Pupillage at 4 Pump Court

Welcome to the latest episode of the four-pump core podcast. I'm Neil Dyer as a junior tenant of seven years' call. We released a podcast about pupillage in October 2020 when we were all having to come up with creative ways to connect with, well everyone really, our clients, our colleagues and applicants for pupillage. Now in 2023, open evenings, pupillage fairs, many pupillages and all the other face-to-face tools that we have to reach out to applicants are back. But we got some really good feedback on that episode. In fact, on the best feedback, I'm about to make my guest repeat. But the world has changed and everything has changed since late 2020 and so we wanted to update the content and advice in that episode and hope that the podcast format is still helpful and relevant for would-be applicants. Today, I'm joined by Athoan Natasha King and Caroline Jackson, who have recently become the newest tenants of four-pump core, following their successful completion of pupillage and chambers. So congratulations to you both for that. With pupillage applications soon to open, we're going to be talking all things pupillage at four-pump core. Why to come here, how to get one and what it's like once you're here. I'm going to start by asking my guests for some feedback. This is a job in which you very rarely get any feedback, so I guess I'm craving it. And you both told me that you have some personal history with the four-pump core podcast. So please tell me and our listeners about that history, Caroline. Well, I vividly remember listening to the podcast when it came out in October 2023 before my own application cycle in early 2021. I was very nervous and I was out of London, so it felt very disconnected from the bar in general and it was a nice way to feel like a part of the bar and again, and it's a nice full-circle moment to be here. I have a distinct memory of listening to the podcast as well. I think at the time I was in my apartment in Corrugian, Switzerland. And I remember thinking these people are very articulate, but they also seem very normal. And to me that was a very positive sign about chambers. Well, we'll hope to keep up the normal say today at least. And listeners, that's a good reminder that I'm not saying that it's a good luck charm or that you have to listen to the four-pump core pubelage podcast to get a pubelage here, but it sounds like it helps. Okay, let's hear a little bit about both of you. Tell our listeners where you come from, what you'd done by the time you were applying, which as Caroline mentioned would have been in early 2021 for an October of 2022 start in Chambers, Natasha. So in terms of my heritage, I am both Thai and Australian. And in fact, I grew up in the number of countries, including Thailand and Australia and the Philippines. But I studied law here in the UK from land to graduate degree, and I also did a master's degree in the United States. At the time that I was applying for pubelage, which would have been in 2021, I was working at the World Trade Organization in Geneva. Caroline? I'm afraid I'm not nearly as exciting. I had a fairly conventional route to the bar. I did a law degree at Southampton University and then spent a year as a research system with the Law Commission in the commercial common law team working on the digital assets project, which is where I was when I was applying for pubelage. And then I did basketball after I'd got my offer. And what made you both choose to apply to four-pump court, Caroline? Well, I was looking for a place that offered three things. I wanted a high-level commercial work, lots of junior advocacy opportunities and a really convivial and friendly place. And I found that quite difficult to find at the bar. Lots of the things had two, lots of sets had two of those three things. But to find a set that had all three seemed more unusual and I heard through the grapevine that four-pump court had it so I thought I would apply. Thank you, Natasha. For me, there were two things really. The first is the set seemed like it was really forward-looking. There was clearly an ambition in Chambers and I think that remains true today to expand and to grow in terms of Chambers' profile and in terms of the quality of the work that we attract. But there was also investment in areas of work which I think will inevitably come to dominate in the future, like tech and like IT. The second thing is that although the areas in which we specialise can seem superficially quite disparate, there's construction and there's tech and IT and there's shipping, professional negligence, insurance, etc. What all of those areas seemed to me to have in common is that they're quite technical and often quite fact-intensive and that appeal to me quite a lot because I'm a person who's not just curious about the law but curious about the world and how things work. And so that was a real attraction to me about Chambers. Thank you very much, that's brilliant. If I don't say so, I don't know if you have coordinated your answers in advance but those two dovetailed perfectly so you've obviously done more preparation than I have if you have. Okay, so when it comes to pupil age applications, everybody tends to focus on the choice that Chambers makes between applicants. But of course, good applicants like the two of you have to make a choice between Chambers 2 and that's a really big decision. Is there anything that you now know about 4Punk Court that would really have helped you to decide about applying here back then? So