Q & A with Emma Price and Emma-Louise Fenelon
Emma Price and Emma-Louise Fenelon are the authors of Baby at the Bar.
This is included in our Employment Law service.
Tell us a bit about the research you did for Baby at the Bar.
When the idea for the book was burgeoning, we did some initial research. It was not sophisticated! We sent a 37-question, 8-page Word document to a few friends and colleagues asking for their warts-and-all experience of parenting at the Bar, encouraging them to tell us the things that don’t make it onto LinkedIn. Twenty-two people responded, and we were hugely encouraged by what they told us and by their enthusiasm for the project. Nearly every respondent told us that their primary or only source of information about what to expect when having a baby at the Bar was informal advice from other barristers.
With the support of the Inns of Court Alliance for Women, the circuits and the specialist bar associations, we were able to spread the word about a further survey, streamlined to 16 questions. In the end, we had surveyed over 250 barristers, men and women, from all major practice areas and at all levels of call. We also reached out to individual barristers who generously agreed to share their particular experiences of things that could not be properly captured by our survey. This included things like practising during IVF treatment, baby loss, taking longer than 12 months maternity leave, and the experience of pupil-parents.
If you could encourage barristers’ chambers to make one immediate improvement, what would it be and why?
It’s difficult to pick one. Our research revealed that a modern and generous Maternity and Parental Leave Policy is essential if chambers want to ensure that members feel supported and valued. Updating a chambers policy takes effort, curiosity and a process of regular feedback and review. It’s not enough to assume that meeting the Bar Council minimum standards is sufficient – the best chambers will go well beyond this. Not least because this will become something that the brightest and the best will increasingly seek out in sets of chambers to which they apply.
Are there any examples of good practice in supporting parents at the Bar that emerged from your research that you would like to highlight?
There were plenty! 20% of our respondents reported positive experiences due to supportive clerking practices and chambers’ culture. There is no easy fix for this, changing culture takes conscious effort. It’s clear that the chambers which excel in supporting members have invested in their clerking teams’ knowledge and understanding of the critical role they can play in supporting barristers with parental responsibilities.
Are there any strategies that were popular amongst contributors for managing their workload as parents?
The shrinkage of time for work after becoming a parent is a theme which many barristers responding to our research survey raised. In addition to managing time like the precious commodity it is, popular strategies included doing the most challenging work to be done in the parent’s most productive hours in the day, being wholly focussed on work when working and parenting when parenting, and setting, communicating and sticking to limits and boundaries. Above all, building in wriggle room for the vicissitudes of life is crucial!
