okay in this video i want to address a question that came up in my youtube channel last week and
that is why did i become a solicitor rather than a barrister it's a good question and it's a good
question obviously for anybody who has an interest in getting into the law game into legal industry
for me it's very very straightforward when the property market crashed around about 2007 or 2008
it was only at that point that i turned my mind to going back to college and
going back to studying and perhaps giving it a go to become a solicitor because up to that point
i had been a self-employed business man since 1986 and i had my own business in retailing in
construction and property investment in all sorts of activities but the property market
crashed and that took care of a lot of stuff for me it created great difficulties it also
presented an opportunity the opportunity for me was to do something which i'd always fancy doing
but never really had the time now i had the time because well quite frankly i had nothing else left
so i qualified as a solicitor i think in 2011 and i set up in practice in 2011 in other words
within a few months of qualifying i set up again as a self-employed person so i have been
self-employed practically for well over right now since 1986 so you can work it out but in terms of
becoming a solicitor or a barrister it was very very straightforward for me very very simple
decision a barrister must get instructions from solicitors say that again a barrister must be
instructed by a solicitor or at least that was the case then 10 years ago and has been
in the profession for many many years it may be changing a little bit now in the last number of
years with a few developments there opening up the profession and so on it may well be the case that
there still must be instructed by a solicitor but the bottom line is when i was starting
a barrister had to be instructed by a solicitor so if i became a master who was going to instruct me
i had no contacts remember i'd been self-employed for 20 years or 25 years at this stage i didn't go
to an expensive private school i didn't play rugby i didn't have any contacts cultivated or built up
down through the years in the legal profession in fact i knew nobody in the legal profession
apart from my own solicitor my own solicitor who had been acting for me since 1986 and who promised
me an apprenticeship if i ever got into the law society and luckily enough i worked hard and i
was able to pass the exams for the law society very quickly and go back to my solicitor and say
mary do you remember you promised me she says yeah i said uh well i've got an apprenticeship or i've
got a place in the lost city will you give me an apprenticeship but she did and i will be forever
and eternally grateful to her for that but being a solicitor versus being a barrister
if i'm a solicitor i can hustle and i can solicit clients from the general public i can do wills i
can do conveyancing i can do litigation i can do employment i can act for employees i cannot
ask for employers so all of that was open to me by becoming solicitor i'd become a barrister none of
that was up to me all i could hope for was that i would get the attention of some solicitor who was
stuck someday and might just pick me that's not a great way to start a business that particularly
when you're more more mature and later in life and you really don't have all that much time to be
messing around cultivating clients and cultivating contacts and so on and so forth so the ability
to be able to generate clients get clients from the general public was absolutely critical for me
and that's why for me the very um simple decision was it was always going to be a solicitor because
as i say from the day that i qualified in 2011 within a month or two i was set up on my own
as a sole practitioner that was not possible and it wasn't feasible as a barrister because
obviously i could set up all right but i wouldn't get clients i wouldn't get enough of those
the likes of this video and the likes of social media marketing and so on has opened up a massive
vista for the likes of me as well because if you are that way inclined and you have a little bit of
street smarts when it comes to marketing then you can use youtube as i'm doing now to build
profiles to generate leads to generate clients and to build the business that's essentially what
i've done so for me it was simple i could cast my net very very wide i could throw
plenty of crumbs on the water through youtube and through blogging and through facebook and through
various other social media platforms and i could generate and canvas and get leads get clients
from the general public as the barrister couldn't do that i'd be relying on some
solicitor to pick me and to say when you are relying on somebody to pick you then it's not
the state of affairs that i find very agreeable anyway i hope you find this video useful and i
hope it clarifies for you if you're thinking about a career in the law game in the legal industry if
you're going to minister to the greatness of the law well then that's the choice you have to make
you've got to choose between being a barista or being a solicitor as i say i hope you find it
useful and if you do i would appreciate if you give us the thumbs up down below thanks a lot