Giles Fernando is a barrister at 11 South Square, a leading set whose members are dedicated to IP work. Giles studied law at the University of Oxford and then worked for a publishing company for two years. He says: “I always knew I wanted to be a barrister, but I wanted to get experience elsewhere first, which was valuable. Also, because I was a little young, it would have been difficult giving advice to people when I looked like their son.” In fact, it was working in publishing that got him into intellectual property, “because there are all sorts of copyright issues that arise regularly. Also, at the time, the world wide web was emerging as a new publishing medium and raising new legal problems, so that sparked my interest”.

Giles then obtained a pupillage at 11 South Square. He remembers: “The first trial I saw in pupillage was a copyright trial which ended up going to the House of Lords. It was very interesting and turned into one of the seminal cases on copyright infringement. I was lucky to see the case from the outset. That was the first time I’d seen the difference between the theoretical side of law and law in practice. The two are very different.”

Now, Giles feels that his workload is spread evenly over all the various types of IP work. “You have to be very good at juggling,” he says. “I had a case at the beginning of the year which became enormous. It took two or three months of my time. We do work silly hours – although not trainee solicitor hours – and you’ve got to be prepared to put in 60 hours a week when you start out.”

Another consuming lawsuit was the Douglas v Hello! case in relation to the publication of unauthorised photographs of the wedding of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Giles worked on it for seven years and got the final judgment in May 2007. He says: “I saw that case right from the beginning. I got a call from my clerk when I was in the shower on a Tuesday morning. OK! had been granted an injunction overnight and we had just found out about it. The clerk called to say I needed to get down to court with a silk from my chambers to apply to set aside the injunction. We didn’t succeed before that judge so we went straight to the Court of Appeal that evening. The two members of the Court of Appeal could not agree on the result so a new three-man court was convened for the following day. The trial in the end went on for 25 days, which is quite astonishing.”

Next came all the appeals and, in fact, the case went to the highest appeal court in the land: the House of Lords. “At the end of the day,” notes Giles, “we lost three-two which was quite frustrating, particularly as the two law lords in the minority gave very powerful judgments.”

Giles enjoys the fact that he’s in court regularly, but not every day. He says: “We’re probably in court twice a week, but if we’re not in court we’ll be doing paperwork. I went down to court this morning on what I thought would be a short hearing. The judge decided it would be a good idea to have the trial expedited so it turned into a very lengthy hearing. I’ve come back to sort out the order from this morning and get on with my paperwork.”

The thing Giles most enjoys, though, is cross-examination: “I think any barrister would say that’s one of the most enjoyable aspects. It’s what the job is all about. It all comes down to that moment in court. For the moment when you’re cross-examining a witness, you have to know his area better than he does. You have to know in detail his life, his documents and his case. Once you leave the trial, you can forget it all. For the people who pretend that you can prepare it all on the back of an envelope, that’s just a confidence trick on the public. The amount of preparation that goes into cross-examination is phenomenal.”

Giles has another everyman answer for the aspect he enjoys least about the job. “Losing,” he says. “I absolutely hate losing.” However, he extracts a crucial strength from the process of losing: “You have to be very self-critical all the time, and that can be a bit of a burden. People who can’t evaluate their performance and identify areas for improvement won’t do very well. This is a profession in which you are constantly learning and you must be open to constructive criticism and be able to learn from the stars you are occasionally lucky enough to see in court.”

Other character traits one needs include having an analytical mind and the ability to use it on the spot. “In intellectual property,” says Giles, “the judges are quite interventionist, so you’ve got to be able to think on your feet. There’s a lot of case law to grapple with, and a tide of legislation from Europe, so you’ve got to be up to date.”

Giles sits on the pupillage interview panel at 11 South Square, so he knows what his chambers is looking for – or rather, what they are not. He says: “We interviewed a chap and asked him about his advocacy. He said he’d never done any. We asked: ‘Have you done any mooting?’ No. ‘Have you done any debating?’ No. We all wondered how he was going to persuade us that he wanted to be an advocate. There are a lot of people who think it would be nice to be a barrister, but don’t really have the ambition and haven’t done anything to show it. And it’s expensive – you’ve got to borrow £20,000 or so. Why do that if you’re not really sure?”

Giles thinks that it’s best for budding barristers to ask themselves honestly whether they would be a barrister if they could do anything else. If the answer is an unequivocal yes, then you’re on the right track. There are some things you can’t ever learn, though. As Giles says: “I wish someone had taught me how to manage a clerk. Notionally the clerks are employed by us, but they’re the ones who actually have all the power.”