NATIONAL MASTHEAD CONFIRMS IT WILL KEEP WRITING ABOUT BARRISTERS UNTIL ONE OF THEM ENJOYS IT
The Australian Financial Review has today published its sixth piece in fourteen days about a hundred barristers who did not ask to be written about, in what the paper calls an "open secret" and everyone else calls a paywall.
The masthead, which this month printed every silk applicant's name with a count of their refusals beside it, has since run the list again, an editorial nobody signed, a column by a retired silk, and two newsletters explaining that the Bar is "obsessed" with it.
"It's like being followed around a pub by a bloke who keeps telling you you're the one who won't let it go," said one Phillip Street barrister, who asked not to be named on the grounds that it hadn't gone well the first time.
The paper's legal affairs desk (not Janek Drevikovsky) said the story had been an "enormous success".
"The Bar is a very talkative place," a spokesperson said. "Which is lucky, because we've got a Friday newsletter to fill, an editorial board that hasn't finished being right yet, and a subscribe button sitting directly under a table of a hundred people's worst professional moments. Engagement has been terrific."
The desk confirmed it had sought a range of views from those named, and had spoken to every barrister on the list who did not mind being on it.
"We rang around," the spokesperson said. "One bloke was amused. Another said you can always get the list if you want it. We ran both. The rest kept saying things like 'my clients have seen this' and 'my daughter found it on Google', which is fine, but it's not a quote, is it? You can't build a newsletter out of that."
Any barrister personally damaged by the piece, the desk confirmed, had been classified as not representative.
"If you were hurt by it, you're too close to it," the spokesperson said. "We want the objective view. That's held by people who weren't on the list, or didn't care, or have since retired to Bowral."
The original article described applicants as "weeded out", as "trying their luck", and as "serial applicants", before a follow-up explained that anyone embarrassed by this was revealing more about themselves than about the article.
"If you don't like being called a weed in a national newspaper, the problem is you," the spokesperson confirmed. "We've looked into it. It's never us."
Asked where a ten-year tally of individual refusals had come from, given the Bar destroys its records each year and nobody had ever held one, the spokesperson said that in the gossipy world of the law nothing stays private.
"Gossip, tally, same thing," he said. "Once you put it in a sortable table behind a subscription, it's journalism. Before that it was something a bloke said at a Christmas party."
The President of the Bar has written to the paper asking it to take the list down, and to all 104 candidates calling the article gratuitous and hurtful. The paper answered with an unsigned editorial accusing him of playing the victim.
"Accountability matters to us," the spokesperson said, declining to say who wrote it. "That's why we put our name to nothing and everyone else's to everything."
The masthead has since begun quoting little known Martin Place solicitor Jacob Carswell-Doherty who is not a barrister, has never applied for silk, and is on no list, having run out of barristers willing to say anything other than "please stop".
"We'd exhausted the President, the silks, the juniors, the clerks, and everyone on the list who'd take a call," the spokesperson said. "Then a solicitor put something on LinkedIn. He's a lawyer of some kind and he's not crying. Close enough for a Friday."
Mr Carswell-Doherty, reached at his desk, said he had nothing new to add.
"I said that a fortnight ago. They quoted it. Then they quoted me saying I had nothing to add to what they'd quoted. I'm a recurring segment now."
The paper confirmed it is looking forward to early October, when the new silks are announced and it finds out who lucked out in this year's silken derby.
"That's when the real story starts," the spokesperson said. "Ninety-odd barristers who weren't picked, in the worst week of their year, and we've already got their names typed up. All we do is add one to the column and ring the ones who don't mind."
Asked whether the paper had considered reporting on the selection committee, the consultees, or anyone who actually runs the process it has spent two weeks calling a private club, the spokesperson paused.
"Is anyone on the committee applying for anything?" he said. "Could we get a list?"