In Camera - a barrister with no self-confidence

NEVIL Phillips is an unusual man, a barrister with no self-confidence. Or so he claims. He’s certainly not showing any shortage of self-confidence at the moment, even though he has just told me that he is “always surprised when clients come back again.“ Lack of self-belief sounds like not just the least likely, but also the least desirable, quality in a man who is, after all, paid to make others believe in him, but Nevil doesn’t see it that way. He thinks a lack of self-belief means that he is always trying to improve. It also means that he is unlikely to become the kind of pompous know-it-all that is all too often the public image of the barrister.

Nevil is convinced that this image is something barristers need to get rid of as quickly as possible. He says, “Any attempt to set up a barrier between barrister and client is doomed, because clients won’t go back to a barrister who tries to make them feel inferior. Some barristers can’t quite pitch things right, and in the long run, that reflects in the way that work comes in.”

In order to survive, and to flourish, the bar needs to concentrate on providing what the market wants, says Nevil. And amongst other things, that means presenting a more human face, and making yourself more accessible to your clients. “Shipping is a very human field,” he says. “The solicitors are out there, and you’ve got to join them.”

Being accessible is not just a question of the occasional pint with solicitors, though. It might mean picking up the phone a bit more often, rather than relying on the clerk to drum up business. It means applying common sense, above everything. It also means being prepared to be humble, to admit your mistakes, and if appropriate, to accommodate them in your fee note. And if being accessible means being prepared to return part of the brief fee if the case settles five minutes after it kicks in, then so be it. That is something that some barristers are still not ready to hear, but in the long run it is vital to obtaining clients, and above all to retaining them.

But while Nevil is very aware of the criticisms that can be levelled at the bar, he is adamant that the ‘hired gun’ advocacy system is still the best way to serve his clients. “Some firms already employ an in-house advocate,” he says, “but ultimately it doesn’t really work. Firstly, an in-house advocate can only work on one case at a time. Any more than one case per advocate, and you will need the bar anyway. Secondly, it is just not cost-effective. After ten years at the bar, my fees are in the region of £175 to £200 an hour. Most of my contemporaries who joined solicitors’ firms are partners now, and how many partners would be content to work for that?”

Nevil has already made it clear that he does not like pomposity. And in fact, it was the lack of it that was one of the first things that attracted him to 2 Essex Court, as it then was – the set has since moved two houses up the road. “I like to think that we don’t just try to be friendly in these chambers, but that we genuinely are,” he says. “One of the attractions of the chambers is that we do as good a job as anyone else, but we enjoy doing it more, and that comes over in the way we relate to our clients.”

By the time he arrived at 2 Essex Court as a pupil, Nevil’s course was more or less set. But he didn’t actually intend to be a lawyer at all. He studied history at university, and originally thought of continuing it to PhD level and making a career in academia. However, Nevil is a social chap, and was really looking for something with more potential for human contact. On top of that, the prospect of another three years or more of student accommodation proved to be too much. I can see his point. We’re meeting in the conference room of his chambers, because every flat surface in his office, including the spare chair, is several feet deep in paper. I can’t imagine what his student accommodation must have looked like.

Other alternatives included doing a current affairs course with the BBC, “But I couldn’t see myself getting very far with that, and it didn’t seem academically rigorous enough,” says Nevil. Law, and the bar in particular, seemed to offer the best of both worlds, meaning both academic interest, and interaction with people. The prospect of actually earning some money didn’t seem a bad thing either.

So that explains the bar, but why choose the comparatively obscure field of maritime law, which is probably not the sort of thing that rookie barristers have held up to them as the first choice for a shipping career? Like many barristers, Nevil did a series of mini-pupillages during his bar course, including work in criminal, commercial, employment and shipping law. But it was shipping that captured his imagination, partly because of the friendly atmosphere at 2 Essex Court, and partly because of the romance of the work.

“It seemed a little bit more exotic than the run-of-the-mill subjects”, explains Nevil. “I like dealing with foreign places, new people, and big ships, and I rather enjoy poring over charts and weather reports.” Another attraction of maritime law is that this is an area which is always developing. Unlike, for example, criminal law, where the principles are well established and there are few new or surprising developments, there is always something new going on. Nevil has written on some of these developments, although, characteristically, he describes his book on the Merchant Shipping Act 1995 as “bedtime reading for the certifiably insane”.

Unfortunately, there are not enough shipping cases to go round, let alone enough wet shipping cases. Nevil estimates that about fifty per cent of his practice concerns dry shipping, and only about twenty per cent wet. The remaining thirty per cent is taken up with general commercial practice, in particular insurance and reinsurance. This appeals to Nevil as these are generally substantial and complex disputes. He reckons his workload is about equally divided between litigation in court and arbitration.

Nevil particularly enjoys arbitration because of the relative informality of the process, where it is possible to build up a rapport with the arbitrator or panel, rather than the artificial ‘them and us’ situation created by the layout of a traditional court room. This is perhaps not surprising in someone who says that his favourite cases are not just the particularly challenging or successful ones, but the cases where in the end you are reluctant to say goodbye to particular experts or solicitors because you have enjoyed working with them. “If I have a hallmark, it is my willingness to laugh”, says Nevil, and finds that even in the most serious cases, there can be a leavening of humour.

Surprisingly for someone who seems to be having rather a good time – and a laugh – at the law, Nevil insists that he doesn’t love his job. “There are clients that you would work through the night for, but that is because they are good clients and friends, rather than because I love working itself,” he explains.

And although he is happy to oblige good clients, even there, there is a line which can’t be crossed, and that is breaking promises made to his family. Nevil is not just trying to convey the impression of a human barrister who sees more to life than briefs and the prospect of silk. His career is quite definitely not the most important thing in his life – that distinction goes to his family of two children, soon to be three. It doesn’t mean that he neglects his work, but rather that he considers that, “If I give my all to my clients, I do have the privilege of being able to say my family comes first, and I find that my clients understand and respect that.”