Juliette Brodsky

The Raising the Bar film that was made a few years ago marked a very important point for the Women Barristers Association. It was its tenth anniversary and the documentary obviously signalled many of the achievements and above all made an important representative point about the importance of having women at the Bar. This, I want to put to you, is a slightly tougher question and perhaps I can go around the table: I’d like you to each perhaps do a little SWOT – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that actually face the Women Barristers Association. So it’s an opportunity for you say something about what you think has been done to date that’s good, where we still need to do a little bit of work and something too about the possibilities for the future.

Fiona McLeod SC

I think our strengths are that we are intelligent, we’re feisty, we’re committed and we’re passionate and I think that that’s also one of our weaknesses because we’re volunteers and we all suffer reform fatigue over the years. I know I, since the beginning, have gone through a cycle of exhaustion with it, just in terms of the number of hours you can commit to it when you’re building a practice and running a family and a life. One of our weaknesses is also that we face this reform fatigue from the Bar because the leaders of the Bar go off us and then they go back and we get support that shifts and changes and we have to stay making sure that our allies at the Bar are aligned with our intentions and purposes. In the Raising the Bar video, Felicity talked about more judges, more senior women, more junior women, women at all levels of the judiciary - and so that it stops being an issue as to whether they are there or not because we’re there in such numbers that you come straight out of law school where we’ve been more than 50% for 30 years and you walk straight into this career progression, if that’s what you want. There are no barriers; (so) that is the sort of aspiration I guess I hold that women barristers networks become an opportunity for networking and fun and not just about the reform but I think we need all sorts of initiatives and new ideas about how to get there.

Judge Frances Millane

Funding is an issue because you have initiatives, you have good ideas and just speaking to Simone (Jacobson), it’s clear that there is a lot of thinking going on about podcasts and technology and its funding. And the Bar Council over the years has been receptive when we’ve gone and begged and wheedled for a bit of money for various initiatives and promised not to ask any more in that financial year, we’ve often got money but I suppose to progress some of the ideas that you have, you’re going to have to think about how you can fund them and whether or not you could get other funds from elsewhere other than the Bar Council.

Simone Jacobson

On that issue of sponsorship, for our celebratory dinner we had in November, we had an independent sponsor for that which was fabulous and which enabled us to shout all the judges who’d been appointed in the proceeding 12 months as our honoured guests which was something we really wanted to do and we have another sponsor for a meet and greet event which we hold with Victorian Women Lawyers once a year. So it’s a start in the right direction but certainly for the technological ideas that we’ve got we will need more funds, that’s for sure.

Juliette Brodsky

That’s certainly I suppose somewhere between the weakness-cum-threats - what about other possibilities beyond the technical ones, what do you see?

Simone Jacobson

I think there’s a lot to be done in terms of reaching out to the public about women barristers, about who women barristers are, how you find them on the website and the reasons why they should be looking at women barristers for work. So, there is a lot of work to be done, that requires quite a bit of promotion and information to the public and I think also there is lot to be done with schools and universities and encouraging younger women to consider a career at the Bar. We have held events for law students, half-day events, by senior judges and senior practitioners to give an inkling of what it is like at the Bar and we’ve held those events for solicitors as well. So I think there is a lot to be done in that respect. in promotion.

Caroline Kirton

We’ve talked persistently this evening about being able to get the assistance of men who are powerful within the Bar - I would really like to see that position stop so that we are just getting assistance from women who are powerful within the Bar and until we have a large number of women coming up from being juniors, middle ranks, a significant number of senior women, because all the best ones of many have gone to the bench and more silks and that sort of thing, to be in the real positions of power either on Bar Council and so forth, that’s the only time things are really going to change.

Juliette Brodsky

Sam Marks, you were about to make a point?

Samantha Marks

I was just going to say (that) one threat, if you like, for the future of the organisation is what you get in any organisation that has aims and what has happened in feminism, generally - you get these waves, so you have people going, “Gee, these things need changing” and they put all this effort into changing some things and some of them get changed and that’s great and then the next generation come in and go “Well, this looks pretty good, we don’t need to change anything now” and then it all starts to recede again. And it’s keeping that energy happening and keeping that mentoring happening and keeping people realising that really there is still a bit of a way to go when the representation is still so much less than the numbers in terms of who is appearing and the work they’re getting and the culture.

Juliette Brodsky

Judge Cohen?

