CEO INSIGHT time I was 15, I pretty much didn’t go to school, and I left with only 5 ‘O’ Levels. I suspect this later affected my applications to become a barrister, as I made 77 applications and only received 12 replies. Going to Tenerife was an opportunity to reassess my life and I came back determined to achieve. I enrolled in further education college, then studied law at University and decided that dressing up in black and going to court every day for an argument was the future I had been looking for, so I became a barrister. It was the closest to being the Wicked Witch of the West – like Elphaba, carving my own noisy niche. Please tell us about the moment you returned to the UK to finish your studies. When watching the ex-pat Brits performing a Christmas pantomime in the only venue with a stage which was where men would go to buy sex – a memory that has fuelled my work on reproductive rights, human trafficking, and decriminalising sex work. I knew there was a world elsewhere. What gave you the incentive to study law? My father made the ink to print newspapers and my Godfather worked on the Daily Mail and the Socialist Worker. I thought I was going to be a journalist and law would be a sound foundation. As I progressed through University, I was asked whether I would become a solicitor or a barrister, so I tried some work experience. Being a solicitor required accounting for time every six minutes, that was not for me as I can spend hours thinking and that wouldn’t look good on a billing sheet. Several mini-pupillages later, taking me to the House of Lords on a food labelling case and the Court of Appeal on gross negligence manslaughter, I knew that the intellectual rigor and advocacy of the Bar would suit me. I am sad that the last 30 years has seen the decline of legal reasoning in criminal law in the senior courts of England and Wales, but I am proud of the contribution I have brought, particularly in identifying the legal errors in joint enterprise law and the ignorance of Constitutional protections for Shamima Begum. This has increased with the comparative opportunities I have from my 17th floor corner office in Melbourne. As a female criminal barrister up against Old School Barristers, how did you navigate the early years? It was quite a surprise to discover the shouty judges and adversarial opponents, but I suppose I gave as good as I got. I had a great start from a defence solicitor in the youth court, and I was often instructed in complex prosecution cases involving serious sexual offending at a time when it was very difficult to get cases involving female victims prosecuted at all. I did my best to carve myself a role as an expert. On top of my court work, I had a column in a legal magazine, and I co-wrote The Sexual Offences Handbook, which contains all the laws on sexual offending since 1952. I now specialise in Murder, Terrorism, War Crimes and Modern Slavery law and I have a Ph.D. on trafficked women who commit crime. Despite being female, despite not attending an elite public school or leg ups from the Old Boys Network, you progressed through the ranks. What has been your strategy for scaling up? To be honest, I have had support from some old boys and girls – the application for Silk is 60 pages long and references are needed from senior members of the legal profession so I must have been doing something right and I am grateful to all my supporters, especially senior women silks and decent scholarly judges on the bench. My strategy is to identify my dream job and write my CV as if I am applying tomorrow, which identifies my relevant skills and allows me to work to fill the gaps. More than once I have faced blocks in my career but, being strategic about where I want to go usually allows me to circumvent them, although sometimes it takes longer than it should. www.ceotodaymagazine.com 30 “Going to Tenerife was an opportunity to reassess my life... I came back determined to achieve.”
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