I always find myself reflecting upon the year drawing to a close at Christmas time and simultaneously looking forward to what is to come with optimism.
I want to set out in this blog post a bit of a review of my 2025. It has been another busy and successful year. Another year on the job and also starting to notice fine lines along the ever persistent and ruthless march of time.
I accomplished a number of things in 2025, one of which was to obtain my mediator qualification with ADR Group and also be appointed a part-time judge.
However, the period from September 2025 until just before Christmas was exceptionally busy and challenging. To be blunt it was awful. I had a number of trials and long-standing matters which came to a head seemingly all at once. There was very little that my clerks could do for me. It was one of those times where you just have to strap in and get through it. However, there were casualties along the weigh, the sleep (or there lack of it), the stress and never fully being present in the company of my family.
One of those matters which fell within this period was in the High Court. Judgment will be released in the new year and I will be writing a piece about that because it is an interesting case. Another trial which I finished just before Christmas involved a trust dispute about property in London which was purchased in the early 1960s. My client had to fly in from Toronto where I am from. I am also looking forward to that judgment being released in the new year.
We learn little from victory, much from defeat
Apparently that’s a Japanese proverb but regardless in my experience it’s true. It is only really when we lose and we get kicked in the teeth is when we properly learn- at least for me.
For me, while professionally I have been having rather good success with outcomes, including before judges and in mediation resolving disputes, I have been getting kicked in the teeth with the issue of managing my practice, the administration, the balancing client demands and something called work-life balance. Work-life balance is at the stage where I firmly believe it is a myth for a barrister and it is something which forever escapes me. That is something which I want to work on in 2026 because even though it has eluded me to date that does not mean that it will forever.
Earlier in this blog post I mentioned that I had obtained my mediator qualification. I am working towards my Civil Mediation Council accreditation and assuming all goes well, and I do not discover that I am a negligent and hopeless mediator, I ought to gain it in 2026. The plan is to set up a company next year for the mediation business and start deploying that.
Part of my draw to mediation is I do believe that for the vast majority of parties it is the best outcome. Mediation by its nature demands that you do not get everything you want but that almost never happens in court anyway. Even if you win in court you still lose. You lose because you do not get everything, you lose because you have to keep going to court, you lose because you do not get all your costs. I am looking forward to mediation and for me I think it is also a means of future proofing.
There is the rise of AI and it is at early stages but the pace at which it improves and develops is both inspiring and also concerning. I do not think that lawyers are immune. We are a knowledge based industry and I have seen an increase particularly of those who represent themselves of using AI. The problem with AI is that it tends to look very good on the surface but once you just dig a little the cracks are all there. While I sympathise with those who cannot afford legal representation or who are opposed to paying the obscene sums that we charge, it lulls people into a false sense of security and I think it emboldens them. There is also an issue that I think it will have an impact on critical thinking in the general public going forward. So part of my mediation is to help diversify my practice and ensure that I can still pay my bills in the future.
One of the other major successes of 2025 was being appointed for the first time a part-time judge. I am still undergoing the training and much of the work I will be doing at my level of the judiciary will be similar to work that I was doing in my early years of practice. It will be a return to some personal injury and road traffic accidents which I have not touched since early 2020. It will be a return to the consumer disputes particularly with trades people that again I used to deal with but I have not dealt with in years. Having gone through some of the initial training, it again makes me reflect on just how my practice has developed, how my path has gone. It is just extraordinary that in these years I have been able to specialise and really find a niche that I think serves me well.
The thing with being a judge, of course, is one has to make difficult decisions. At this stage, I do not think the general public would accept an AI judge. But given the backlogs, and given the discussions regarding scrapping jury trials, I think in time that perhaps we will see AI judges. I do not think it is impossible. I doubt it will be within my working career, because it will really require full acceptance of society for AI, and viewing AI as either an equal or some kind of trusted source.
The difficulty with AI is, of course, it hallucinates, even when you tell it not to, it does. Further, it is only as good as the data it is trained on. If the data which the language model has been trained on is flawed or biased, then it too will be. This is something which I reflect on, and think about while I am driving across the country to various courts.
One of the other things which I want to try and achieve in 2026 is ideally a ranking in the legal directories. I have yet to be ranked most likely because I have never bothered to apply. Now I might apply and not get ranked anyway, but I find personally the whole process of filling out forms to be very tedious. It is something which I know is a real weakness in me. It winds me up probably disproportionately, and that is something I wish to improve upon.
When you apply to these rankings, effectively your clerks will do a printout of all your cases. You look at them, and it is just totally overwhelming. You have to pick out which ones you think reflect your skills and make you stand out compared to others who are applying. To be blunt, it is really difficult to justify the time it takes when you are already busy. It is not like my practice is suffering; if anything, it is too busy. If anything, I need to increase my prices to find better market equilibrium. So why would I sit down and fill these forms, something which I am not particularly good at, and for something which I seem to not be suffering for?
Despite my pessimism, I do have significant encouragement from my clerks and chambers and the marketing team. They want to see me do it and I think I must. Not because I need it, but because it is always important to step outside of your comfort zone. I think if you just stay within your comfort zone, then you never grow and over time your comfort zone will shrink.
You never experience new things. You never improve. I think that just sitting back and thinking I cannot be bothered, I do not have the time, I do not like these things anyway, it is a trap to sit and be comfortable. And while that by itself is not an issue, it is the length of comfort.
I have already started the process and it might be that at the end of 2026 I am not successful. And I think to myself, well, what was the point of that? But hopefully having gone through the process, I have realised it is not actually that traumatising. Maybe the year after I succeed, who knows. But I think I have got to just sit down and get it done.
Hopefully by spring 2026, I will be getting more experience as a mediator. I will be continuing to serve my clients and getting the best outcomes for them.
Further, and in a way, I hope I am still getting kicked in the teeth once in a while because that is how I grow and that is how I learn. The only way I am going to stop learning as a barrister is I am either going to leave the Bar or I am going to die. Neither of those things are particularly attractive right now.
