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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   26336 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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Intrigued, I asked a long-standing lawyer of my acquaintance and his opinion was that although you (Count) and I are technically correct as regards the UK, in practice in the UK:

  • defending barristers are chosen by the client or his solicitor
  • this is true even when those barristers are being paid by the government through legal aid (unlike public defenders in the US)
  • barristers who have a reputation for letting their clients down don't get work
  • any defending barrister who wants to keep their career becomes very adept at finding ways to make sure they don't have to publicly withdraw and leave their client in the lurch, including amazingly tortured analyses of their client's exact words or sudden attacks of extreme literal-mindedness and incuriosity

@RoyGBivensAction

Yeah, everything you say is correct. There's the high minded theory and then there's what happens in practice. In reality what happens a lot in Criminal cases specifically is that due to our split profession the barrister tries to minimize contact with the defendant and instead deals with the solicitor handling the case as much as possible and then the solicitor (who usually isn't present at the trial) makes sure the defense barrister is only told the minimum needed to run the clients case as favourably to them as possible so this whole professional embarassment issue never even props up because it's not a breach of the rules to lie to the court when you don't know what you're saying is a lie.

Of course a lot of the time this goes totally lopsided because the client runs their mouth off during cross examination and gets utterly caught out by the prosecution and it transpires that the story which had been told to Counsel has next to no relation to what actually happened, but handling situations like these gracefully is part and parcel of the job of a defense barrister and doesn't leave you facing regulatory sanctions, after all, you believed and ran with what you were told by your instructing solicitor.

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