currently instructed in the Russian aircraft litigation. Van Shah's joined chambers more recently in 2023, following a period in academia. He has already obtained a considerable amount of trial experience, having acted in McDonald Hotels and Bank of Scotland, which was a claim for breach of a Brigandser implied term that went to trial in 2024, and like Sophie was also instructed in the NMC litigation. Van Shah's to start with, I'm sure many of our listeners are curious about what life at the commercial bar actually involves day to day. Can you describe your typical week as a junior at the commercial bar? Well, Tony, I don't think there is any typical week. The actual tasks one has to engage with can vary quite a bit. For instance, just in the last two months I've worked on an application for permission to appeal to the Court of Appeal, an application to the AISC Court in Kazakhstan to set aside an arbitral award, a journal article about the Brigandser duty which was published earlier this month, all of this while preparing for an upcoming fight week trial in the commercial court, and that really shows you the diversity of the work you can benefit from even as a junior, there's never a boring day at the office. So you've told us there isn't a typical week, but would you say there are any typical features of life as a commercial junior? Yes, of course, I think there are at least three features of life as a commercial junior that remain quite consistent and that can be quite enjoyable once you get used to them. The first is unpredictability. I usually start my day with one key task, but invariably that task is interrupted numerous times because of correspondence or applications from the other side, draft letters or queries from my solicitors or tasks from my leaders. You have to constantly have a timetable running in your mind, but also be very flexible and be willing to change the priority of those tasks at short notice. The second feature is mastery of the details. As the most junior member of a council team, you're usually the person who will look first to documents, whether they're witness statements or expert reports or disclosure. And you're also usually the person who will have the privilege to look at those documents for the greatest length of time. And that means you can really acquire a mastery of the details of the case. For instance, the timeline of events, the contents of correspondence, the methodology used by an expert, the key words used in a disclosure exercise. And that can feel quite empowering as a junior because what you may sometimes lack in experience, you can make up with that mastery of the details. And finally, honing your drafting skills. As a junior, you're also ordinarily the person in the council team who is preparing first drafts of documents, skeleton arguments or written submissions for trial or notes of advice, which are then looked at by others in the team. The advantage of this is that you're constantly getting feedback when you're drafting and you're constantly honing your drafting skills. It can be quite satisfying to see that growth in your written advocacy over just a short period of time. Thanks, Vanshaj. Sophie, do you think there are any aspects of life at the commercial bar that are misunderstood by those at university or at bar school? I think there's quite a common misconception that commercial barristers work in a very solitary way and can be quite isolated. That's true to a point. As Vanshaj has just explained, we do spend quite a lot of time, especially at the more junior end, doing legal research and drafting documents, which are largely individual activities. But the work is in fact very collaborative. We often work in teams of barristers and even in cases where you're instructed on your own, you're still working alongside at your instructing solicitors. Especially as I've gradually got more senior, I've been quite a lot of my time considering questions that come in from solicitors, both about the day-to-day running of cases and the overall strategy, and then on video calls discussing those matters. Even in relation to the legal research and drafting tasks, while the juniors usually work on the first questions, you then work as a team to hone the drafts, providing and incorporating comments and discussing the lines being taken. So it is often much more sociable than people might think. And looking back, if you could give yourself a piece of advice on the first day that you started practice, what would that be? I've received some extremely good advice from one of my pupils' advices, which was, if you're dealing with a difficult question, either of substantive law or strategy, take a step back and think about what the common sense position is. You obviously need to be completely on top of a strict legal position, be that the case law or the relevant procedural rules, and your conclusion must reflect those, but it is important to step back and check that where those rules or decisions have led you is to a position that actually makes sense from a practical perspective too. I find that looking at things from the common sense end of the telescope can often prompt you to consider another angle or a read-through that is likely to be attractive to a judge. Often by the time a problem has reached us, or is requiring a lot of thought, there's no clear answer in the existing law or procedural framework, and in filling that gap, common sense and practical perspective can play a big role. Vanshaj, is there anything you wish you'd understood before you came to the bar? Well, it's actually something that you told me