I’m Average. Almost

The average barrister is male, in their mid-40’s and has been at the Bar for 10 or more years having started in their mid-30’s. They practice from chambers in the Brisbane CBD.

I don’t quite make average as I was admitted at 24 and have practiced mainly at regional bars. I am also fortunate enough to have spent some time in my legal career outside the private Bar both in government service and academia. It was these experiences that gave me an interest in demographics and led me to question how a professional organisation like the Bar should be responding to our aging membership. How can we remain an attractive profession for younger people and how do we retain our longer serving members as the Baby Boomers approach retirement?

The ever efficient Bar Association staff have kindly provided me the data for analysis (with identifying particulars removed). Time invested in learning IT skills enabled me to extract some basic facts and graph them.¹ I will mostly let the findings speak for themselves but there are some interesting and perhaps unexpected results.

• There appears to be a significant number of practitioners approaching the time when most barristers retire with another ‘hump’ following in 10 years.
• Barristers who have Chambers outside of Brisbane account for about 13%.
• About 12% of all barristers are not in a Chambers in a major court town near the registry.
• Female barristers still make up only about 16% of the total.
• The Bar remains popular with as many people joining each year as ever.
• Members leave the profession at a fairly steady rate after their second year.
• Most of the new members join in their thirties suggesting they have had earlier work experiences, perhaps as solicitors.
• Silks are admitted as Juniors, on average, 7 years younger than the average Junior who is still practicing as such.

Caveat Lector

“Lies, damned lies, and statistics” was a catchphrase of Benjamin D’Israeli. It should be borne in mind that we do not have critical data to validate many of the theories that the statistics suggest. In particular there is no way at present of comparing admissions during a calendar year to people now holding membership. This means any apparent drop in numbers such as women in their 8-11th years of admission could be because very few joined our ranks 8-11 years ago or because that age group have temporarily left full-time practice.

It is also difficult to account for the large numbers of barristers in government or corporate employ (sometimes without individual practicing certificates) or indeed those on the rolls who do not practice extensively.

Equally, Chambers addresses are a poor way method of distinguishing members with more than one chambers, those practicing in a city without a Registry, those working from home, door tenants and squatters.

I propose to re-examine the data for a future edition of Hearsay in relation to the major areas of practice nominated compared to Gender, Location, Age and Years at the Bar. If any member has a suggestion for other statistical research, please contact me directly.

Andrew Sinclair

Andrew.Sinclair@innsofcourtsc.com.au
Telephone (07) 5479 2940

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Endnote 

1. For the obsessive footnote readers, data was extracted in CSV format, manipulated with
   PERL and graphed in Excel.