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Despite burgeoning numbers of solicitor-advocates and plummeting numbers of court cases,
the bar is flourishing.
Total revenues for The Lawyer's Bar Top 30 are up yet again, to £555.1m from £530.5m
last year, and perhaps more importantly, the average revenue per barrister (RPB) of all barristers
tenanted in the top 30 sets has rebounded from last year's disappointing £269,563 to £332,000.
This 23 per cent hike comes with a mere 4 per cent rise in lawyer numbers.
It is not immediately clear, though, exactly how the top commercial sets have been able
to continue increasing revenue.
There is mounting pressure from law firms desperate to retain as much litigation work inhouse,
with `Herbert Smith Chambers' finally making its splash with the recruitment of two
well-known silks, Murray Rosen QC and Ian Gatt QC.
The bar has also been embroiled in a long-running fight against plummeting volumes of
traditional High Court litigation, which has been well catalogued. That decline has now
spread to the appeal courts, with the Court of Appeal ± for the commercial bar at least ± now
experiencing a similar drop in volume of work, with the top five sets making around 10 per
cent fewer appearances there than in 2003-04.
Commercial set 39 ESSEX STREET, which topped last year's table with 175 appearances,
visited the Court of Appeal only 121 times this year. Birmingham's ST PHILIPS, one of the
UK's biggest sets, appeared 85 times in the Court of Appeal in 2004-05, compared with 124
times the previous year.
The House of Lords bucked the trend for decline and continues to run at full capacity. In
contrast to the Court of Appeal, the top five sets by volume made 10 per cent more appearances
than in 2003-04.
The only three chambers to have finished in the top five for number of appearances in both
the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords in both 2003-04 and 2004-05 are all leaders in the
field of public law ± BLACKSTONE, 39 Essex Street and MATRIX.
Buoyed by cases such as the `designer baby' case of Quintavalle v Human Fertilisation & Embryology
Authority, Blackstone topped the list for the second successive year, with tenants making an
appearance in 28 cases, with a total of 40 barristers involved.
Matrix, The Lawyer's Chambers of the Year 2005, had a record number of cases in both
courts. The set appeared 76 times in the Court of Appeal and 21 times in the Lords, with
multiple barristers involved in several cases. Matrix's high point came in December 2004,
when Ben Emmerson QC, Rabinder Singh QC and junior Raza Husain appeared in the Lords
in the landmark Belmarsh case against the Government's policy on detaining terrorist suspects.
(The importance of public law is also evidenced by the performance of Freshfields Bruckhaus
Deringer's litigation group, which claimed second spot for the
UK's biggest-grossing litigation teams in the 2004-05 financial year,
behind Clifford Chance (see page 39 for litigation sector analysis). In
London, more than 60 per cent of Freshfields' litigation work is now
defined as public/administrative law.)
The four `magic circle' commercial sets ± BRICK COURT, ESSEX
COURT, FOUNTAIN COURT and ONE ESSEX COURT ± remain the four
largest by turnover. Lord Grabiner QC's One Essex Court is celebrating
the largest growth in overall revenue. Earnings are up 9 per cent
to £27.3m. Despite the loss of Elizabeth Gloster QC to the bench,
average RPB has risen to £506,000, one of only four sets to post RPB
in excess of £500,000. Gavin Kealey QC's and Julian Flaux QC's 7 KING'S
BENCH WALK topped that elite group with RPB of £533,000, joined by
Brick Court with RPB of £516,000, One Essex and commercial chancery
set WILBERFORCE, with RPB of £505,000.
The biggest turnover gains were made outside the elite, with an
astonishing 20 per cent hike at OUTER TEMPLE CHAMBERS, 19 per
cent at FOUR NEW SQUARE, 17 per cent at XXIV OLD BUILDINGS, 16
per cent at ONE CROWN OFFICE ROW and 13 per cent at LANDMARK
CHAMBERS showing the biggest growth in
London.
But strong gains were also made outside
the capital. The regional bar boasts three sets
in this year's Bar Top 30: Manchester's KINGS
CHAMBERS and the ever-present Birmingham
giants NO 5 CHAMBERS and St Philips.
All are eligible for the award of `most
improved' set of the year, with Kings posting
a 20 per cent hike in turnover, and No 5 and
St Philips reporting 16 and 14 per cent hikes
respectively.
Perhaps more impressively, St Philips was
able to post a 20 per cent rise in RPB to
£154,000 and refunded a total of £400,000
to members, which was partly the result of
the departures of 12 tenants over the the year.
Despite the bar's robust financial performance,
a significant decline in those joining
the bar shows how difficult it will be for
revenues to be maintained. The latest figures
show a 20 per cent drop, with just 572 pupils
in 2004 compared with 711 in 2003. The
2003 figure was itself an 8 per cent decrease
from 2002, when there were 766 pupils. The
bar's failure to diversify its intake has also
been highlighted in the latest statistics, with
the number of ethnic minority pupils also
dropping, from 20 per cent in 2002 and 2003
to 16 per cent last year. The gender split
remained static, with women accounting for
49 per cent of new entrants.
Recruitment of the very best candidates and
the need to find new revenue streams remain
the key concerns for the commercial bar.
The two largest areas of growth over the past few years have been instructions from
in-house legal teams and international work.
The latter has been assisted greatly by the
return of the silk system. The QC mark has
always been a great selling point for the
English bar and it finally made a triumphant
return this summer, with the first new
transparent and politically correct silks due
to be appointed next spring. The bar needs
the new system to work for the next
generation of top barristers to further their
reputations in the international arena.
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Revenue per barrister is up 23 per cent on a mere 4 per cent rise in The Bar Top 30 headcount. By Matheu Swallow