Mark Vinall is a barrister at Blackstone Chambers, which specialises in commercial, public and employment law. He studied law with French law at the University of Oxford, a degree which included a year in Paris gaining insight into the fact that the answers reached by the English legal system “are not the only ones possible”. Mark always knew that he wanted to be a barrister, and has found that the flexible reality suits him well: “Compared to a solicitor’s life, your day can be more easily organised to suit you and there is more responsibility at an earlier stage. The buck stops here, in that you have to find the answer. But that’s the great thing – you get the chance to think hard and get the answer, rather than having to subcontract out the interesting stuff to someone else.”

Pupillage at Blackstone was characterised by its fair approach to assessment and retention, says Mark: “You’re judged on a level playing field because you’re seen by four different pupil supervisors and, in addition, everyone does certain pieces of assessed work for the same person. That gives you confidence that when a decision comes to be made, it’ll be on a full and objective picture of what you can do rather than a more subjective basis. It also helped that in my year the pupils got on very well and were mutually supportive.”

Mark’s work is split into two kinds: court-based and desk-based. He discusses what that means on a day-to-day basis: “I will either be preparing for or attending trials and other hearings, or doing paperwork, such as drafting opinions, statements of case or skeleton arguments. As you’d expect, you tend to work much harder when you’re coming up to, or you’re in the middle of, a trial. In terms of how often you’re in court, media is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum (with, I suppose, criminal at one end and tax at the other). At the beginning, you’re unlikely to be doing media exclusively and unlikely to get much advocacy experience in that field. Most cases are important enough that the client doesn’t want anyone too junior. So it’s good to start off more broadly – all our very junior tenants do employment cases, whether or not they intend to continue with employment law, because they then get regular exposure to advocacy and running an entire case.”

Mark expands on the sorts of legal issue that are covered by media and entertainment law. He says: “At one end, you’ve got soft intellectual property, such as performers’ rights, copyright, moral rights – all the bits that give rise to income for pop stars and record companies! For example, I was junior counsel for the British Phonographic Industry in the recent Copyright Tribunal case, which decided how much composers and publishers should be paid for the use of their music online. At the other end of things is contract law that just happens to arise in an entertainment context; for example, a musician’s record deal is just a specialised sort of contract. You need an understanding of how the industry works and the income streams to make sense of it. I was junior counsel for Seal’s former manager in a case that involved contract issues, including what the contract meant, restraint of trade and undue influence. We had to assess whether a management deal was unreasonable, so we needed to sit down with industry experts to determine what terms would have been normal at the time.”

Unsurprisingly, many cases have an online component: “I had an interesting case where we acted for a web-hosting company that was accused of trespassing on the claimant’s domain name. More generally, almost every case these days involves email evidence and the use of ‘metadata’ [data showing when and by whom a document was created] is becoming more important.”

For those who think media law is all celebrity clients and showbiz glamour, Mark injects a note of reality: “The work can be glamorous, meeting famous people and doing interesting things, but the two don’t always go together. Famous people can have dull cases too!” Mark continues: “A great case is that perfect matrix of interesting issues of law, interesting facts and a great team to work with. With a mix of those three, you can’t go far wrong.”

Mark explains what he likes most and least about his career: “You get to be involved in the process of righting wrongs that have been done to people. Although media clients are not always the most obviously needy people, there are times when you’re able to really help someone in trouble. The downside is the work-life balance – this is not the sort of job where you can leave the office at 5:00pm. You sometimes have to work late, or at short notice, or when you hoped to be doing something else. However, you can control it to some extent – you don’t have to work stupid hours all the time.”

So, what does it take to be successful in this field? Mark’s view is that “you need the same skill set as for most barristers’ work: a good understanding of the law, an ability to process, manage and retain complex facts, and an ability to explain things clearly to people”. Over and above these strengths, media law also requires the development of “an interest in and understanding of how the various industries work”.

The Free Representation Unit (FRU) is where it’s at, says Mark: “I can’t recommend FRU highly enough. Even if you don’t see yourself going within a million miles of employment or social security law, you should be queuing up to do FRU. It’s the best experience you can get! You get to do real cases of your own, you do all the advocacy (both submissions and witness handling) and you make the strategic decisions on how to run things, but there is help available if you need it.” Mark’s other top tip is a must-have book: “Every music lawyer I know has a copy of All You Need to Know About the Music Business by Donald S Passman. It’s aimed at musicians, so they can understand what their lawyers and accountants are doing, but it gives you an idea of how the industry works and deals with difficult subject matter in a light-hearted way.”

Mark offers a final word of advice on how to secure pupillage: “There is no getting away from the fact that you need a certain level of academic ability – this is difficult commercial and IP law – but in terms of the other things on your CV, it doesn’t really matter what you do so long as you’re doing it well. And don’t forget, if you go to an interview claiming that you want to do a particular area of law, then you should have some sense of what that’s all about and some of the hot issues.”