David Mumford is a barrister of seven years’ call at Maitland Chambers, one the largest commercial chancery sets in London. He read classics at the University of Oxford and then moved to London to do his conversion course at City University and his BVC at the Inns of Court School of Law. He explains: “I don’t think I got a feel for chancery work until I started the conversion course. It was always something that attracted me to the Bar generally, that one would be doing a job that had more intellectual demands on a day-to-day basis than many jobs, and so it was perhaps natural that I’d go to an area of the Bar that might be said to be more academically oriented, in terms of the nature of the work one does. But it only really became apparent to me that I was attracted to chancery work when I began studying – and realised I enjoyed – equity, contract and land law.”

David did his pupillage at Maitland Chambers, where he enjoyed seeing the work of his pupil masters, who were generally barristers of 10 or 15 years’ call. He says: “The work was reasonably large scale, as appropriate to barristers of that sort of call, and could be anything ranging from a property dispute to a fairly large commercial matter to some complicated trust problem. But it was broadly a representative cross-section of the work we do in chambers.” Although the work he does now is obviously a little less senior than what he saw during pupillage, “the sort of problems I’m having to solve are not at all dissimilar to what I saw during pupillage, and the way that you set about solving them is essentially the same. Pupillage is good training.”

David has between 20 and 30 cases on his shelves that he describes as ongoing, in the sense that he’s done work on them in the past and so far they haven’t settled or been otherwise resolved. “Many will sit idle for months on end,” says David. “In terms of what’s actually on my desk and requiring something to be done in the immediate future, there’ll probably be about four for five cases at any one time.”

David describes a couple of his current cases: “I’ve been drafting particulars of claim in a fairly straightforward contractual dispute to do with the exporting of tinned tomatoes from Italy to England; and I’m just about to get involved in a big professional negligence claim against management consultants who advised on the restructuring of a brewer’s supply chain.”

David says: “Very rarely does your day involve sitting at your desk and doing one thing only. If not in court, my day in chambers would normally involve me turning up to my room between 8:00am and 9:00am. I will check my email and voicemail. Usually it’ll be a question of setting about whatever piece of work I have on at that time; but during the course of the day solicitors will almost inevitably get in touch regarding another case and suddenly something that’s been sitting on your shelf for months will go live. There’s a very pleasing variety of work - the sorts of factual circumstances your cases involve, and the sorts of client, are very diverse, particularly with chancery work, where one might be doing a fight about co-ownership of a matrimonial home one day and a contractual dispute between two large corporations the next. Maitland is also a very friendly place and we tend to wander in and out of each others’ rooms or grab a coffee or a sandwich together. If it’s a day when there isn’t court the next day, I’ll normally hope to be leaving chambers by about 7:00pm.”

Things are different when David’s in court, however. It takes a lot of work to prepare for an interlocutory hearing or trial: “If that requires you to be in chambers until midnight preparing then that’s what you have to do. Quite often you will have to get up pretty early the next morning, particularly if travelling to a far-flung county court or district registry.”

More often in chambers than court, David notes: “The beauty of the job is that we have that variety: we are not in court every day and have the time to sit down quietly and really think about a problem between appearances; but equally we are not desk-bound. We get plenty of oral advocacy opportunities and one doesn’t lose the sense that that is ultimately what the job is about.” Moreover, solving people’s problems is what excites him: “I find reading an entirely new set of facts, analysing what the issues are and trying to work out what the solution is very satisfying. I enjoy doing it whether it be with a view to advising, drafting a pleading or, ultimately, standing up in court and arguing about it.”

Get ready for the flipside, though. David explains: “It can be very, very stressful, especially if you’ve got last-minute instructions to do a difficult hearing in front of a judge who is intimidating and well respected, and you simply don’t have the time to be as prepared as you’d like to be. And even if you are well prepared, there is always an inherent element of unpredictability in court work, particularly with live witness evidence. I’d be lying if I said there hadn’t been hearings where things haven’t gone quite as expected. That said, the stress makes it all the more exhilarating when it goes well.”

The highlight of David’s career to date was acting for a former actuary and director of Equitable Life in a professional negligence case against its former auditors, Ernst & Young, and board. David recalls what it was like: “It lasted some six months in the commercial court and there were about 15 different parties to it, many of them represented by QCs. It was a very daunting environment, particularly since it was a case that involved quite difficult allegations of professional negligence in the actuarial context. It was difficult enough to get a handle on the concepts sufficiently to be able to argue them in court, and that just made something that was already intimidating even more scary. However, once the case got going and I got on my feet and did my opening – and even more so once I cross-examined my first witness – I really started to enjoy it. It was a thrilling experience and it got me a lot of exposure to good solicitors and barristers that otherwise I wouldn’t have got that early on in my career.”

For David, there’s one thing that comes top of the list of skills you need to work at the Chancery Bar: intellectual ability. He says: “You have to have a strong academic record. You’ve got to be able to digest quite complicated and diverse factual situations, together with what is sometimes quite obscure law, quickly and work out what the issues really are. That requires you both to have good analytical skills and not to be daunted by things that may appear, initially at least, quite difficult. You have to be able to extract, and ideally present as being simple and obvious, an argument out of instructions that are often very complex. It’s not pure intellectual ability, however: you’ve got not only to see the answer yourself, but have that sense for how to convey it in a way that other people will see it as being the answer too.”

Furthermore, David notes how you have to have self-discipline, because you are your own boss and you’ll have lots of people making demands on your time. “No one is going to organise your time for you,” he points out. It is something he readily admits he hasn’t mastered fully.

So, what should a budding barrister do to improve his or her chances of bagging a spot at the Chancery Bar? “Get a good degree with good grades behind it,” advises David. “I would also say come and see what it’s like: come and do mini-pupillages. There are a lot of misconceptions about the Chancery Bar. We have a lot of overlap with the Commercial Bar and a lot of the work that we do is not as dusty and old-fashioned as some people might think. And do what you can to practise your advocacy. Mooting is essential: you’ve got to be able to show that you’ve done legal advocacy.”

Above all, David says, you have to be informed about what the Chancery Bar is really like. “There’s so much misinformation out there,” he says. “It’s sexier than you might have thought.”