there are two things that I can highlight which I think are really useful for pupil age applicants to know. The first is the quality of the pupil age training at 4Punk Court which I really believe is second to none at the commercial bar. I think it's great training for the realities of being a barrister. It's a good mix of informal observation of your pupil supervisors, formal assessments, and then of course there's a practicing second sixth so you get into court fairly early on. I also think that our pupil age program is incredibly transparent. You know exactly what's going to happen at what stages, what's expected of you, and what standard you're expected to meet in order to get tendency. And I think that's great because it means that not only are your odds of getting taken on as a tenant better, but you're also going to have a more rewarding and intellectually enriching year because the program is still well structured. The second thing I would say is the culture. Every chamber is going to say that people they are really friendly and really personable, but I think we're genuinely lucky at 4Punk Court that it is true. Really without exception, everyone in chambers is so kind and so friendly and so generous with their time. It really feels like a team and I think that extends not only to other barresters and members of chambers but to the clerks and the rest of our staff. Caroline? I'd certainly second both those things and I would also say that while it might seem crazy to be thinking about your life as a tenant when choosing between pupil adoptions, it is worth considering what your life would be like as a tenant at the places that you're trying to choose between as well as a people, especially 4Punk Court because we do have very good retention rates. And so I think chambers offers a lot of support and flexibility when developing your practices a junior tenant. So whether you have a clearer idea of the area of law that you want to work in, you can get a lot of support for being considered from junior roles with senior members on cases in that area to being invited to drinks with relevant solicitors to arranging succumbents. And if you're more like me and you enjoy the novelty of having different instructions in different areas coming through all the time, it's really great to know that pretty much every instruction you get can be completely different, different law, different facts and even different jurisdictions. Okay, so moving on to the application process itself, what would be your top tip to applicants for a successful paper application, Caroline? I would say, "Consition." I think unless you're being asked to do a clear essay task, you should prioritise brevity and shouldn't be afraid of line breaks, headers and even bullet points in the right place. Applications are a test of written advocacy, but they're also something of a game of points and you need to make it really easy for a marker who's buried under a pile of applications and make sure that your explanations of how you fulfil each of chamber selection criteria are buried in a wool of text that they just don't want to read. I would really echo Caroline's point about selection criteria. I think that's really crucial. The other thing that I'd add is don't assume any knowledge from your reader and I think that's particularly crucial for international candidates. The person who is reading your application might not be familiar with your particular legal background or your professional background. So if you received a particular grade, explain what that grade is, explain how it compares to grading systems and classifications in the UK. If you received a particular award or prize or scholarship, explain what that is, give it context. If you still need to complete further training or get a visa in order to work in the UK, confirm that you can explain how you intend to, just don't assume any knowledge from the person that's reading the application. I think that's really important. Those are two really great answers I think and I've recently been the person at the bottom of the pile of those paper applications or really a pile of PDFs these days doing the dreaded pupil age paper shift and I would definitely echo what Caroline said. You should imagine writing the application for yourself and write things that you would want to read. In my case that would mean writing for a fellow millennial whose attention span has also been ruined by growing up in the internet generation and lay things out really clearly in a way to make it very, very easy for us to see that you meet the recruitment criteria and obviously that's something both our guests today did because I marked their pupil age applications and here they are, so you're very welcome. Okay so you get through the pupil age paper shift and then the next step is of course interview. So tell us a little bit about your interview at ForPumpCourt, what was the format and how did you approach it Natasha? So ForPumpCourt had two interviews. The first round interview consisted of an oral analysis of a problem question which I believe was provided 30 minutes before the interview. I think there were also several competency and general CV questions. Then the second round interview was an advocacy exercise and that I think was provided a couple of days in advance. It's a few years ago now so I'm trying to remember and then that was followed by sort of more in-depth competency and CV questions from the panel. I can't remember exactly how many people were on each of the panels