Cashing in Karma Points

To the Great Hall of the Royal Courts of Justice for the tenth anniversary of the Bar Pro Bono Unit, swarming with the great and the good. Loathe all members of this government as I may, and unimpressed with his Opinion on the Iraq War as I am, it is to Peter Goldsmith's credit that a year before the election that made him Lord Goldsmith, Attorney General, he was the moving spirit behind the foundation of the Unit.

I've done a fair amount of work for the Unit over the last few years: far, far less than the truly committed few but perhaps more than others. Since, somehow, private client express trusts, commercial offshore dealings, business partnerships and commercial land matters rarely qualify for the Unit's consideration most of it has been in my other, least important to me, area of practice: corporate insolvency and most often bankruptcy. Which I actually loathe as a practice area as Room TM101 is one of the most depressing places I have ever spent time and I can't avoid thinking "there but for the grace of God".

There can be benefits in doing PB work beyond the warm feeling in the soul and the karma points. Just once i a while a case worth taking all the way may turn up, often in the pigeonhole of someone who'd be far too junior to take it were it paid "at a proper fee". Plus there's the networking angle. But by and large I honestly think the motivation is from a desire to do good works. Or perhaps for some, a kind of unfocussed guilt for being in a well-paid profession. Most lawyers in this country have a passing interest in both the law as an academic discipline and the general concept of justice too, strange though that may seem, and doing PB work does fit in with that. Perhaps the legally most complex Opinion I have written this year was on a PB bankruptcy matter. Most of the work in my experience consists of explaining why, exactly, the client doesn't have a case -they have after all, by definition been refused Legal Aid for one reason or another, which is a bad start-, but there's a genuine benefit in doing that in itself.

Even so, it's good to be thanked, with free-flowing and tolerable wine and really quite impressive nibbles. Plus, since I tend to find the recent practice of hiring out the RCJ for private functions mildly irritating -somehow a tad inappropriate- at least for once it was (a) a charitable function connected with the law (b) to which I was invited. Not to mention the enthusiastic students and pupils, most of them women, who had volunteered to do the drink serving. One of them even asked me for my card, sadly she admitted it was so she could write in to ask to do a mini-pupillage (which isn't in my control, still when I pass her details on my colleague and I think she should take points for utter brazenness).

Couldn't quite see the point of having a quintet play in a notoriously enormous barn of a space though.

Always amused to watch certain legendary members of the senior judiciary, particularly those legendary for their socialising as well as their judgments, shmoozing around too. Evidently Lord Leg-Over still has it....