Tenancy - Full Membership

Read about...

Are you a confident and ambitious barrister, looking to transfer to the bar or become a barrister authorised to practise at the Bar of England & Wales? 

Do you have a positive outlook, know what you want your practice to look like in 3 years time (and beyond) and, more importantly, can you demonstrate precisely how you are going to achieve that, with the help of our great team and our innovative market leading structure?

If so, we would like to hear from you.

Are you also...

  1. hard working & committed?
  2. motivated & reliable?
  3. flexible & commercially minded?
  4. excellent at communicating? 
  5. comfortable marketing yourself?
  6. I.T. literate?
  7. friendly?
  8. a team player?
  9. a nice person?

Our experience tells us that if you have these 9 qualities, then you may well be suited to working with us.

We are confident you will also love working with us because we will assist you to strategically develop your practice in line with your own objectives and provide you with the professional environment and culture we believe will help you to thrive.

Benefits of Clerksroom:

  • Ability to work from home 
  • London office at 160 Fleet St
  • Manchester office at Deansgate
  • Purpose-built HQ in Taunton, Somerset where all of our clerking team are based
  • dedicated staff for diary management, billing, fee collection, mediation, public access, marketing & case management
  • Full range of services 
  • IT support desk
  • Chambers 365 web-based practice management software
  • Business level Office 365 
  • Xero, cloud-based accounting software
  • Managed Outlook email and archive
  • Motivated support team
  • Variety of marketing opportunities
  • Career progression
  • Barristers returning to work, wanting to work part-time, those in need of flexibility, returning to practice, all most welcome.
  • Stability. We have no borrowing. There is no "joint and several liability", just a simple SLA between us. 

Barristers in England &Wales are all self-employed, sole practitioners. At Clerksroom you can work from home, online, focus on your practice but also have the support network of 160 Barristers and 25 staff. 

  • We provide the support network and support services
  • You focus on your practice
  • Simples......

What we offer:

We are essentially a traditional chambers, offering pretty much everything that a traditional chambers offers. However, we don't offer rooms as our members work from home. (We believe that is a 5% saving on an average chambers rent) We don't have chambers meetings and we don't do politics. We make clear and transparent decisions and communicate openly with everyone via our chambers operating manual. We are regulated by the BSB and we have a Head of Chambers (Harry Hodgkin) for the purposes of the BSB Handbook. Our clerking systems and procedures are documented and our services are available online 24/7 via our Intranet. Our clerks are located in our purpose built (freehold owned) 6000 sq ft HQ, located on a prestigious business park at J25 of the M5, Taunton with neighbours including  Kennedys, Clarke Willmott, Ashfords, Foot Anstey & Porter Dodson. We also have a hot desking facility at 160 Fleet Street in the middle of legal London and also in Manchester in Deansgate. 

Our services include:

1. Marketing & work generation:
 
  • for barristers, including advice, paperwork and attending court and public access work for barristers qualified to accept instructions using the public access rules.
  • for mediators.
2. Senior ClerkGreg Speller undertakes the usual duties associated with this traditional role. Greg is also responsible for managing chambers’ complaints policy and process. Complaints about Clerksroom are few and far between as we take pride in doing our best to get it right first time, every time.

3. Diary clerks. Accepting new work, managing existing work and all the usual associated diary management tasks.

4. Fees clerks. Negotiation of fees, fee agreements, agreeing block contracts with solicitors or complex contracts for bulk work with major providers, our fees team look after it all. We have a billing clerk for sending invoices out and 4 fee collection clerks.

5. Case management. Our case manager is responsible for all incoming paperwork, be it hard copy or digital, instructions to advise or briefs to attend court. Papers that arrive in the post or DX to HQ are scanned and recorded on the case file, shared via our secure intranet or forwarded on to your home DX box if requested. We try to avoid paper being passed around if we can, it is expensive to post/DX or print instructions and we encourage the use of electronic files where possible.

6. Payment processing. Our payments clerk monitors cheque payments, BACS payments and card payments centrally and issues the receipts as they are received. Cheques are banked weekly.

7. Mediation. Our mediation team is respected as a market leader with 3 dedicated mediation clerks. Any full member who is also a qualified mediator is automatically added to our list of available mediators and offered for mediation work.

8. People Management.  From initial enquiry about joining to induction, ongoing practice development or retirement, our 20 strong clerking team is here to help find the answers. 

9. Library. We have a group scheme with Butterworths Lexis Nexis that allows us to provide the full range of Lexis Nexis digital library services to our members for an additional £100 pcm. Members can opt in or opt out of the library scheme as they wish.

10. Home DX. Most members have a home DX box for which they pay a small joining fee and a small annual subscription There is usually a 24/7 DX box near to your home. Our case manager Hazel Altria makes the necessary arrangements and liaises with DX for all new members if they wish.

11. I.T. As a market leading chambers, you would expect us to have market leading I.T. We operate a cloud based case management system, connected to our intranet and website. We take bookings and instructions online and our team of clerks manage them both on and offline. We provide all of the I.T. needed to practice at the Bar and deploy it using our MyClerksroom intranet. We connect with smartphones, iPads, laptops and have an I.T. support desk for any setup or issues you may have. Our new intranet is accessible from our website and allows you to update your website profile and manage mediation enquiries, public access enquiries and access a host of centrally provided services including our market leading in-house software where you set your work preferences. 

12. Telephone. We believe our array of online systems are there to complement our most important tool, the telephone. We know people still like to speak on the phone, however well connected we may be in other ways. Our diary team of six clerks take an average of 3,500 telephone calls a month. Our barristers have a dedicated support line directing them to the most appropriate clerk for the help they need. Solicitors call us and book hearings, seek advice on suitability, fees and all the normal questions fielded by any clerk. By being innovative online, we have created more time to devote to the telephone as and when needed.

If there is anything we have missed out and you would like to check it with us, please call 01823 247 247 and we will be more than happy to speak in confidence about the service we provide or email Stephen Ward using [email protected] 
 
Click here to view our video showing a little bit about our culture. Our culture is central to everything we do and everyone we work with.
 
Still interested? Download our key documents here including:
 
  1. Our brochure for Barristers
  2. Our model SLA
  3. Our sign up form
  4. Our practice questionnaire

Click here to download our pack.

 
Papers in briefcase

If you would like to discuss any of the above in confidence, please contact:

Can't find what you are looking for or prefer to talk?

Barristers: 01823 247 247 Mediators: 01823 704 099