Other roles 

Specialist roles within the Clerking “umbrella” may also open up for you. You may think that you only want to be a Clerk, but the reality is that some people are better diary managers than others, some better at man management and practice management, some love the business development side – some people like working with figures and after a short time spent clerking, realise that they would be happier and better suited to a fees, credit control or financial role. That is one of the many things that makes working in a modern day set of Chambers so unique, in that it can present you with the opportunity to change your career path within the same industry, if the skills you have, or develop, are better suited to a different role and one in which you would be happier. 

You should bear this in mind when you climb the ranks and eventually reach a stage where you consider yours to be the most important job in Chambers, just because you are a “proper” clerk. I have seen sets where the diary clerks think they are above everybody else in the support team because they fill the diary by doing “proper” clerking. It doesn’t work like that, and without the other pieces in the jigsaw, the whole team would fail. What’s the point of filling up the diary if you are filling it up with potentially bad debt cases, because you have ignored the warning signals from the credit control team. Perhaps you wouldn’t be getting the phone calls at all if whoever is in charge of business development hadn’t been going the extra mile themselves. It is easy sometimes, especially in a big set of Chambers, to think of your role in isolation, but you must keep reminding yourself that it is a team game.