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See probationary tenancy as a fresh opportunity to impress a new group of decision-makers, advises Abiodun Olatokun
As an undergraduate law student, you made the brave choice to forge a different path from your vacation-scheme classmates. You decided that you would become an in-court advocate. You undertook mini-pupillages, were grilled by scholarship panels and talked your way through seemingly endless pupillage interviews. You smashed the Bar course and finally got pupillage. You wrote a social media post about how you had achieved your dream. You assumed that your barristerial practice would proceed unencumbered, then you finished that pupillage. Plain sailing from here?
That was my story. However, once I completed my training, I found that I would not continue my journey at the same chambers. My next step would not be tenancy, but probationary tenancy or ‘third six’ as it was once known. In this article I hope to provide advice to those who have also found themselves in this position and assuage any concerns that they might be experiencing.
I entered the final stages of my pupillage in June 2023. Around that time, it became clear that my prospects of tenancy at the same set were low. I asked my chambers to defer the decision about my tenancy so that I would have another three months in which to meet their standards. In retrospect, I’m not sure that this was a good idea. I faced a gruelling combination of informal and formal assessments over the summer months at a time when I was burnt out and desperately in need of a break. Had I been more honest with myself, I would have understood that I was not in the ideal position to perform at my best.
I will not pretend that it was easy to decide to seek probationary tenancy elsewhere; I spent several weeks grieving that decision. With the benefit of hindsight, I can say that I should have skipped to the final stage of the grieving process earlier by accepting and acknowledging the writing on the wall. But how could I? I was head over heels with my first set of chambers. As a graduate I had applied to them on four occasions and had wanted to be there for an embarrassingly long period of time – since my teenage years.
But after speaking to others who went through this process, I eventually put my ego to one side and resolved to act in my best interests. It was time to accept that my immediate future might be elsewhere, and I began to consider alternatives.
During the pupillage hunt, I had stored all my applications in the productivity tool Trello, saving the results of these applications (first round, second round, reserve/offer) on Trello’s lists feature and linking these to Google Docs. I created a new Trello board for my probationary tenancy applications, duplicating the list of chambers which had shortlisted me for pupillage. I then produced my ‘pro-forma application pack’ which comprised:
When composing my covering letter, I researched the chambers profiles of comparable junior juniors whose practices looked like what I wanted mine to look like in two years’ time. I included (appropriately anonymised) details of the cases I had worked on during my pupillage along with legal career highlights that were not strictly advocacy-based, but would be unquestionably impressive (such as teaching over 20,000 students about citizenship and the rule of law in a successful online human rights course).
The overall intention was to produce a document that would serve at once as an advertisement of my suitability as a probationary tenancy candidate and a first draft of a chambers profile.
Once I was happy with my covering letter, I headed to the Bar Council’s probationary tenancy vacancies page. This is an excellent resource which allayed any concerns I had about where I would go next; there are plenty of chambers to choose from. At the time of writing, 66 chambers across the country are advertising for probationary tenants. The most recent opportunity was added the day before this article was submitted, and a number of chambers on the page had been recruiting probationary tenants in this way for over eight years.
I compared the list of chambers which had shortlisted me as a pupil applicant against the chambers recruiting probationary tenants, eliminating those not advertising from my Trello board. I then proceeded to send copies of my tailored CV and covering letter to the relevant CEOs and pupillage committees.
In addition, I asked the clerks at my chambers to reach out to their colleagues managing practices at other sets. Through those approaches I was able to make applications outside of the probationary tenancy vacancies page. These conversations also enabled me to get a better sense of what my strengths and weaknesses were as an applicant.
As pupillage applicants we heard the doomsday refrain of the Inns of Court/Bar course provider ‘health warning’. The traumatising din still resounds in the back of my mind, too; the overwhelming level of competition for pupillages such that many capable graduates will not become barristers. While this may have been the case at the outset of the journey, it is not true at the point of probationary tenancy.
Probationary tenant applicants are typically barristers who have completed pupillage and with prior experience of advocacy. There may well be fewer than 100 such people added to the pool each year. By contrast, there were 2,979 applicants for 638 pupillages through the Pupillage Gateway in 2022/23. Probationary tenancy is the thin point of the funnel; as applicants, we are proven specialists applying for a large number of potential opportunities to further specialise. Chambers recruit junior tenants to solve problems in their ability to fulfill entry-level instructions in their areas of practice, and so we possess significantly more power in that recruitment process than when applying for pupillage. (See ‘Who gets pupillage?’, Counsel Bar Student Guide 2023.)