but it was I think around three for the first round and then seven or eight in the final round the Concord member. My approach for the interviews was as follows and I'll break it down to what I did to prepare prior to the interview on the day of the interview and then at the interview itself. So in advance of the interview I think it's important to prepare thoroughly so that you feel confident and you feel comfortable. I read some of my contract loan notes, I reread my CV, I reminded myself of all the key names and places because sometimes that can be difficult and stressful when you're in an interview environment. I did some practice interviews with friends which I found very useful and helpful just to practice saying some of the things out loud. Then on the day itself I tried to just relax and to stay calm so I did meditations before I went into all of my interviews and actually I think that was invaluable because it's really easy when you're in that kind of a situation to just give into panic and that I thought was really helpful. Then at the interview I prioritize trying to be personable and trying to engage with the panel. I think it's easier to perform better and to feel less stressed if you feel like you're engaging and I think the most effective advocacy is when it's dialogue rather than monologue. I think sometimes the focus can be on getting all the substance of your questions right when actually what you should be focusing more in my opinion is the sort of dynamics that you have with the panel. Thank you Natasha Caroline. Following on from that I think the nice thing about four-point-court's interviews is that they're slightly longer than many comparable sets. I think the first interview was 30 minutes and then over an hour for the second. So you do have a chance to actually connect with your interviewer rather than being rushed in and out the door and it also gives you a chance to warm up and settle in and to give properly developed responses. I'd certainly recommend practice interviews. I definitely interviewed my interviews over the course of the application season but also you can start to spot common patterns in the sort of questions that Chambers ask. There are lots of legal knowledge questions, legal reasoning questions or debates-based questions and I personally realised that the debate style questions were a weakness of mine but thankfully by the time my four-point-court interview came around I had ground through enough practice debate questions to be able to give a apparently passable response. I would second what Natasha says about being friendly and apparently relaxed even if that is a facade. Chambers is a relatively small bubble and the people interviewing you will want to be able to imagine working alongside you and enjoying the experience. Am I right in saying that both of you had remote interviews? Yes, I think that's right, yes. And did you, obviously that's not the case anymore, the default anymore. Do you think that there's any particular difference because some applicants will still have remote interviews? Do you think that there's any difference or any particular tips that you would give for a remote interview as opposed to an impression interview? I think one of the things that I realised when I was doing practice interviews online with friends is that your eye line is very different when you're doing a remote interview versus an in-person interview. It's very easy in person to make sure that you're making eye contact but actually the camera is normally in a bit of a weird place on the laptop so what I did is I had a sticky note next to the camera on my laptop saying look here and so every time I felt that my gaze was wandering I would direct it back to the camera because otherwise then you're looking at the faces on your screen rather than making a parent eye contact. So that's one tip I would say for the virtual interviews. I would say generally just not to be concerned about virtual interviews, I found it really easy to get a good rapport with the panel, I didn't feel like I was hindered by the fact I was doing something on a remote platform so if you do have to do a remote interview basically don't be worried about that. Thank you very much. Sorry for springing an extra question on you there. I'd just to pick up on a couple of things that you've said from an interviewer's perspective. One Natasha mentioned, refamiliarising herself with her application and I think that that is so so important because although we've talked about the paper application as your way of getting your foot in the door and showing chambers that you on paper meet chambers criteria you have to remember that everything you write on that application is also a potential interview question and you're being interviewed generally by people whose job it is to interrogate documents and ask questions based on them. So a lack of familiarity with something that you put on your paper form can really indicate to the panel a lack of preparedness for the interview, we would expect people to be familiar with everything that they've written because we've taken the time to read it we expect them to at least have done the same and then if we're talking about really advanced interview skills being everything that you write on the paper application again because it's something that the panel might ask you about is also your opportunity to get the panel to ask you about things that you want to talk about. So we see often people include things like a case that somebody in chambers