If you’ve ever spent your morning commute daydreaming about starting afresh with your career, this feature is for you. Each Monday, we speak to someone from a different profession to discover what it’s really like. This week we chat to barrister Benjamin Knight, from Central Chambers, Manchester, and Liberal Chambers, London.
Take-home pay can be painfully low… Early on, a junior criminal barrister might bill something like £10,000 to £50,000 in gross fees. Even that can be misleading. Some fees are never collected properly, some get written-off and none of it accounts for chambers contributions, travel, insurance, practising costs and tax. Once you factor in the hours, take-home can be painfully low. At the top end, you sometimes hear headlines about criminal barristers earning millions. In reality, the handful who might gross seven figures tend to be very senior KCs, and the eye-watering figure can reflect years of work on a single huge case alongside everything else. Crime income is also unpredictable year to year, which makes ordinary life planning oddly difficult.
People think nothing of ringing at 10pm… A normal week is 50 to 60 hours but a trial week can be double that. Late nights are common, not because barristers love the grind, but because you can spend the whole day in court and then start your second day of work at night: prepping the next day of trial while also keeping other cases moving. Add late disclosure and last-minute instructions and you learn to take breaks where you can rather than where you are “supposed” to.
Criminal barristers joke that we do not retire; we just drop dead in our wigs… The more realistic version is that people keep going while they are still sharp and want to do it. Some move to the bench (become judges). I am Generation X. Retirement has always felt like a slightly fictional concept unless you end up with a decent pension route. For many, that’s a lot of the attraction of becoming a judge.
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