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It seems that the exclusive privileges of barristers to appear in higher courts has slowly been eroded by various acts including in 1990 and 1999. I assume the answer is yes, but Does anything remain of exclusive privileges?
And yet it seems that a fundamental precept of the concept of litigants in person is that no legal representation is strictly required at all, so can barristers actually do anything that laymen truly cannot (for themselves)?
One important formal difference is that self-represented litigants cannot claim the same costs if they prevail in a civil case. Costs are capped at 2/3 of what they would have received, had they been represented. ("Disbursements", such as court fees, are not subject to the same limit.) Moreover, their deemed hourly rate is £19/hr, unless it's possible to demonstrate that they've incurred greater financial loss as a result of doing the work. This is much less than the billed rate for qualified counsel.
A less practical privilege is wearing gowns and wigs. Self-represented litigants are not allowed to pretend that they are barristers by donning their finest horsehair, or going on about "my learned friend". Solicitor-advocates are "my friend" but laypeople should not use this language at all.
Outside of the courtroom, ordinary people can in principle do their own conveyancing (for example), but there are many practical obstacles. One is being fully exposed to the costs of mistakes. Mortgage lenders will often refuse to let random members of the public take care of the legal intricacies, and some solicitors on the other side will advise their clients not to bother. There are also a few technicalities which are easier for practicing solicitors, such as access to DX (a specialist private postal service) for shuttling reams of paper documents across the country. Case law (Domb v Isoz [1980] 1 All ER 942) lets solicitors effect an exchange of contracts by telephone, but this has not been recognised for other people, who continue to have to do it physically.
Technically, there’s nothing Novak Djokovic can do on a tennis court that I can’t. He’s just better than me at it than me in every possible way - although I’d back myself over him to design the engineering services in the stadium.
Self-represented litigants are allowed at all levels of the the justice system and courts will generally allow them every procedural break that they can. But … a barrister is a professional at the top of the game who knows the relevant law, the court’s procedures, the rules of evidence, and has practice, practice, practice. The layman doesn’t. Nor does the solicitor.
Look, tennis is an absolutely fair game, just like the courts. But if you put me against Djokovic, I know who’s going to win.