has been involved in and that's great if you know the case well and you're ready to talk about it in relative depth but you might have someone who was an advocate in the case sitting on your panel who knows the case much better than you could ever really hope to when you're preparing for interviews at several chambers all at once. Whereas if you talk about in your application form say something that you've written about in your dissertation then you're going to be on much safer ground and probably you're going to know more about it than the panel. I know when I was interviewing at the bar my favorite thing in the whole world was if the panel asked me about my PhD thesis because I'd been revising for that question for three years by that time and I felt that I was on really safe ground and could hold a conversation with the best of them. Second to pick up on something Caroline said, interviewing is definitely a performance skill is I think of it a lot like a sport or playing a musical instrument if whatever sort of performance skills you might have you wouldn't go out to play a concert or play a sports match without having practiced what you were going to be doing and expect to win the match or to give a good performance and exactly the same with an interview is something where you'll get rusty if you don't practice it but it's very easy to make to take the opportunities or make yourself opportunities like Natasha said to speak with your friends or your colleagues or your peers at university practice your interviews take advantage of the various interview practice schemes that specialist bar associations the ins of court and other sort of bar organizations or chambers run take advantage of them practice your interviews and your interviews will get better okay thank you very much for for that I'm going to move on now to you've got through the paper safe you've got through the interview you've waited for 18 months and now people is here and you're starting as a people so we really want to give people a sense of what it's like to be a pupil here so that they can feel like they're making an informed decision about the decision to commit to that year in chambers so I'm gonna ask a few rapid fire questions about that and I don't feel that you need to rush the answers starting with how your pupil age in chambers was structured Caroline. People age here is split into four seats of three months each the first six months you sit with two different supervisors and you'll sit four assessments two written and two advocacy assessed by other members of chambers then in your second six you start doing your own court work as well as continuing to work for your supervisor and the tenancy decision is made three months into your second six just before you move to your final supervisor they might experience all being well the final seat is all about building your own practice and making a seamless transition to tenancy. Thank you Natasha describe a typical day in the first six of your pupil age normally the function of the first six is to make sure that you are informally observing your pupil supervisor and getting a sense of how they run their own practice on top of that sort of informal observation of meetings with clients meetings with professional clients hearings court advocacy you will be doing assessed pieces of work for your supervisor as well as the formal assessments which are assessed by other members of chambers. And Caroline could you describe for us a typical case that you took on in your practicing second six? So a typical case would probably be a small claims road traffic accident in a county court the two drivers will normally attend as witnesses and you'll have to cross examine the other driver and call your own witness before making closing submissions and in my experience these sorts of cases really do have it all unpredictable witnesses and clients stubborn judges tracks across the country to obscure a county court there are great sandbox for practicing cross-examination techniques and learning civil procedure. Also a great way to learn English geography if you didn't know it before. I'm going to ask both of you starting with Natasha what was the most valuable lesson you learned during your pupil age? Particularly in the second six I think I learned very quickly that you should look at your briefs as soon as you receive them. As a junior member of chambers you're often going to be juggling multiple matters at the same time, sometimes some of them are on a larger council team and others will be in your own right where you're the sole council and you need to get a sense quite quickly of how long things are going to take so that you can manage your own time. So even if you're not going to start working on a particular case or particular matter right away just make sure that you open the file, check that you have all the documents that you need and get a sense of how much work is going to be involved so that you can better manage all of the matters together. Caroline? If you're attracted to the file you're probably quite an independently minded person but it's really important during pupil age to learn how to build and rely on the informal network of support that you have within chambers. So for example getting the mobile numbers of other members of chambers before your first case hearing, something unpredictable will happen. I want to settle the case only for my opponent to leave before I get her to agree and order. I've heard other crazy stories like the time of witness