Philip OPAS QC interview 4/8/2003

I think lawyers write their epitaph on water, and it disappears with the next tide. You don’t leave anything behind you that succeeds you like an engineer, or a builder or a craftsman can do. All we contribute is hot air. I’m not saying that facetiously. But I don’t believe any client being better off by a few hundred thousand as a result of my efforts matters much.

Because they make it up again, or lose it again in five years. And so many of the leading cases that I might have been involved in are no longer relevant because the law changes. I know in these ways, we could go back to Horace, the Latin poet who said ‘I’ve erected a monument more enduring than brass, loftier than the highest pyramids’ and all he did was write poetry.

He’s been proved to be correct. But when it comes to lawyers, how often does anybody cite a precedent that’s more than ten years old? It’s no longer relevant. I know the rule of law is important, it’s indispensable to our society, but there is no-one above the law – we’re all answerable to the law.

Having said all that, and having taken part in most capacities over my career, I feel that now it’s so expensive to go to litigation. The average person can’t afford it. The average person who might have legitimate reasons, genuine rights that are being trespassed, cannot get adequate remedy because they simply can’t afford it.

When I took silk in 1958, the going rate for a senior stuffgownsman in the Supreme Court was 50 guineas. For a silk it was 75. Translated literally, that was about 150 dollars. In the High Court, it was 75 guineas for a stuffgownsman; 100 for a silk.

Now (today) all of that is utter chickenfeed. You couldn’t get someone whose ink isn’t dry on their admission to appear before a magistrate’s court for $150 dollars. The thought that a silk can get $5000 a day horrifies me. I never worked for that sort of money. My hand would tremble writing those sort of fees on the back sheet.

But I know in today’s reality, silks can earn up to half a million a year in fees. I find that so difficult to come to grips with. I don’t know whether anything I’ve done has lasting value. I haven’t written the sort of verse that Horace has, but I feel somehow, I’ve been a trier. God knows, I’ve done my best. But my best hasn’t been all that good. I’m not saying that for someone to contradict me – I believe I haven’t done much.

Conducted for the Bar Oral History project by Juliette Brodsky in the Neil McPhee Room, Owen Dixon Chambers and filmed by Stewart Carter (People Pictures)