Chancery work is split into two areas: traditional and commercial chancery litigation. Traditional chancery includes trusts, probate, real property and tax, while commercial chancery covers a wide range of finance and business disputes. Chancery work often has an international dimension, relating to asset tracing, cross-border insolvency and offshore trusts. Chancery barristers present cases before tribunals up to House of Lords level and draft a wide range of documentation.

Edward Cumming is a barrister at XXIV Old Buildings and a member of the Chancery Bar Association. He had his eyes on a career in law from a reasonably early age, having completed a series of work placements at a local solicitors' office as a clerk. During his law degree at Downing College, University of Cambridge, further work experience and a love of public speaking (he was president of the Cambridge Union while at Downing) helped to crystallis his vision of a professional future at the Bar. "I had quite an open mind to begin with," he explains. "It was an idea that formed slowly as I got more experience of the work of a solicitor, the work of a barrister and the law in general. I like wrestling with difficult problems and, where possible, engaging with a judge or other bright people about them, I suppose. There is also the challenge, as a barrister, of having to think on your feet a lot more."

It was also at university that Edward developed the interest in trust law and equity that would lead him towards chancery work. "I sometimes describe chancery as property disputes in their broadest sense. So not just disputes over real property - such as landlord and tenant - but also over more sophisticated concepts of property like trusts or companies, where you have property held though a legal entity, probate and insolvency. Chancery work sort of brings all these strands together. Then on top of that, you have the more commercial side - business disputes, boardroom disputes, when partnerships fail or when joint ventures fail, and people who thought they had shared interests suddenly have competing interests and it all gets bloody. At XXIV Old Buildings we specialise in offshore disputes as well - that's our particular niche and it's something that the chancery Bar has as a particular speciality which you might not find elsewhere."

Indeed, it is the international flavour of Edward's practice that he particularly enjoys. "I've had great opportunities to be involved in international cases in my time at the Bar," he says. "I've got a case on at the moment where a bank based in Europe is being sued in Singapore by a company based in the Caribbean. I've also been involved in a big dispute about the ownership of Freeport, which is the second largest port in the Bahamas, and have spent some time in Guernsey working on offshore trust stuff there. So it's pretty varied - that's one of the great things about this area of practice, there is such a wide variety of work. There's always something new and interesting to deal with, and there's a good balance between working with corporate and private clients, which is quite interesting. It means you have to develop a good variety of skills to deal with different types of people and different interests."

As a chancery barrister, Edward's time is divided between long sessions at his desk preparing for technically challenging trials and in court, occasionally with little time to prepare if an injunction is required. "You don't get in court as much as a criminal lawyer, for example, so you have days when you can just be doing paperwork," he says. "At the same time, you have days when you are in court for the whole day dealing with interesting points which you may have spent the best part of a week preparing. In chancery practice it's generally a more deliberate process than in other areas, but you can also have emergency injunction applications at short notice which are very exciting: you have to think on the fly. You could have minutes to hammer out a skeleton argument broadly summarising what you're going to say and you then have to build on it on your feet in front of the judge."

For that reason, Edward believes two distinct skill sets are required for success at the Chancery Bar. "First, the ability quickly and accurately to assimilate information (which may sometimes be in huge reams of documents relating to a massive trust dispute or some company's records), analyse it and judge its strengths and weaknesses. Then, when you have decided what is relevant and at the heart of a dispute, you have to be able to get up and demonstrate why, making your case as persuasively as possible and maintaining credibility in the eyes of a judge. Those are two very different skills."

While he believes chancery to be an interesting and challenging area of law that demands this all-round ability, Edward also warns that it's worth remembering how much is at stake for clients. "You can be dealing with very difficult, weighty issues involving people being thrown out of their house, for example, or companies where people have staked their house as security. You are dealing - at the very raw end - with what can happen when things go seriously wrong. As a junior tenant, you can be seeking possession and sale orders against people who have worked their whole lives and suddenly it's all unravelled. That can be very difficult and I think you need a certain level of maturity in order to deal with it. As I said, there are also days when you are sitting on your own doing paperwork and there's not much human contact, so you also need to be fairly driven to make a go of it."

For those who are convinced that chancery is the area for them, Edward's advice is to be tenacious. "The headline, I suppose, is: if you want to do it, then stick in there, because it's absolutely worth it," he declares. "I think it's one of the toughest areas to succeed in - you need to be bright, you need to be eloquent and you need to be able to show that level of maturity. You also need something of a commercial mind, because you are problem solving. That is a difficult collection of skills to have - and even if you've got them, it's a difficult collection of skills to demonstrate to someone who's meeting you for the first time or interviewing you. You've also got to show you are dedicated. That doesn't mean you have to decide too early, as long as when the time comes to apply you are committed. My other advice would be to do lots of mini-pupillages to get an experience of the breadth of the areas of practice on offer and find out what the commercial chancery Bar is really about. After all, you are going to be doing this all your life, so you want to be sure you enjoy it."