denied writing their own statement in the witness box. So being able to call another junior at any time on short notice is amazing, likewise if you have any doubts about pleading or really any piece of work you're doing, it's really great to be able to utilise that. Yeah, you definitely learn a lot in the county courts during your second sex and I remember vividly meeting a witness at some far-flung county court in the north of England when they walked in and said, "Oh, there's just one thing, see that bit in my witness statement?" The bit that gives us that our whole defence to the case, that's wrong, it is actually the other thing that happened. And yeah, it's fair to say that it can induce some panic. From chambers perspective about the structure of pupil age, I think what I would really like to emphasise is that a lot of work has gone into making the pupil age assessment process and training process fair and robust and some of the things that you touched on are elements of that. Having the same supervisors as your co-pupils so that you're being assessed by the same people who have the same standards, having the same assessments assessed by the same people so that there's that element of standardisation in the work that you're doing and in the way that you're being assessed. And then coming to make the decision as to whether to offer tenancy, which we very much hope to do to everyone that we recruit as a pupil, that's made by a tenancy committee, which is made up of supervisors, people who have seen the assessments and independent people who've had nothing to do with you, all of whom are trained in fair recruitment. They don't leave a decision like that to the uncertainty of a whole chambers vote. And I think that's something that I hadn't really thought about, hadn't really realised before I came to chambers as a pupil, but I was immensely grateful for once I got to chambers that I felt that I was going through a process that was fair and transparent and that I was going to get a predictable outcome from it. And I don't know if you have anything to add on that, but that's just something I want to emphasise. I think it's a real unique strength in chambers and something that you might not appreciate, but when you're in the pupilage programme, it makes an enormous difference to the process. Yes, and we look very much in chambers. We have a commitment to equality and diversity and we take part in a number of access schemes and programmes to try to improve the diversity of our membership and our staff. But the most important thing I think, or certainly from the perspective of pupilage applicants, is knowing that there's a robust and fair process in place where you're going to get a predictable outcome and everybody is treated in the same way. So I would encourage anyone who has any doubts about the commercial bar being for them. If they think the profile is good enough for it, I would encourage them to apply for chambers and to come and give it a go and you'll get a fair crack of the whip here, I can guarantee that. Okay, so you've been through pupilage and you are now a month and a half into tenancy. What are your plans as a junior tenant, Caroline? It's quite an extreme experience for me and likely for many listeners. I've always had some kind of goal I've been moving towards, your academic results, then getting pupilage, then getting tenancy and now I'm here. Now I'm self-employed with no immediate obvious milestones so I want to learn how to run my practice as a business and develop a sustainable routine and lifestyle and try and focus on the journey rather than the goal for me. How are you getting on with that? It's working progress. Over the next twelve months at least, I think my goal is to just keep learning. pupilage is actually quite short, it's only twelve months and I feel like there is still so much for me to learn about how to be a barrister and about how to run my own practice. So I just want to keep pursuing the things that interest me and stimulate me intellectually. I want to keep working with other members of chambers so that I can learn from them and observe the things that I like and that I want to take from their approaches and really critically for me I want to be iterative and reflective about my own work, my own advocacy so that I can keep improving and that's all that I'm planning on doing for now. Natasha, you're very modest, Lacey, that you want to keep learning from others. I've certainly heard from people who have been involved with working with both of you and supervising both of you, that you're both already exceptional barristers and there's absolutely no need for that modesty, indeed you wouldn't have got through the pupilage process and got ten and say if you weren't already exceptional barristers so believe in yourselves and I'm sure there's always room for growth and there's always room for learning but you've reached a significant milestone and I think celebrate that. Caroline, if you work out how to balance the demands of the job with having an excellent work-life balance then please let us all know the secret. Is there anything that you wanted to talk about today that we haven't already covered? Just because I know that the people who will be listening to this will primarily be in the process of applying for pupilage, I would stress that it's really important to be kind to yourself. Pupilage applications are incredibly stressful, they're time-consuming, they're competitive, you will face a lot of rejections along the way and often