when I was your pupil Tony, and it's something I wish I'd appreciated the significance of earlier, which is the importance of finding ways to switch off from work, an integral aspect of being a barrister, particularly a junior barrister who has only recently started getting their own cases, and is keen to make a difference in those cases, is that your mind is constantly thinking about your cases. I would often wake up and instantly start thinking about how I would draft particular sections for a skeleton argument I was working on, or about points of flow I was researching, and even when I returned home after work, those types of thoughts would keep intruding into whatever I was doing. Initially I thought that was an advantage, because it meant I was thinking more deeply and more rigorously about my work. And there is a certain level of truth to that, because some of the best ideas I've had actually came to me when I wasn't at my desk. But after a point, I think you crossed the line of productive thinking, and stray into circular rumination where your mind is simply going over the same points that you've already thought of. And it's very important to know how to cut that off, because otherwise work will intrude into all aspects of your personal life, and you can never really switch off and take a break. And ultimately I think that has a detrimental impact in the quality of your work. Well I'm very glad to hear you still remember something, let's say during Pupelage, but what are some of the ways in which you've been able to switch off? Well in terms of actual tools that can help you switch off, I think different things work for different people. I find exercise to be the most effective for me, because it forces me to get out of my head and really focus on what I'm doing. Sophie, was there any aspect of life at the bar that you found particularly challenging when you first started practice? I think when I first started I found it a real challenge to deliver advice to people, which was not the advice that they were necessarily hoping for, or which was difficult for them to hear. For example, if a client feels very passionately that they or their business has been wronged in some way, but there isn't in fact a good claim to be brought, or a claim that someone is bringing against them does have merit. And how have you tried to address them? It's always still difficult, but I think there are three things that can make this easy. First, you have to remember that it's in your client's best interests to be properly advised. In the big picture, it's obviously important that they can act in light of proper professional advice, and that is what they've come to you for. Second, you need to feel confident that you are completely across the detail. As long as you're happy that you've fully considered the position, you can be confident that you're giving that right advice. And if clients have confidence in your advice, I find they're generally receptive to what you have to say, even if it's not necessarily what they were hoping to hear. And third, and related to that, I think it helps to remember that the clients are, even if their individuals representing large corporations, human, and in delivering the advice, have sympathy for their position and just try to be as empathetic as possible. Thanks, Sophie. Vanshaj, are there any other challenges of being a junior at the commercial bar that you would identify? Well, for me, one of the challenges has been navigating uncertainty. There's an unavoidable base level of uncertainty that's built into this show. But I think the scale of that uncertainty is really quite acute when you're a junior junior. And it can take many different forms. One particular form that I struggled with was the following scenario. An email comes in from your solicitor team to you and your leading council raising a query. Should you reply directly with your views? Should you first write to your leading council and check if they agree with your views? Or should you wait to see if your leading council would prefer to simply reply directly with their own views? Particularly when you've just switched over from pupalage to tenancy and you've had no experience of correspondence with solicitors, it can be quite difficult to judge the answer of that question. But there are also many other forms of such uncertainty, which can be quite pervasive. For instance, how early should I get to court before the hearing? Am I using the correct title to address the judge in a tribunal court? Should I interrupt my leader with a note when they're in the middle of their submissions across examination? And how have you learnt to deal with the uncertainty of the job? Well I think there are three things that have really helped me navigate that challenge. The first is speaking to my peers. Are the juniors who've been through exactly what you're going through and who can help answer some of these questions that you may have? And I think brick court is particularly good with that. We have WhatsApp groups for all the juniors where these types of questions are asked, we also have a fair number of social events that are only for juniors. The second is communication with my leaders. I've grown to learn that if I'm not sure about a particular step, I can just ask my leading council, and they're always quite happy to guide me, and that does take a lot of the pressure off. The third is learning to trust my judgement, which comes with some degree of experience, but once I've done a certain type of task once or twice, I find it much easier to navigate it because I have a better understanding