GeekLawyer’s Blog

The Bar Council has just notified Geeklawyer that a thief broke into their premises and nicked a laptop and four hard-drives full of embarrassing data: the partial financial records of barristers; their names and addresses; names of the Great and the Good of the Bar Council and the Bar Standards Board; the names of complainants against barristers.

Bad huh? Sounds like the Government loosing the traditional taxpayer/MI5/MI6 data on the taxi/train/Clapham Rickshaw. Well, no. The Data was all casually unusable since it was password protected.

Props to the Bar Council for engaging in safe data-intercourse. One wonders however, given the weakness of Microsoft password protection of documents, whether this was mere password protection of the data, or encryption? The latter would make it unusable but the prevalence of password cracking tools would make the former a less than ’state of the art’ form of protection, although clearly better than the Government level protection of rice paper umbrellas in a Monsoon.

The End. In so many ways, the end.

This episode saw the downward spiral of the 24 caret plonker Ickbal from what seemed to be the unbreachable all time low of previous episodes. Never missing an opportunity to show that he was as dim as he was egotistical he offered numerous dishes to camera.

In a crowning articulation of the perils of upward social mobility Ickybal tells us that as a child he’d never dreamt of aspiring to the Bar imagining he’d exhaust his career in a West Midlands coal mine. Geeklawyer felt that even that lofty goal was a little above him, but at least being at the Bar he would not have been able to cave the roof in on his colleagues. Precious little consolation to those of us who might trip over his ego in the robing room.

On being given a wig to wear (”Wow, I’ve got a big head!” being a rare moment of self awareness) he improvised to camera:  “My Lords I propose this case as a lot of bollocks.” Somehow one felt the inevitable anxiety that this was the exact and full quality of advice and advocacy that his punters would receive in his short lived career at the Bar before he retired to become an unlicensed cabbie in Birmingham: “I had that Lord Neuberger in the back of my cab the other day”.

Probably the highlight of his career was winning £271.32 from the Orange phone company as a litigant in person. Retarded Ikcbal proved well the adage that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client: £271.32 did, however, seem like suitable highpoint on which to end his career.

Bizarrely, though, there were even bigger fools than Ikcbal on display. And while Ikbal has the defence of a low IQ youthful exuberance and the demonstrated limited capacity to utter anything other than vacuous piffle David Wolf had no such excuse.

Mr David Wolf practically exuded “oil of ‘ism’” aftershave from his pores. Geeklawyer wondered how he ever got to chambers in the morning so deep must be his bowel loosening fear of treading on an innocent fly or looking at a woman in a sexist non-supportive way on the Tube. Mr Wolf spent most of the episode wringing his hands in tearful angst at the ghastly elitism of the Bar. Matrix Chambers, he proudly declaimed, was engaged in organising a revolt at the Bar by which the bastions of privilege would be overthrown by having different coloured areas of chambers to correspond with different areas of practice.

“See? Green headed chambers notepaper matches the green walled area of chambers; you know when you are in the ‘Right-On’ part of Matrix, where we fight for the underdog at a very reasonable £300/hour”.

Oh, and they don’t have pupils, they have ‘Trainees’ who don’t ask clerks for help, they ask ‘Practice Assistants’. Matrix Chambers can be found at Griffin Building, Gray’s Inn. When Geeklawyer says at, he means above. Matrix Chambers is suspended about 300 foot above the ground: levitated on a cloud of its own virtuous, but inclusive and mutually supportive, hot self righteous air. Rumour has it that this will be powering the next generation of Zeppelin Airships.

Our last sight of Howlin’ Wolf was his shocked tut-tuting at the pomp of a House of Lord’s decision that went against his punter and how jolly elitist and inaccessible it was to the man in the street. He was cut short by the camera before saying the hearing should really have been before the Shoreditch Workers Peoples’ Collective Court. Mr Wolf then departed to get a breakfast of organic muesli and soy milk.

It was not all bad however. The delicious Cat, who can sit on Geeklawyer’s lap any time, got a puppyledge at Keating Chambers in London; and the funny sounding Northern Lass got a pupillage and tenancy in Newcastle. Spiffy - she seemed fairly competent and Geeklawyer wishes her well.

But if the pupils, aspirants and tenants seemed like a bunch of cunts then Kakoly Pande saved the day for the Bar. She exuded pure 24 carat charisma. Clever pretty modest and talented she exhibited the sort of self-confidence talent and class that made one doubt that she would ever fail at the Bar; fail and wind up becoming a Solicitor-Inadequate at the minor Midland solicitors Frisbees or somesuch career graveyard. Faced with objections from junior tenants as to her prospective tenancy she gave what seems to have been a bravura performance and won them over. Their objection was less to do with her than the shortage of work at the Bar: a common theme throughout the series, and rightly so.

Again, the larger and more important policy driven skirmishes between the Government and the Bar were not explored. This is not a criticism: a program such as this would not perform too well by exploring these issues.

Overall the fourth episode maintained the weaknesses of the previous episodes in that it didn’t step beyond the photogenic. Nonetheless it made for good television: it was engaging and interesting if not as good a reflection of the reality of the Bar as it could have been. One wonders if the public are any the wiser; Geeklawyer wouldn’t know, he tries to avoid them wherever possible.