it's happening on top of lots of other commitments you will have exams or you'll have work commitments or caring commitments so do make sure that you're taking care of yourself, you're sleeping properly, you're eating properly and you're making time for friends and family because it's going to be a slog so I just want to emphasise to those of you listening, please take care of yourself, it's very important. I wanted to point out that as someone who's taken a fairly direct route to the bar I know that lots of people feel the pressure to move straight through the pipeline from uni to bar school to pupilage and I think there is a sense that anything that you might be doing to fill the years between pupilage cycles is just killing time and I cannot emphasis just how quickly pupilage goes by and how relatively limited your opportunities for formal training are after that point and actually building up your skill set before taking pupilage by being a judicial assistant, working in the law commission, working in industry, working for a start-up for solicitors or in-house or basically anything else can actually really help you to feel confident and to thrive during pupilage and can actually accelerate your progress as you start out as a tenant. The bar is very welcoming to people who have taken slightly longer to get there so you I really encourage people not to feel like the only way to succeed at the bar is to get there as soon as possible. I would really agree with that. Yeah, thank you both. And picking up on something that you both have said or an element of what you've both said, speaking as someone who missed about for a lot of years before coming to the bar and doing a PhD and exploring the possibility of an academic career path, I was actually very grateful that I came to the bar a little bit later in life. I felt by that point I had a better sense of myself, I had a better understanding of my own capabilities and my own limits and when I needed to rest among other things because I think there's a sense when you're an undergraduate sometimes that you can do it all, you can attend a 9am lecture after having been out until three o'clock in the morning and I learned that that may have been true of me at 18 and it certainly wasn't true of me at 24. So I think having that sense of perspective and that sense of self really really made me a lot more robust mentally robust for my pupil age, which as Natasha says, the process of getting pupil age is difficult and the process of pupil age itself is quite stressful because although we do everything that we can to make the process seem fair and to our feel fair to the pupils and we do everything we can to limit the amount of work that pupils have to take on and everything like that. The reality of it is that you are still effectively in a 9-month interview for a job that you really, really want and you're going to feel observed and you're going to feel like everything that you do really, really matters every bit of work is the most important bit of work you've ever produced and so having a sense of that is really important and being able to cope with that is also something that's really important. I think that also leads me on to the one thing that I wanted to add that we haven't really talked about today is that there tends to be from applicants and having read probably thousands of applications now for pupil age, many pupil age, mentoring schemes and so forth. There tends to be an approach from applicants that idealises the job of a barrister and that's fine and you can really want to do the job. It's important to understand that as we've sort of alluded to as a various times throughout this podcast that the job is not all perfect and that there are real challenges with it that being a commercial barrister is demanding and that you have to work very hard at times and that the market will demand things of you that you might not necessarily have set out to give and be having a real sense of the realities of the job and that there are challenges to it and that you need to be robust and hardworking and that you need to be prepared to really put in the time at times when you're in trial or preparing for trial and things like that. It's something that often doesn't come across in forms from applicants but that does come across in the best app, the forms of the best applicants so I would encourage you when you're answering that question why do you want to be a barrister not just to say the good things because there are many good things about being a barrister, the advocacy, the chance to have an influence on the area of law in which you practice which is something that I still am a little bit in all that whenever there's a decided case that has your name on it that's part of the common law of legal tradition forever. The being self-employed gives you the opportunity to direct your practice into the fields that you want to work in and to try to manage your workload as best you can to satisfy your needs outside but there are also challenges and I think that's really, really important to acknowledge and to understand actually if you want to be a barrister. Okay, I'm going to wrap it up now by asking Caroline and Natasha in turn to sum up in one sentence why someone listening today should apply to four-pump court. Well, as Neil's just said being a barrister is a demanding job but doing it at this time as it has more of its fashionable, the good bits of the bar. I'll try to say something pithy, great work, great colleagues, great training.