Judge Susan Cohen

I agree very much with what Sam is saying and it seems to me - I haven’t looked at the figures lately - but as far as I know, one of the big lacks still is women in the middle to more senior Bar, there is a number of silks, senior counsel now, there are women on various benches in noticeable numbers, numbers can certainly increase, and it appears from what we’ve been told and from what I’ve learnt tonight, there is a lot more self confidence in a lot of the younger women coming to the Bar who don’t perceive that there is discrimination or that they are not being treated with equal opportunity because a lot of the steps that have been taken in the past. But how to get them intent on staying at the Bar and building those middle to higher ranking numbers, the 7-12-15 years seniority, that still seems to me to be where the big lack is and if the younger ones aren’t seeing the need to push ahead into that group and to between themselves encourage each other to stay - I suppose we haven’t seen yet whether they will - but that’s an area I think a lot of concentration should be put on.

Samantha Marks

My aspiration would be to see somewhere between 40 and 60% of the Bar female.

Juliette Brodsky

How do others feel about this?

Frances O’Brien SC

I think we’ll have the gerontocracy that we had with men. [Laughter] There will be half a dozen women who are anything from 20-30 years and there’ll be a great mass of juniors at 1-10 – that’s how it used to be when I first came to the bar there were half a dozen men with more than fifteen years standing, they had all the power on the Bar Council and the rest of us just did as we were told because their vote was worth three times everybody else’s and I think that is what will happen to us. But I think our threat is from outside the Bar. I think the Bar’s future is under a serious cloud. I don’t think anybody is even conceiving what the prospects of the future (are) really about. I think Frances (Millane) has hit the nail on the head: if we don’t get really into some serious flexibility about where the briefing is coming from, we are going to be completely dumbed down, solicitors are increasingly doing all of their own advocacy.

Kim Knights

To pick up Fran’s point, I think Fran is absolutely right when she says our biggest threat is outside the Bar. I think that women at the Bar have seen huge improvement in the culture of the Bar and I think there is a recognition within the Bar of issues - many of them have been addressed. The real problem is borne out when you look at the survey results. Women are not getting briefed in the proportions that they should and that means that when there is not so much work to go about, then women are getting even less and it’s going to be very hard to sustain a living here.

Juliette Brodsky

Well, Judge Lewitan - as the person who founded it and looking down the track, seeing it from your vantage point?

Judge Rachelle Lewitan

Well, I think one of the greatest strengths of the Women Barristers Association is that it gave women a voice and I think that the women should use that voice and if the Bar is under threat, use that voice to persuade the Bar that their – that reforms are necessary and perhaps have an input into the nature of those reforms.

Juliette Brodsky

Can you just elaborate a little more about the reforms that you see as needed?

Judge Rachelle Lewitan

Well, like you were saying about the threat that the Bar is facing from solicitors taking over more and more work and the need to perhaps market the Bar to the public and …

Juliette Brodsky

You can imagine some people curling up their toes at the very thought of this.

Judge Rachelle Lewitan

Yes, but as judges we know that the best advocacy is usually the advocacy of people who are doing it all the time, and the client is often best served by experts and the experts are the barristers who are the specialist advocates.

Juliette Brodsky

Well, thank you all very much – it’s been great having you, and I’m sure you’ll be happy with the results. (Applause)

(CREDITS UP, MUSIC)

Judge Felicity Hampel

What the WBA did and what its great strength is that being able to bring together really diverse people who have often got different interests and needs, uniting for an aim but not necessarily always seeing the direction in the same way and harnessing all of that energy rather than having to have just one way of doing things, is to me the challenge but the real potential for the WBA.

Samantha Marks

It can be easy with the wonderful benefit of hindsight to say, well of course these things happened and their time had come and of course women were making advances everywhere. But you only have to look at the fact that it is only in the last year that the NSW women barristers have felt able to put together an association and that they had to do that with a huge amount of resistance from their powers that be. They actually asked me up the year I was convenor a few years ago, to tell them about how we had gone about establishing our association and what we’d felt had benefited, how we had benefited from it. They watched the wonderful movie Raising the Bar that Fiona (McLeod SC) was responsible for and I think the fact that our sister state, as it were, the other biggest bar in Australia could take an additional 10 or 12 years to get to the point that we were able to cannot be overlooked and I would just have to say again that I really take my hat off to the (Victorian) women who led that role those years ago.

"The woman's cause is man's; they rise or sink together" - Alfred Lord Tennyson

Edited transcript of interviews conducted by Juliette Brodsky on March 30 and April 10 2007 in the Neil McPhee Room, Owen Dixon Chambers East, and filmed by Sarah McLeod, Stewart Carter, Branden Barber and Bonnie Elliott.