Out of five formal applications made over two months, I received two offers and considerable interest from the chambers I did not join. By contrast, I applied to 39 chambers over four years as a pupillage applicant and received a similar number of offers (three). The economics of probationary tenancy applications are completely different to pupillage.
I began my probationary tenancy in December 2023. That was a strange time to begin for two reasons. First, because I did not yet have a full practising certificate, I was unable to conduct reserved legal activities. Thankfully this was resolved within my first few days at the set.
Secondly, the season. Solicitors were wrapping up urgent business before Christmas and I found that mid-December was not a great time to develop new business relationships. I spent those weeks preparing my home office for my new practice, getting to know colleagues and building my understanding of the areas of law in which I would be working.
That was time well spent, as I became very busy in the new year. In the first five months of 2024, I have been involved in 60 matters across education, employment, immigration and housing. I have already appeared as sole counsel in the Employment Appeal Tribunal and have won many 50/50 cases on behalf of a range of clients. Probationary tenancy has helped me to turn around the precarity I experienced at the end of my training into a solid foundation. Through probationary tenancy, I became an established public lawyer with repeat instructions from solicitors. Recently, I made a successful application for tenancy and I feel that I have arrived – and am finally settled – at the Bar.
Chambers will start adding vacancies en masse around the end of July. I was not ready to make applications at that time as I was so exhausted. I took a long working holiday and began to make applications in earnest from mid-September. Although that meant that a couple of the vacancies I had been interested in applying for had lapsed, I came back more refreshed than I would have been otherwise and was still presented with more options than I had time to apply for. A self-care break was a good idea and didn’t negatively impact me.
If things didn’t quite work out at your previous set, learn whatever lessons you need from it and move on. Probationary tenancy is a fresh opportunity to impress a new group of decision-makers. I struggle with mental health conditions relating to adverse childhood experiences and the scrutiny of assessment combined with mock exercises was quite difficult for me during pupillage. By contrast, with the minimal scrutiny experienced as a probationary tenant, I have thrived in running my own practice. There are plentiful opportunities for probationary tenancy, and there are several positives I have been able to draw from the experience that I could not have envisaged earlier on in the process. For me, probationary tenancy was an opportunity to reflect and to launch the next stage of my career with momentum. I wish the same for any pupil who, like me, has found themselves in need of a second (or third, or fourth etc.) home.
Abiodun Olatokun FRSA is a barrister practising public law at the 36 Group. He is also a university lecturer, charity trustee and a campaigner for the rule of law.
As an undergraduate law student, you made the brave choice to forge a different path from your vacation-scheme classmates. You decided that you would become an in-court advocate. You undertook mini-pupillages, were grilled by scholarship panels and talked your way through seemingly endless pupillage interviews. You smashed the Bar course and finally got pupillage. You wrote a social media post about how you had achieved your dream. You assumed that your barristerial practice would proceed unencumbered, then you finished that pupillage. Plain sailing from here?
That was my story. However, once I completed my training, I found that I would not continue my journey at the same chambers. My next step would not be tenancy, but probationary tenancy or ‘third six’ as it was once known. In this article I hope to provide advice to those who have also found themselves in this position and assuage any concerns that they might be experiencing.
I entered the final stages of my pupillage in June 2023. Around that time, it became clear that my prospects of tenancy at the same set were low. I asked my chambers to defer the decision about my tenancy so that I would have another three months in which to meet their standards. In retrospect, I’m not sure that this was a good idea. I faced a gruelling combination of informal and formal assessments over the summer months at a time when I was burnt out and desperately in need of a break. Had I been more honest with myself, I would have understood that I was not in the ideal position to perform at my best.
I will not pretend that it was easy to decide to seek probationary tenancy elsewhere; I spent several weeks grieving that decision. With the benefit of hindsight, I can say that I should have skipped to the final stage of the grieving process earlier by accepting and acknowledging the writing on the wall. But how could I? I was head over heels with my first set of chambers. As a graduate I had applied to them on four occasions and had wanted to be there for an embarrassingly long period of time – since my teenage years.
But after speaking to others who went through this process, I eventually put my ego to one side and resolved to act in my best interests. It was time to accept that my immediate future might be elsewhere, and I began to consider alternatives.
During the pupillage hunt, I had stored all my applications in the productivity tool Trello, saving the results of these applications (first round, second round, reserve/offer) on Trello’s lists feature and linking these to Google Docs. I created a new Trello board for my probationary tenancy applications, duplicating the list of chambers which had shortlisted me for pupillage. I then produced my ‘pro-forma application pack’ which comprised:
When composing my covering letter, I researched the chambers profiles of comparable junior juniors whose practices looked like what I wanted mine to look like in two years’ time. I included (appropriately anonymised) details of the cases I had worked on during my pupillage along with legal career highlights that were not strictly advocacy-based, but would be unquestionably impressive (such as teaching over 20,000 students about citizenship and the rule of law in a successful online human rights course).
