Daniel Bromilow is a barrister at 9 Stone Buildings, a chancery practice with expertise in a broad range of areas. Daniel studied law at the University of Cambridge and took the BVC at the Inns of Court School of Law. He says: “I really can’t think of any other job I would want to do. I always leave decisions to the very last minute and really just fell into becoming a barrister. We had a law information evening at my college. A barrister turned up and he seemed very tanned in the middle of winter. I asked him where he’d been and he said he’d just been away for his second week-long skiing holiday. I thought that sounded good so I decided I’d give it a shot.”

Now with 11 years’ call, Daniel has developed a broad practice area covering chancery and civil work, but specialises in landlord and tenant, real property, and company and corporate insolvency law. Although now installed at 9 Stone Buildings, his pupillage was split between three other sets. During this time he practised company, entertainment, media and pensions law, and also did some general chancery work. He says: “I saw no landlord and tenant work during my pupillage, due to the nature of the work of my pupil masters. It was only something I started doing after I’d got tenancy.”

Daniel’s landlord and tenant work developed from simple beginnings. He says: “It started off with just straightforward possession hearings because I was the junior member and clients wanted someone cheap for a simple hearing. It was more a question of falling into it rather than making a determined effort to do it. The range of work I do now is slightly broader than the work I did as a pupil.”

Daniel works on about a dozen landlord and tenant cases at any one time: “I’d say that there will be four or five short-term cases I’ll be dealing with, maybe four or five medium-term cases that will last for up to a year, and then there will be four much longer cases in the background.”

Litigation has only just begun on a particular case that has been rumbling on for years. Daniel explains: “It involves a site on a farm. The current owner’s father originally let a traveller in a caravan occupy part of the field on the farm. Fifteen years later, after the farm had been inherited by the current owners, they decided they wanted to develop that field and they’re trying to get possession. Because everything’s been done on a very informal basis, it’s difficult to say exactly what the legal relationships are. The real issue is to find out what people have done and how they’ve presented themselves and put that in a legal framework. It’s not entirely straightforward. And then of course there are various statutes, such as the Mobile Homes Act 1983, and you have to look at it in the light of all those statutory frameworks.”

Daniel remembers another recent case that proved pretty tricky. Indeed, the odds were stacked against him: “It was about service charges for long leases. There were a whole range of difficult technical points made by the other side. It was a difficult one because they raised so many different technical points and if they’d succeeded on any one of them, we would have lost. So we had to get a clean sweep or nothing. We won in the first instance. We won at the first appeal and we just found out that they’ve been refused permission to have a second appeal. The litigation lasted about two years because of the constant appeals and applications.”

Daniel has three types of day. He could be in court, where he’ll “hang around for an inordinate amount of time and then do the hearing – they’re normally fairly short, although there are exceptions”. Otherwise, he’ll either be working from home or in chambers: “I don’t think I could live as far away as I do if I had to come into London every day. I think it would kill me!”

That flexibility is something that all barristers relish, and Daniel’s no exception. What’s his favourite thing about being a barrister? “It is definitely being one’s own boss,” he says. “I think that’s the thing that makes us different from others in the legal profession. It’s the ability to work when you want and the fact that you don’t have someone saying what you have to do. Despite the flexibility, you have to accept that you don’t know exactly what you’ll be doing. You might get instructed at very short notice. Just as you were thinking you’ll be able to work from home for the next two days and then have a leisurely weekend, you’ll get an urgent application that needs doing on the Thursday for a hearing on the Monday. So you’ve got the flexibility, but things keep cropping up at the last minute.”

For budding barristers who are thinking about landlord and tenant work, Daniel has this advice: “Make sure you have some sort of training in the area before you start. There is a massive amount of primary legislation that governs the area and you just have to know all of it because you never know when a bit of it will become relevant in a case. When I started out I didn’t know any of it. So I had to go on a steep learning curve to get the knowledge. My advice would be to try and flatten out that curve if you possibly can and get to know the area of law well in advance.”

Interview practice is also a must, advises Daniel: “Get people to interview you – it doesn’t matter who they are because the people who will interview you in real life will come from a range of backgrounds. Just practise interviews with anybody – even people on the bus!”

Although he seemed to fall into the practice area, Daniel says: “I’m glad I did. It’s not always possible to take two weeks off a year for skiing though!”