Charting the future

NSW bar looks for ways to stay bobbing in a turbulent sea ... Economic ideas to the fore in strategy plan ... Relevancy deprivation syndrome could be a factor ... Where are the bar's public voices? 

Barristers without charts

THE NSW bar 'n' grill's strategic plan has received far too little attention, something that should be remedied right away. 

You can read the whole concoction here.  

In theory comments on the plan closed on July 18 and now a process of cogitation is underway. 

The committee devising the strategy comprises Justin Gleeson (chairman), Brian Rayment, Ian Temby, Kate Traill and Mary Walker. 

It is intended that the plan will "chart some of the key objectives of the bar association, and the strategies to achieve them, over the next two to three years". 

See this. 

Basically, it is a marketing document - a search for ways to pull the bar out of the doldrums - with a few nobs on, such as getting more tails on seats in the inner sanctums of the ABA and the Law Council

There are the necessary motherhood statements about "promoting the public good and collegiality … dealing with the government and the media and promoting fair and honourable practice". 

There are also some good, but not particularly original, ideas: 

• Development of a national, uniform SCs' appointment system; 
• Creating a local hub of excellence for settlement of international disputes; 
• A series of seminars, along the lines of the rhetoric series; 
• Promoting a non-compulsory scheme of sabbatical leave for members, including a recommendation that each barrister take three months off every seven years; 
• Schmoozing of solicitors, in-house counsel and government agencies; 
• More investment in marketing;
• Smarter, more informative online information about barristers; 
• Assistance for sole-trading barristers to have the sort of support enjoyed by practitioners in a firm;
• A more committed contribution to the "public legal domain"; 
• And, of course, something really must be done about costs.  

All very good, but more is required - a wholesale shift from a closed, reactive bar to an open, engaged one. 

For outsiders dealing with the official organs of the bar, particularly journalists, the process is akin to trying to extract a small, skinless, chicken bone from a very possessive mastiff.  

Questions and requests for information are funnelled upwards to the chief bureaucrat and invariably a negative or, at best, minimalist response is the outcome. 

It's easy to get the impression that engagement is discouraged. 

The bar is worried about being over-shadowed by competing voices. At the moment, it doesn't have a public voice at all. 

Just image a world where barristers participated in public debate and forums on pressing political-legal issues of the day - the future of juries, privatising prisons, litigation costs and delays, workers comp, constitutional reform and so on. 

An online list of experts in important fields, who were available for media comment, on the record, might also be a handy innovation. 

Apart from the obvious show ponies, when did you last see a Sydney barrister on the ABC's QandA or an IQ2 debate, or holding forth at Writers Week? 

If there are any, you can count then on two fingers. 

The outcome, unfortunately, is that the bar as an organisation and an institution drifting towards irrelevancy - which is really weird for people with a lot to say.