Short Answer
Is there anything that actually prevents this or is the norm for
barristers to be self employed purely just customary?
he opts to work for someone else like a large corporation whom he will
exclusively serve full time by doing all of the functions of a
barrister for them like drafting opinions and appearing in courts to
represent them etc, so that he can in return get a steady salary and
not have to spend money on office space himself.
Barristers are not permitted to form law firms as a matter of the occupational rules that apply to them, although they can have what amounts to office share arrangements (called "chambers") and third-party client development and compensation negotiation through a para-profession in England called "clerks" who brokers work for barristers.
The high paying work for barristers is sufficiently great, and their chambers and clerks coddle them to such an extent, that being self-employed involves much less conduct of business than other kinds of lawyers or self-employed professionals.
The lack of barrister firms avoids conflicts and undue specialization, while maintaining high quality standards and professional independence as advocates for their clients, in a profession that is small now and was historically even smaller.
Long Answer
Or his good friend is a solicitor who has his own firm and they enjoy
working with each other so much that the majority of his instructions
are received from his friend Sol anyway, so one day they figure it
would just be more convenient for him to come “in house,” so that they
can consolidate their finances, accountancy fees, and website etc.
Professional regulation of barristers, such as the "cab rank rule", prevent this kind of relationship from developing to the same extent that it does in other legal professions:
The cab rank rule is a bedrock obligation for the independent referral
Bar. The rule means that barristers cannot discriminate between
clients, and that they must take on any case provided that it is
within their competence and they are available and appropriately
remunerated.
The cab rank rule promotes access to justice. It means that clients
will not be deprived of the advocate of their choice because the
client or the client’s cause could be seen as objectionable or
unpopular. People with unpopular causes or accused of serious offences
do not need the additional challenge of having first to persuade a
lawyer to take them on.
Barristers do not choose their clients, nor do they associate
themselves with their clients’ opinions or behaviour by virtue of
representing them.
The independent referral bars of England & Wales, Ireland, Northern
Ireland, and Scotland collectively re-affirm our commitment to the cab
rank rule. It:
Promotes access to justice
Recognises that it is for judges and juries to decide and to judge, and that passing judgment is not the role of advocates
Imposes an obligation on the independent referral bar to accept work even from those with whom we profoundly disagree, and of whom we
profoundly disapprove
Means that our role and duty as advocates is, and is only, to advise, and then to represent, always subject to our duties to the
court.
The English legal profession is divided between barristers, who are elite trial lawyers who office share but are all sole practitioners and try cases prepped for them by solicitors to a great extent, and solicitors who do pretty much everything else that lawyers in the U.S. do. As Wikipedia explains:
Solicitors tend to work together with others in private practice and
are generally the first port of call for those seeking legal advice.
Solicitors are also employed in government departments and commercial
businesses. The Law Society is the professional body representing
solicitors.
Barristers, on the other hand, do not generally deal with the public
directly, but take their instructions from a solicitor representing
the client. Barristers then represent the client at court and present
their case. The Bar Council is the professional body representing
barristers. . . .
The main actions of barristers involve going to court, especially to
the higher courts. They make speeches in front of the court, they
write briefs, they give legal advice, and they provide expert opinion
for difficult cases. Usually they use briefs of professional clients,
solicitors, and accountants. The barristers analyze the briefs and
bring the results to the court. . . . [T]here are approximately 10,000
barristers in England and Wales. Most of them have their offices in
London. Their elite still form the Queen's Counsels, of which many of
the judges for higher courts are chosen. . . .
A solicitor stays in direct contact to his clients and gives them
personally legal advice. A solicitor prepares the lawsuit for his
clients and represents his parties personally in the lower courts
(magistrates' courts, county courts and tribunal). In cases on higher
courts (High Court or higher) where a barrister is necessary, a
solicitor acts as an agent. Moreover, solicitor's practice is
comparable to notary public. Dealing with conveyancing as well as
trust businesses, developing last wills, and administrating estates
are parts of solicitors' practice. Furthermore he oversee contract
conclusion and consulting in various fields of law like tax,
competition, insurance and company law. Profitable real estate
businesses makes over 50% of his income. . . . [T]here are
approximately 100,000 solicitors in England and Wales. 25% of it stay
in employer-employee relationship at companies, bigger solicitor
offices or administrations. 75% of it works as self-employed.
Barristers don't look for their own work. They have a profession called "clerks", a well paid profession unrelated to American law clerks, that makes rain for them, mostly from solicitors seeking seeking litigation counsel for the clients that they develop more conventionally.
The story below also captures very well the way that key aspects of the legal economy in England are driven more by traditional and culture than sterile theories of economics, which provide boundaries on what can be viable, but miss so much that a more descriptive approach to economics can reveal.
Clerks have co-existed with chimney sweeps and gene splicers. It’s a
trade that one can enter as a teenager, with no formal qualifications,
and that’s astonishingly well-paid. A senior clerk can earn a
half-million pounds per year, or more than $650,000, and some who are
especially entrenched make far more.
Clerks—pronounced “clarks”—have no equivalent in the U.S. legal
system, and have nothing in common with the Ivy League–trained Supreme
Court aides of the same spelling. They exist because in England and
Wales, to simplify a bit, the role of lawyer is divided in two: There
are solicitors, who provide legal advice from their offices, and there
are barristers, who argue in court. Barristers get the majority of
their business via solicitors, and clerks act as the crucial middlemen
between the tribes—they work for and sell the services of their
barristers, steering inquiring solicitors to the right man or woman.