of what to expect. Sophie, which of your cases have you found to be the most interesting in your practice so far? I've always found that cases are particularly interesting, either if they engage a lot of contested factual and expert evidence across a range of different subject matters, or if they raise a novel point of law, or even better, both. In terms of cases raising lots of factual and expert issues, I particularly enjoyed a case I worked on when I was very junior, which concerned a broken printing press. In a very short space of time, I became quite the expert on the printing of ready meal and medicine packaging, metallurgy, subsidence, as well as some different financial points, and then we could apply all of that to an interesting legal question about whether you can prove causation by rolling out other courses. It reminds me of the Loansdark case we did together, Tony. That claim was, I think, the first civil claim in England and Wales for losses caused by cyber attacks. Our client had provided telecom services in Liberia, and had been the victim of the attacks. We would be looking at Liberian law in one moment and then technical cyber evidence in the next. In terms of a case that purely raised an interesting point of law, I found the Manchester Building Society case fascinating to work on. There was quite a lot of prior case story and history concerning the scope of duty principle, but the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court reached different conclusions, and the Supreme Court has now clarified the test and legal framework. The Supreme Court had the same panel sitting on cheat hearings as under medical negligence case, which also raised similar scope of duty issues, and it was particularly interesting to see the Supreme Court draw cases raising similar issues together to set the law at a high level of principle. Banshaj, how about you? Is there a case in your practice that you have found to be particularly rewarding? Well, it's difficult to pick just one, but if I had to, I think it would be NMC in Ernst & Young. Can you tell us a bit about that case? Well, as you mentioned earlier, Tony, that was $2.7 billion claim in audit negligence, brought by NMC, a former FTSE 100 company in administration, against its auditors, EY, for their inability to detect a massive fraud, perpetrated by various arms of the company, including its scene emmanagement. And what would you say that you learned from being on that case? It was by far the largest case have been involved in both in monetary terms, but also in terms of the length of the trial, which started in May 2025 and ended in October. And for me, it was a fascinating opportunity to understand how a case of that size is managed. We had a team of four Kings Council and three juniors, including Sophie. And I was given a lot of responsibility within that council team for various parts of the case. In particular, understanding how, first, the accounting software was used to conceal the fraud from the auditors. And second, how the subsidiaries of NMC had been redomensiled to the ADGM, and then been restructured, and the impact this restructuring had on the loss allegedly suffered by NMC. And it can be quite an intimidating prospect to have that level of responsibility in what was only my second trial. Fortunately, there was a lot of support from the rest of the council team, and from the excellent team at RPC. Looking back now, I feel like I can take a lot of confidence from the work I was able to do in that case. And what was the outcome? Well, the case settled a few months after trial, and before judgment was issued, so we'll never know what the ultimate result of our arguments would have been. But it was still an incredibly rewarding experience to have been a part of the case. Sophie, if we change topic and look to the future, how would you like to see your practice develop over the next two to three years? As I mentioned earlier, I find I'm starting to spend more time in a more senior junior role, having more involvement in shaping the overall strategy and approach to bigger cases and taking more responsibility for the day-to-day decisions. I'm very much enjoying that, and I'm looking forward to my practice gradually moving more in that direction. And Fancha, I have the same question to you. Are there any changes you'd like to see in your practice in the near future? I think there are two categories of change I'd like to hopefully see. The first is in terms of the structure of the practice. I'd like to have more opportunities to make oral submissions. This is now my third year of practice, and I think there's a lot of knowledge I've been by from my leaders, which I'd like to put into action. To a degree I've already seen that shifts start to take place where leaders and solicitor teams have offered me the chance to make submissions and some aspects of a hearing, or even to do some of the smaller hearings in my cases unlead. And hopefully that continues. But I'd like to also have some unlead cases of my own where I can shoulder more responsibility in deciding the legal strategy. I think that would be an excellent learning curve, and one I'm very eager to get started. The second category of change is in terms of practice areas. I'd like to have more opportunities in arbitration, public international law, as well as cryptocurrency and digital assets. Fortunately, given the quality and diversity of work that brick-corder tracks, that doesn't seem like an unrealistic expectation. Excellent. Thank you very much for a really interesting discussion about life as a commercial junior.