I did not read for a Law degree, which meant that I had to complete Part 1 of the Law Society Examinations, and then Part 2. The qualification system has changed since then, for the better.
Between Part 1 and Part 2, I spent about 3 months working for the late Ivan Geffen in Walsall, one of the technically best lawyers I have ever known. In the three months that I was there Ivan twice got acquittals when four policemen said that they had seen the person commit the crime. Ivan was a beacon for civil liberties in the West Midlands.
After Part 2, I served articles with a firm in Sandy, Bedfordshire called Leeds Smith, now called Leeds Day. I mainly did unregistered conveyancing. Registration was now coming in locally, so I made applications for First Registration. I did a little litigation and a fair bit of assisting – serving proceedings on defendants in civil cases for example. The best task was when I was driving around Bedfordshire trying to find heirs for a lady who had died in 1917.
After admission as a solicitor I worked for Neville Barnett in Raynes Park, London. I did civil litigation, matrimonial, and crime.
My family largely lived in the North East so I took a job with Leonard Osterman in Stanley, County Durham. My diet there was civil litigation, matrimonial, and crime.
I made a career mistake, taking a job as a court clerk at Sedgefield Magistrates Court. I had not appreciated it before, but the main job of running a court is to keep everything in apple pie order, and not make any mistakes. There was little opportunity to show initiative.
I had by now obtained a place to read for a Masters Degree in Yugoslav Studies at Bradford University. As there was no funding I advertised for advocacy work in the Bradford / Leeds area, thinking to do advocacy in the morning and to study in the afternoon. This resulted in a job offer from Bradford Law Centre, who had had back word from a solicitor they had appointed and now needed to make an appointment urgently.
I had a wonderful time at Bradford Law Centre. No doubt I will be writing more about this in the future. We did Immigration, Housing, Welfare Benefits and Employment – all of which I had to learn from scratch. We trained volunteers, some of whom later qualified as lawyers. We did work around marital and housing injunctions. We trained local advice workers and took some of their cases to court. At least four council housing estates were demolished or significantly revamped after our interventions. We had two ground breaking cases, Hardial Singh [1984] 1 All ER 983 and R v Immigration Appeal Tribunal ex parte Mahmoud Khan (CA) [1983] QB 790.
Hardial Singh is approved by the UK Supreme Court and by several foreign courts. It basically says that you cannot keep people detained indefinitely. You must remove them within a reasonable time span or you must free them.
Mahmoud Khan was a Court of Appreal Decision in which Lord Lane said,
“The tribunal should also state briefly, if appropriate, why they find or do not find a particular fact — stating, for example, that they are not satisfied in relation to the evidence given by a particular witness, or that they are satisfied, and so on. It is impossible for us to lay down any precise guidelines. The overriding test must always be: is the tribunal providing both parties with the materials which will enable them to know that the tribunal has made no error of law in reaching its findings of fact? We do not think that the brief reasons set out here suffice for that purpose.”
“Those final remarks in the last two sentences that I have read are proper guidelines for tribunals dealing with immigration matters.”
Although I enjoyed Bradford Law Centre, I would never be able to be openly party political. Also, Law Centre funding was always precarious. It was better to set up a solicitor practice where I could be my own boss.
I ran a solicitor practice, James & Co., in Bradford 1984-2004. I had business partners but most of the time I was solo.
This section is about legal life.