The overall intention was to produce a document that would serve at once as an advertisement of my suitability as a probationary tenancy candidate and a first draft of a chambers profile.
Once I was happy with my covering letter, I headed to the Bar Council’s probationary tenancy vacancies page. This is an excellent resource which allayed any concerns I had about where I would go next; there are plenty of chambers to choose from. At the time of writing, 66 chambers across the country are advertising for probationary tenants. The most recent opportunity was added the day before this article was submitted, and a number of chambers on the page had been recruiting probationary tenants in this way for over eight years.
I compared the list of chambers which had shortlisted me as a pupil applicant against the chambers recruiting probationary tenants, eliminating those not advertising from my Trello board. I then proceeded to send copies of my tailored CV and covering letter to the relevant CEOs and pupillage committees.
In addition, I asked the clerks at my chambers to reach out to their colleagues managing practices at other sets. Through those approaches I was able to make applications outside of the probationary tenancy vacancies page. These conversations also enabled me to get a better sense of what my strengths and weaknesses were as an applicant.
As pupillage applicants we heard the doomsday refrain of the Inns of Court/Bar course provider ‘health warning’. The traumatising din still resounds in the back of my mind, too; the overwhelming level of competition for pupillages such that many capable graduates will not become barristers. While this may have been the case at the outset of the journey, it is not true at the point of probationary tenancy.
Probationary tenant applicants are typically barristers who have completed pupillage and with prior experience of advocacy. There may well be fewer than 100 such people added to the pool each year. By contrast, there were 2,979 applicants for 638 pupillages through the Pupillage Gateway in 2022/23. Probationary tenancy is the thin point of the funnel; as applicants, we are proven specialists applying for a large number of potential opportunities to further specialise. Chambers recruit junior tenants to solve problems in their ability to fulfill entry-level instructions in their areas of practice, and so we possess significantly more power in that recruitment process than when applying for pupillage. (See ‘Who gets pupillage?’, Counsel Bar Student Guide 2023.)
Out of five formal applications made over two months, I received two offers and considerable interest from the chambers I did not join. By contrast, I applied to 39 chambers over four years as a pupillage applicant and received a similar number of offers (three). The economics of probationary tenancy applications are completely different to pupillage.
I began my probationary tenancy in December 2023. That was a strange time to begin for two reasons. First, because I did not yet have a full practising certificate, I was unable to conduct reserved legal activities. Thankfully this was resolved within my first few days at the set.
Secondly, the season. Solicitors were wrapping up urgent business before Christmas and I found that mid-December was not a great time to develop new business relationships. I spent those weeks preparing my home office for my new practice, getting to know colleagues and building my understanding of the areas of law in which I would be working.
That was time well spent, as I became very busy in the new year. In the first five months of 2024, I have been involved in 60 matters across education, employment, immigration and housing. I have already appeared as sole counsel in the Employment Appeal Tribunal and have won many 50/50 cases on behalf of a range of clients. Probationary tenancy has helped me to turn around the precarity I experienced at the end of my training into a solid foundation. Through probationary tenancy, I became an established public lawyer with repeat instructions from solicitors. Recently, I made a successful application for tenancy and I feel that I have arrived – and am finally settled – at the Bar.
Chambers will start adding vacancies en masse around the end of July. I was not ready to make applications at that time as I was so exhausted. I took a long working holiday and began to make applications in earnest from mid-September. Although that meant that a couple of the vacancies I had been interested in applying for had lapsed, I came back more refreshed than I would have been otherwise and was still presented with more options than I had time to apply for. A self-care break was a good idea and didn’t negatively impact me.
If things didn’t quite work out at your previous set, learn whatever lessons you need from it and move on. Probationary tenancy is a fresh opportunity to impress a new group of decision-makers. I struggle with mental health conditions relating to adverse childhood experiences and the scrutiny of assessment combined with mock exercises was quite difficult for me during pupillage. By contrast, with the minimal scrutiny experienced as a probationary tenant, I have thrived in running my own practice. There are plentiful opportunities for probationary tenancy, and there are several positives I have been able to draw from the experience that I could not have envisaged earlier on in the process. For me, probationary tenancy was an opportunity to reflect and to launch the next stage of my career with momentum. I wish the same for any pupil who, like me, has found themselves in need of a second (or third, or fourth etc.) home.
See probationary tenancy as a fresh opportunity to impress a new group of decision-makers, advises Abiodun Olatokun
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