Queue See

Qld gazettes arrangements for converting from senior counsel to queens' counsel ... Marketing ploy in a desperately needy climate ... Melbourne SC still pressing for the queens' counsel option while fighting off attacks on the "imponderables" of selection ... Warning: original notion of the QC had little to do with higher fees  

Qld attorney general Jarrod Bleijie-Petersen has gazetted the new arrangements for the appointment of Queens Council in and for Pineapple Land. 

It all looks much the same sort of vetting process, with the bar 'n' grill's consultation group going over the self-nominateds, then the CJ doing some fine combing, consultations and even additions. 

The extra step is the CJ's list going to the executive council for the issuing of letters patent only to those applicants approved by Daphnis - i.e. the AG cannot add mates or subtract enemies at this stage. 

Those appointed as Senior Counsel between 1994 and 2012 can also apply to the bar to be converted into QCs. 

Even here Daphis has a veto power before the piece of paper goes off to ExCo. 

Retired judges can also ask for their SCs to be given the letters patent treatment. 

The new arrangements are gazetted under the entirely apt heading "Extraordinary". 

See here. 

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So what does it all mean? 

Apparently it's a marketing ploy so that customers might think they are getting a superior service from someone stamped with approval by Queeny herself. 

There's also the idea that people are muddled because they can't work out the difference between an SC and a QC and the whole upper-end bar market has been thrown into turmoil. 

Really, who's swallowing this bollocks? Who's confused, who doesn't know who gives good counsel, etc? 

The people that do the briefing know who's up and who's not, so this re-branding is really ab exercise in self-basting. 

It's more to do with the fact that a lot of the bar is desperate for work and any little marketing trick might help.

What may happen is the bunyipification of the QC "brand", where only the NT and Queensland still supply letters patent thereby turning the grandeur of queens' counsel into a sub-tropical joke. 

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Meanwhile, Melbourne senior counsel Michael Wyles is still hard at it. 

He's widened his marketing campaign, sending further emails to the far reaches of VicBar in his quest for the "reinstatement of queens counsel". 

He's also been fending off assaults on the silk selection process from academic barrister and administrative law guru Damien Cremean. 

In The Australian Journal of Administrative Law, Cremean went to town on Victoria's silk selection business, pointing out that the rules didn't even specify that someone had to be learned in the law. 

"The system for silk in Victoria seems to fail every administrative law test: a vague discretion, exercised only by one person, on unspecified criteria, without appeal, without interview, by recourse to people's untested views, without reasons being formally required to be given, and without appeal. This is no better than hopeless ..." 

The Wyles One was having none of that. In a withering rebuttal which would find favour with adjudicators at Lower Remove debates he said appointing silks is not an administrative process. 

It's a mystical search for excellence and leadership "safeguarded by the Chief Justice", Earl Warren. 

It seems Cremean wants to stamp out all the secret manoeuvrings and Kremlinesque preferments. 

In a memo to members of Foley's List, Wyles explained that there will always be "imponderables" in the process. 

"Some will be left as junior counsel so that there are able advocates of that rank available to the public. No one is defeated by the process." 

Vast swathes of the bar were heard choking in chambers on their amyl-drenched orange quarters.  

"Demands for 'transparency' in the process are as misleading and untenable as they are warranted," said the Guthrie Featherstone of VicBar. 

The urgency of the campaign doesn't seem to have caught on with the judges. The chief justice's HQ tells us that word of these excitements has not dripped upwards to Earl herself. 

See: Queen Victoria Land  

See: Memo to members of Foley's List

Also, Wyles paper: The Institution of Senior Counsel 

And here's a bunch of his recent correspondence and attachments for closer inspection ...

Wyles QCs Missives 

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In NSW the senior prefects at the bar 'n' grill once more have been tinkering with the silk protocol.

There may be a bigger consultation committee and some new provisions about referees. 

Applicants can hardly wait to sample these innovations. 

A reliable Phillip Street flâneur tells me a story of a few decades ago. 

A leading QC was briefed by the NSW Crown Sol who had marked a fee on the brief before it was delivered to the great man.

After the matter concluded the brief was returned. The silk had crossed out the amount that the CS had marked and inserted a higher rate.

The CS phoned the silk to ask him if he was sure he wanted to do that. 

"Yes, that is my fee," was the reply. 

The CS then asked when the silk would be returning to the Governor his commission as a queen's council, as part of the deal of being a QC, in fact its origin, was to agree to do work for the crown as and when requested and at the crown's rate of pay. 

Our silk quickly acceded to the lesser fee. 

Those SCs in Queensland who opt to convert might bear that in mind, specially in times of government austerity. 

Up the republic.