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Jane Street, Point72, Citadel etc are massively scaling up their hiring. It’s like back in the dotcom era or early 2000s when people were saying Google would become one of the biggest companies on earth with only 5000 employees since you dont need that many people to maintain a search engine. Now they have almost 200,000 employees, mostly unnecessary, because everyone wants their fiefdom and when you start making money everybody wants a cut. As the big funds and quant shops start expanding into traditional banking territory they will hire bankers (as they already are) and they will bring headcount, because that is what humans do when there’s money. Jane Street is growing headcount at like 50% a year; revenue is growing faster, but my suspicion is that much of that isn’t due to the headcount.
I take a rather dim view of barristering as a profession. Many barristers are great people, but it’s always seemed like a job for the Oxbridge debate types who don’t like to work very hard and who get paid insane hourly rates to re-enact the Oxford Union in court, RP accent and all. Top solicitor partners make more but they really do seem to work much more too. Maybe I just don’t understand it as a foreigner, but my barrister friends barely seem to work and get paid big time hourly or daily (not sure which it is) to regurgitate the same arguments, cadence and so on for new clients. Plus it’s the clearest example of an AMA-type employment cartel in the UK, because they deliberately restrict training places to a trickle so that fees remain extremely high. The UK decided that lazy people with high verbal IQ and the right accent who read literature or languages at Oxbridge ‘deserve’ a comfortable £120k a year and so they have this process of the conversion course and bar school and then the pupillage bottleneck to give them the job.
£120k? Even junior commerical barristers in their first year post pupillage earn multiples of that each year. From the website of One Essex Court (top Commercial Chambers), bolding mine:
Almost makes me question my life choices... I think I'd be good enough to get pupillage and then tenancy, maybe not at OEC but very likely at one of the other similar caliber sets, I know how to turn up the charm when necessary and while I don't speak in RP I think you could safely describe my accent as "exotic" in the good way.
People tell me the best part of being a barrister is getting others to effectively treat you like royalty: say a FTSE 100 CEO wants to discuss something and he wants a meeting in person. It's now his choice, either he can come visit you at your chambers, or if he's really that busy you're happy to go visit him, but he should be aware that all time from the minute you leave your house door to the minute you get back to your home's door is all chargeable time being billed at £500 per hour (plus VAT of course).
And of course the total independence that comes with being self employed means that even as a junior you can treat some very senior very commercially successful people (almost insulting them to their face when they say something legally stupid) in a way that a solicitor would be terrified of doing because they'd risk losing a massive contract with all the career implications that'd follow.
As a barrister it literally doesn't matter: make the CEO look like an idiot in front of the whole C-Suite and what are they going to do, not hire you again? That's perfectly fine because you're already rejecting so much work your diary would be full twice over. You even have the polite fiction to hide behind that you're an officer of the court and while the lay client pays for your time your first duties are actually to the court and you can not in good conscience do what the CEO wants you to do, what he wants to do will be shot down in court and he'll then have to pay the other side's barrister's fees so actually this is just tough love meant to save you money.
Plus if it's senior court litigation and you're not a natural person you need to have someone with higher rights (almost all barristers) represent you in court by law and every other barrister will give you basically the same answer as I have, so just take my advice and let the professional run the case. Fun fact: as a corporate firm you can do the work of a solicitor through your employees if you want to and you don't need to have a solicitor to run litigation in the higher courts, that's strongly recommended but it's left up to you, but legally you're not allowed to get one of your employees to do the job of a barrister, that's a criminal offense.
Also self employment means that if tonight you don't feel like working tomorrow as long as you don't have any deadlines or court appearance that's fine, there's no boss you're answerable to: you choose when you work. It's basically like being a minor Greek deity (or so my friends who're now reaching the point where they have an established practice tell me). And then there's the whole massive status that comes with being a barrister and especially once you take silk...
They’re the very very highest tier and in the most lucrative corner of commercial law, the average new commercial barrister makes nothing close to that, and for those in crime, chancery, family they make much less still, often even at the height of their career. It reminds me of that funny story going round a few weeks ago about Oxbridge grads laughing Goldman Sachs out the door because they were getting offers at quant firms for £500k or whatever out of the gate, but of course it wasn’t “Oxford grads”, it was a tiny handful of senior researcher PhDs at the tiny quant finance institute moving into industry after a decade plus of academia, a handful a year of them. The base graduate salary in front office in the City is probably still like £50k, and at the Bar it’s similar too. Even so, a mid career highest tier commercial barrister (even at OEC) is making perhaps a million, 1.5 a year; even a top commercial KC tops out at 2.5/3 unless he’s uniquely lucky or mercenary, the cap at top American law firms for a partner is much higher.
But yes, while we can quibble about exact comp it’s extremely good per hour and better than almost anything in finance on an hourly basis unless you’re extremely good, senior or lucky.
Maybe, I tend to think it’s all connections really, although of course they say otherwise. It’s a cartel and they do very well for themselves, but it’s important to say that they are an extractive profession of the kind that was largely abolished with the end of the guild system (again, notable exceptions like the AMA notwithstanding). If I had been born in Britain I would probably try to have become a barrister, it seems to be what all the relatively smart people with good verbal ability from reasonable backgrounds do. I’d probably do something a little more exciting, like crime or divorce, though. Still, one can’t complain too much.
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