Clerks are by their own cheerful admission “wheeler-dealers,” what
Americans might call hustlers. They take a certain pride in managing
the careers of their bosses, the barristers—a breed that often
combines academic brilliance with emotional fragility. Many barristers
regard clerks as their pimps. Some, particularly at the junior end of
the profession, live in terror of clerks. The power dynamic is baroque
and deeply English, with a naked class divide seen in few other places
on the planet. Barristers employ clerks, but a bad relationship can
strangle their supply of cases. In his 1861 novel Orley Farm, Anthony
Trollope described a barrister’s clerk as a man who “looked down from
a considerable altitude on some men who from their professional rank
might have been considered as his superiors.”
Fountain Court is among the most prestigious groups in London
practicing commercial law, the branch that deals with business
disputes. . . . the barristers had tried to walk an aesthetic line
between modernity and the heritage that clients expect of people who
are sometimes still required to wear a horsehair wig to court.
Barristers are self-employed; chambers are a traditional way for them
to band together to share expenses, though not profits. The
highest-ranking members, barristers who’ve achieved the rank of
Queen’s Counsel, are nicknamed silks, after the plush material used to
make their robes. But even the silks cannot practice without the
services of clerks, who operate from a designated room in each
chambers, matching the ability and availability of barristers to
solicitors in need. . . .
Clerking has historically been a dynastic profession monopolized by
white working-class families from the East End of London; Taylor’s son
is a clerk. Predominantly, clerks hail from Hertfordshire, Kent, and
above all Essex, a county that’s ubiquitously compared to New Jersey
in the U.S. . . .
London’s barrister population is getting more diverse, but it’s still
disproportionately made up of men who attended the best private
secondary schools, and then Oxford and Cambridge, before joining one
of four legal associations, known as Inns of Court—a cosseted
progression known as moving “quad to quad to quad.” In short,
barristers tend to be posh. Being a successful clerk, therefore,
allows working-class men and, increasingly, women to exert power over
their social superiors. It’s an enduring example of a classic British
phenomenon: professional interaction across a chasmic class divide.
One of the most peculiar aspects of the clerk-barrister relationship
is that clerks handle money negotiations with clients. Barristers
argue that avoiding fee discussions keeps their own interactions with
clients clean and uncomplicated, but as a consequence, they’re
sometimes unaware of how much they actually charge. The practice also
insulates and coddles them. Clerks become enablers of all sorts of
curious, and in some cases self-destructive, behavior. . . .
A more unsavory side of this coddling relationship is apparent
elsewhere. At a chambers called 4 Stone Buildings, a clerk called
Chris O’Brien, 28, told me he was once asked to dress a boil on a
barrister’s back. Among clerks, tales of buying gifts for their
barristers’ mistresses are legion. But they maintain a level of
sympathy for their employers, whose work is competitive and often
profoundly isolating. Clerks speak of how their masters, no matter how
successful, live in perpetual fear that their current case will be
their last. . . .
Junior clerks, traditionally recruited straight after leaving school
at 16 and potentially with no formal academic qualifications, start at
£15,000 to £22,000 ($19,500 to $28,600); after 10 years they can make
£85,000. Pay for senior clerks ranges from £120,000 to £500,000, and a
distinct subset can earn £750,000. The Institute of Barristers’ Clerks
disputed these figures, saying the lows were too low and the highs too
high. . . .
Money is tightest in criminal law. One chambers, 3 Temple Gardens,
lies 200 yards from Fountain Court but might as well inhabit a
different dimension. Access is via a plunging staircase lined with
green tiles similar to those in a Victorian prison. The clerks room,
in the basement, is stacked with battered files detailing promising
murders, rapes, and frauds. . . . Even the barristers appear harried
and ashen in comparison with their better-fed commercial-law
counterparts.
The mean income of a criminal barrister working with legal-aid clients
is £90,000, meaning even a successful criminal barrister likely makes
less than a top commercial clerk. At Fountain Court, once described as
a place so prestigious that “you could get silk just by sitting on the
toilet,” I watched Taylor casually negotiate a fee above £20,000; at 3
Temple Gardens, the clerks wrangled deals for a few hundred pounds.
The best-paid criminal clerks make perhaps £250,000 per year—and yet
there’s an excitement and pressure to a criminal clerks room that’s
absent in the commercial field. Some barristers only work as defense
counsel, some only prosecute, and some alternate roles, depending on
the case . . . Many in the criminal field are motivated by a belief
that they’re a crucial part of the British judicial machinery, and
their work closely corresponds with the public’s imagination of what
it is to work in the law. . . .
As a chancery chambers, dealing with wills, trusts, banking, and other
matters, 4 Stone Buildings is an establishment from the old school,
with a facade still pockmarked by World War I bombs. Guests stride
down a corridor with deep red wallpaper to a waiting room equipped
with a fireplace and shelved with aged lawbooks. The best of the
silks’ rooms face out across a low dry moat to the gardens of
Lincoln’s Inn—one of the four Inns of Court, along with Gray’s Inn,
Inner Temple, and Middle Temple, all less than a mile apart. There are
34 barristers at 4 Stone[.] . . .
One vital function clerks play is finessing a “cab rank” rule, set by
the Bar Standards Board, that states a barrister must take the first
case that comes, regardless of their interest. Clerks can invent or
manipulate commitments to allow their barristers to turn down work
that doesn’t appeal.
