‘Reluctant’ silks told to get back into court

Barristers in Victoria have been rebuked by the Bar Association president after magistrates complained at their reluctance to resume court ­appearances following Covid-19.

Court sittings were taken online during the pandemic but there are increasing calls from senior lawyers and judges for life in the courtroom and in law firm offices to return to normal. Picture: iStock

Barristers in Victoria have been rebuked by Bar Association president Roisin Annesley after magistrates complained at their reluctance to resume court ­appearances following the Covid-19 pandemic.

“It was disappointing to receive feedback this week from the Magistrates Court as to the perception that there was an unwillingness on the part of counsel to appear in person in court, particularly in regional Victoria,” Ms Annesley wrote in the latest Victorian Bar Association newsletter, In Brief.

“It was expressed to me that there is a real desire from the bench to be assisted by counsel in court in person. The perception from the bench is that some counsel are reluctant to appear in person because it is more convenient for them to appear online.

“Convenience of counsel is not an overriding consideration in relation to the availability of counsel to accept a brief.”

Court sittings were taken online during the pandemic but there are increasing calls from senior lawyers and judges for life in the courtroom and in law firm offices to return to normal.

NSW Chief Justice Andrew Bell called for this during his swearing-in speech in March, saying it was “incumbent on senior members of the profession to take the lead in the return to professional life as we knew it more than two years ago”.

He said he recognised the “real opportunities and benefits presented by the technology with which we have all become familiar and the concomitant advantages of workplace flexibility and significant cost savings” but his “strong hope” was that 2022 was the year “which sees the reversal of the unintended but insidious depersonalisation of the legal profession brought about as a result of Covid”.

High Court judge Stephen Gageler also urged a return to normal in a speech at the Australian Bar Association conference in Melbourne in April, noting that although “without the combination of shared professional experience and serendipitous contact that comes with physical proximity, individual members of the bar will survive”, there would be casualties.

“Boomers in the twilights of their careers will make it to the end,” Justice Gageler said. “Those who have become curmudgeons will do so happily. Gen Xs will probably do OK.

“Gen Ys, and especially those who are at the dawns of their ­careers will miss out. If they miss out, the Bar, and in turn the bench, and ultimately the system of law … will be weaker for it.”

ABA president Matt Collins told LawyersWeekly in September that the legal profession was yet to confront issues raised by the way in which the system had been forced to adapt to the pandemic. “We didn’t really have time to stop and reflect upon what it meant to be having more conversational hearings before judges over remote technology, rather than in the solemnity of the courtroom, and to have lost the ability to have those incidental conversations that barrister and solicitors … have while they’re waiting for their matter to come on or sitting at the Bar table,” he said.