Brick Court Chambers - True Picture

Brick Court pupillage review 2025

The Chambers

As one pupil at Brick Court put it: “Really the biggest draw is the breadth of what you can do here.” So, what kind of work does the average barrister at Brick Court do? Senior clerks Paul Dennison and Tony Burgess told us that a rough pie chart of the set’s revenue would be around 60% commercial, 35% competition and 5% public law, “with a 5% swing either way any given year.” We heard a lot of the public law work is done for free, so in terms of caseload, it makes up “slightly” more than 5%. As Dennison puts it: “It’s the kind of set where if you read the FT or The Times and keep on top of news generally, it’s likely that you’re going to be reading about a case that Brick Court has been involved in across all practice areas.” This is especially true of the public law work on offer in chambers. To provide just a few examples, barrister Tim Johnston was recently instructed to draft and prepare the arguments for a judicial review claim concerning the lawfulness of the government's policy of removing asylum seekers to Rwanda before both the Divisional Court and Court of Appeal. The set was also brought in to represent the Vatican in what is believed to be the first time the Vatican has been sued in a foreign court.

“…if you read the FT or The Times on the way into work in the morning, it’s likely that you’re going to be reading about a case that Brick Court has been involved in.”

These sorts of cases have attracted the attention of the Chambers UK Bar too, where the set receives the top accolades for its work in commercial dispute resolution, competition law, energy and natural resources, European law and civil fraud. Despite the set’s role in high-profile cases overseas, “not all of the barristers want to go overseas in order to build an international practice,” Burgess tells us, “but here you can really just decide what you want to do.”  Brick Court’s clerks frequently seek out work from outside London to find “lower-level county court claims” for junior tenants to take on, because “junior barristers need to learn how to litigate a case from start to finish and doing that on their own is one of the best ways to do it.”

As one pupil added: “I found a lot of the commercial stuff was really exciting. You're dealing with really complicated points that have a massive impact. These tectonic commercial disputes can go either way, so you're dealing with really complicated questions that are important to big cases.”

The Pupillage Experience

Rather than dividing the year into two blocks of six months, Brick Court assigns each pupil three supervisors across the year: one specialising in commercial, one competition and one public law, and the aim is for these supervisors to vary in terms of seniority. “The reality is that a lot of people have quite mixed practices, which is often part of the appeal for people applying to Brick Court,” one pupil explained, “so in your seat with your commercial supervisor, there might be a competition edge to the work.” Pupils sometimes also work for other members ofchambers, “which can be quite interesting and diversifies what you're doing further.”

“I'm not just doing the piece of legal research that will feed into the skeleton argument. I'm writing the actual skeleton argument.”

“Over the course of the entirety of pupillage, the tasks were very varied - some of them would be shorter research notes, some of them would be doing first draft of the skeleton or doing either a section of or an entire pleading.” For one pupil, “the vast majority of work I did was live,” with the occasional “background know-how task” during quieter periods. “I think earlier in the year I was often given slightly more abstract research tasks,” but by the end of the year “I'm really into the weeds of the facts. I'm not just doing the piece of legal research that will feed into the skeleton argument. I'm writing the actual skeleton argument.” On the public law side of things in particular, one pupil was quick to highlight the opportunity to work on human rights cases during pupillage, such as for the UNHCR and onsubmissions to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights: “The UNHCR case was wicked. It was just a really interesting legal point; I really enjoyed it.”

Pupils don’t get on their feet during pupillage at Brick Court, but there are plenty of opportunities to practice advocacy skills. There are seven advocacy exercises in total, the first two are unassessed practice sessions and the marks from the remaining five count towards the tenancy decision. According to one former pupil, “you'll be given a set of papers to work on. You prepare a speech and you do a little mock competition against the other pupils.” This was followed by “a bit of a grilling, and then afterwards you get really detailed feedback, which is one of the best parts of pupillage at Brick.” Three weeks in March and another three in June are dedicated to the written assessments. Pupils do one per week, covering the three practice areas across the three weeks. The assessments are either skeleton arguments or notes of advice, and all six written assessments count towards the tenancy decision. There are also formal meetings throughout the year with representatives from the Tenancy Committee, “where they give you an indication of how you're doing and if there's any particular areas you should be thinking about working on,” one former pupil added.

The Tenancy Committee makes recommendations for tenancy based on reports from the pupil supervisors and a pupil’s performance in assessments. “Obviously very considerable weight is attached to the Tenancy Committee’s recommendation, because the committee has gone through all of the evidence,” says Chair of the Pupillage Committee Victoria Wakefield KC. Of course, “no one is born flawless, so if a person's exhibiting a good trajectory, and reaches our standard by the end of the year, then that is often enough.”

“The hours at Brick are very regulated, it’s a 9am-to-6pm pupillage,” one pupil told us. Although there’s no set number of days pupils are required to come to the office, “Tony and I encourage people to come in chambers as much as possible, because there’s an element of camaraderie, especially at the junior level,” adds Dennison.

“We've got a WhatsApp group where sometimes we'll put a little pint emoji in the group and see if anyone fancies one on a Thursday or Friday.”

The set recently introduced a monthly pub trip and according to one former pupil: “We've got a WhatsApp group where sometimes we'll put a little pint emoji in the group and see if anyone fancies one on a Thursday or Friday.” We also heard about a party at the Natural History Museum to celebrate 100 years of the set as “super overwhelmingly fun!” There are also celebrations whenever someone at the set takes silk, where “you get an opportunity to catch up with people you wouldn't necessarily see as much of otherwise.”

The Application Process

Prospective applicants must complete a two-day mini-pupillage at Brick Court before being considered for pupillage, although “in exceptional circumstances if someone had a reason why they hadn’t, we could of course be flexible on that” says Wakefield. These take place in two “seasons”: autumn and late winter. “The application process for mini-pupillage is entirely paper based,” Wakefield tells us, “historically, we used to have interviews at that stage, but we don’t anymore.” The ten members of the pupillage committee decide how many mini-pupillages to offer, which is usually 25 in each season.

The process is kept as anonymous as possible “to make it as fair as possible. To make sure there's as few opportunities for biases and prejudices and all of that kind of stuff as possible,” Wakefield adds. This anonymised approach to marking written work continues into pupillage too: “It's a method of combating bias and I think that is a really positive thing for a chambers to do to have that sort of centralised anonymised assessment system,” one pupil commented.

In the end, around 15 candidates are invited to interview for five pupil positions. The interview consists of a presentation of an oral permission to appeal application to the Supreme Court, which they have about a week to prepare. The other, shorter part of the interview is an unseen question, “so we’ll ask them something from current affairs, but try to reason out with them what their approach is to that problem,” says Wakefield. One pupil explained that the process is “obviously quite intense,” but “the subject matter of all of the work was so interesting throughout the application process. It's difficult, but the job is difficult!”