In recent years human rights law has become a popular choice for both students and practitioners. University law faculties are increasingly offering human rights modules as part of their law degrees and more firms are boasting specialisms in the field. The introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998 has made the European Convention on Human Rights directly enforceable in the national courts.

Naina Patel is a public law and human rights barrister at Blackstone Chambers. An early interest in the legal system took her to Balliol College, Oxford to study law, but she soon found herself on a more circuitous route to the Bar. "I suppose I'm an interesting case because I went to university to read law, but changed to philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) during the first term. Not because I was ruling out law long term, but because I decided that for me, law would be more intellectually stimulating with a more detailed understanding of how society works, and PPE seemed like the best way of developing that understanding. It's a matter of personal choice - I like having a broader base from which to approach questions of rights balancing and governance, but I would say to those trying to decide what to study: choose what you love. Your university education is a very precious time and you should spend it studying what you'll enjoy. It is more than likely that this is also what you will excel in."

After her degree, Naina completed the CPE/diploma in law at City University before heading to the States to study for a master‘s degree at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Again, her area of study wasn't law in the purest sense, but rather its role as a policy tool in the post-conflict reconstruction and development of countries such as Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. "Similarly, if you are interested in doing postgraduate study in a particular area, even if it's non-law, then do so," she advises. "The Bar is a career for a lifetime and there is no real disadvantage in coming to it when you are 30 as opposed to 21 - it's very much a long game."

These early experiences also helped Naina to crystallise her ideas about how she saw her career progressing and to develop her interest in human rights work. "At university and thereafter I did quite a lot of work in international development," she explains. "I was driven by an interest in the interaction between states and vulnerable individuals, and how to make life better for them. Upon graduation I felt that for me, law offered more immediately tangible results than a career in development policy. It was this which ultimately brought me to the Bar."

Naina's desire to tackle the roots of societal problems in a meaningful way has led her to spend much of her time working on cases she considers to be at the heart of her specialty. "The term ‘human rights law' can be a bit of red herring," she suggests. "Human rights issues can crop up in a whole range of areas, including employment and commercial law disputes. But what people normally mean when they use this label is public law and judicial review work raising human rights points. The reason I became interested in this area is that it really is the interface between the state and the individual, where you see - in very real terms - adjudications between the competing demands of state policy for society as a whole and for particular individuals or communities of individuals."

Naina works in a range of areas: immigration and asylum, prison law, healthcare, education and cases involving international law issues. While much of her early work principally involved acting for claimants, often individuals, her recent appointment to the Attorney General's Panel of Counsel means that she has started acting on behalf of the government, which gives her the contrasting perspective of a client organisation seeking to meet certain policy objectives. "In order to do your clients the best service, you need to able to anticipate the other side's case," she says. "I personally think there is no better way of honing that skill than actually having worked on both sides of litigation."

Naina's advice to those hoping for a career at the human rights Bar is to become a good lawyer first and a good human rights lawyer second. "You need similar skills to those you need in many other areas of the Bar," she says. "In other words, you need to be able to draft and argue persuasively and you need to be good with clients and people. These are three of the fundamentals for any successful barrister. Thereafter, one of the ways in which human rights work is different from other areas of work at the Bar is that it's an area of law that is still developing, so you tend to need to think outside of the box a bit more and to be creative with arguments. You can also have a very wide range of clients, so in addition to your interpersonal skills, you need to be able to tailor your tactics and strategies to the varying needs of your clients. For example, when you are working with less affluent members of society, the issue of costs can be decisive as to whether individuals can bring claims, so you need to be quite strategic in your thinking about how to structure the litigation so that they are in fact able to sue if they are not eligible for legal aid."

The next crucial consideration for budding human rights barristers concerns choice of chambers. "Think about what sort of a practice you want human rights to be a part of Naina elaborates. "Not many chambers do exclusively human rights work. Most do it as part of a range of other areas of practice. It's unrealistic to expect that in the early years of practice you will be doing exclusively human rights work anywhere. I would also apply for as many mini-pupillages as you can, both in order to get experience of seeing human rights practitioners in action and also to experience what different places are like to work at. Your chambers is somewhere you may well end up spending all - if not a large part - of your professional life, so it's important that you are happy there. It's a question of finding your niche and growing into it and not feeling like you need to be somebody you're not. I don't think there is a particular blueprint of a person who is right for the human rights Bar: if you are able and determined, you'll succeed."