Orlagh Kelly: So thank you, Chris. We are joined today on the Get Briefed podcast by Chris Daw KC. Thank you very much for joining us. We've been waiting for a while to get you on.

Chris Daw KC: Good to be here. Thank you for having me.

Orlagh Kelly: And so just to give our audience a little bit of a background, if they haven't heard from you or heard about you before, I think that they will. You're obviously a KC, but you're also an author and a broadcaster and have in fact written and presented a five-part BBC series called Crime: Are We Tough Enough? So your particular slant on what I would describe as your career is very interesting, not only to me, but to lots of other people who practise and who observe you. I've had an opportunity to chat to a couple of people and said that you're coming on as a guest, and they're not colleagues of yours, but they were able to say they were looking forward to hearing what you said — so no pressure.

Chris Daw KC: Good to know.

Orlagh Kelly: So let's start at the start, Chris. How did you get to starting a career at the bar? What is your backstory?

Chris Daw KC: Well, my backstory is fairly straightforward, really. I went to a very ordinary comprehensive school in Milton Keynes in the 80s when education wasn't in a great state in this country. You know, I think we were, famously, we got to an average of 40 per class at that stage. Very large class sizes and very demoralised teachers. So I didn't really necessarily get engaged with education up until the age of 16 very much.

And in fact left school at 16 with the ambition of becoming a donut seller on the beach in the south of France, which I pursued diligently for several weeks. I hitchhiked to the south of France with a friend of mine and we did actually embark on a very brief career as Coca-Cola-stroke-donut sellers, until we A, ran out of money, largely because of eating the stock. And B, someone told us that you needed a licence apparently to trade on the beaches. It's called a trader's licence — who would have thought? So neither my other 16-year-old friend nor I were aware of these regulations, and it mattered little since we'd run out of money and made such a hash of our business. So I then came back to the UK and my parents had actually moved. My parents were both, you know, didn't go to university, both left school at 15 and went into manual and shop work when they first left school. And so they didn't necessarily, I think, have a huge kind of insight into education or where it could go or whether it was realistically something for, I guess, for our family and people like us. But they moved from Milton Keynes up to a place called Southport in the north of England, which is just north of Liverpool.

And I went there and they moved into a fairly small house, but there was one small bedroom left which I was allowed to have on condition that I go to work or go to college. And there were no jobs, I can tell you, in 1986 for anyone really — four million unemployed at the time, and certainly not for unqualified 16-year-olds. So I went to Sixth Form College, and just one of those sheer sort of strokes of good fortune was that it was one of the best state Sixth Form colleges at the time in the country, with really good A level results and a really good track record of getting its students — all of whom were state educated — into really good universities. And so when I started my sixth form career, not having a clue what I wanted to do, I went to the careers centre, which I don't know if they still have those, they probably do. But I went to the careers centre with an idea that I want to find out what's out there. What can someone like me do? What can a failed donut seller do as an alternative career?

And so I did a computer test. They even had computers back then. I did a computer careers test. And in those days, you got a printout, and it came out of a printer. It told you, it basically told you your future. And so what this piece of paper said was that there were only two jobs that I could conceivably do. One was actor and one was barrister. And that was it — those were all the choices I was given.

Acting sounded kind of fun, but not really like a job. And then I thought, barrister — well, I don't really know what that even means. I don't even know what they do. All I know is that sometimes you see them on TV programmes, you see these lawyers in wigs and gowns and, you know, all being dramatic. And that's really all I knew. And so I went, having been given this output from the computer, I went along to Liverpool Crown Court back in mid-'86, '87, when I was doing my A levels, and I watched cases for several weeks, two, three, four weeks over the summer holidays. And I just watched and just thought, this is so cool. Like, I honestly can't believe this is a real job. Like, you get to actually cross-examine witnesses. You get to actually make these speeches to the jury where you're pleading for your client, you know, and you're saying how all the evidence doesn't quite stack up, there's definitely at least a reasonable doubt, if nothing else. And I watched several cases where defence barristers were arguing, you know, what from someone in the public gallery looked like fairly difficult cases, you know, where their client's defence was quite thin, was my view as a sort of inexperienced 17-year-old. And yet in each case they were acquitted — I think all but one of the trials I watched, the defendant was acquitted against the weight of the odds. And in my mind, it appeared to me largely because of the efforts of their barrister to kind of cast doubt and to create confusion around different parts of the evidence. And that was it.

You know, I became hooked, and that was all I ever wanted to do from almost the first setting foot inside a Crown Court room and watching the events play out, the drama of it. And then the rest, I guess, is history in the sense that I then applied to do a law degree at Manchester University. I did a law degree at Manchester University and then went on to study for what was then, I think, the Bar Vocational Course — I can't remember what it's called now. And took up a criminal pupillage in Manchester where I'd done my degree. So I sort of went back to Manchester after doing the bar course in London and then spent 10, 15 or more years basically doing nothing but criminal cases day in, day out, by the hundred. You know, I mean, some days I would do three, four, even eight or nine hearings in a day. That's how busy we were back then. And I think they're still very busy now given the backlog. But it was day after day, week after week of just intense advocacy, going to court almost every day. If I wasn't in court, I was in a prison somewhere seeing a client or I was drafting a document. But in those days, criminal advocacy and criminal practice was almost entirely court room based. It was almost all advocacy. And so I did that. I spent many years defending in complex drugs conspiracies, serious fraud cases, armed robbery conspiracies, all of the kind of heavy, meaty, serious crime stuff, until I took silk in 2013, just over 10 years ago. And since then, my career has been very different. I do very little sort of organised or serious organised crime work and drug trafficking work. I do some, but most of my cases now are very different. They are acting for usually wealthy people or corporations, sometimes high-profile individuals.

And alongside that, as you say, I've made a sort of separate career in writing and broadcasting, which I really enjoy, particularly when the subject matter is crime and punishment and justice, which is the area that my career has given me the most knowledge about, I suppose. So that's a long answer to your question, but that's how we end up where we are.

Orlagh Kelly: And so a couple of points just before we get into where your career sits now, which is of course super interesting. It doesn't sound like you had a hard time getting pupillage back there — in what I'm guessing is the early 90s.

Chris Daw KC: Well, I absolutely did have a hard time getting pupillage. And it was very difficult to get pupillage even then, although it was not as difficult by any means, in terms of statistically at least, as it is now. The number of applicants per place now are considerably higher. But even then, if you came from a sort of non-legal background — what you might call a non-traditional background — getting pupillage in one of the more prestigious chambers was almost impossible, because almost all of those pupillages went to the nephew or the grandson of a judge, or some, you know, there was always a story as to how people got their pupillage. And many, many pupils in those days were privately educated. Probably the majority coming to the bar were privately educated, certainly getting on for 50%. And given obviously only 7% of people in the country are privately educated, that was a significant disparity. But in the end, I got pupillage at a very small chambers which only did criminal defence work, didn't have any silks. I think it had at the time about 15 members. But that was my first rung of the ladder. And, you know, I subsequently moved on and now, you know, have in my career been a member of some of the most prestigious sets in the country in my areas of specialism.

But all of that started at a small chambers in Manchester which doesn't even exist anymore. So I suppose it proves the point that becoming a barrister — pupillage is the number one priority, because if you don't get it, you don't get to practise and have a practice certificate and you don't get to do the job. So pupillage, whatever it looks like, is better than no pupillage. And mine was an unfunded pupillage in those days. So I didn't get anything except when I started working in my second six — I had to live on an overdraft and all the stuff that I think barristers still do now, but certainly nearly all of us did then in our early days. But that was my launchpad, and it did at least give me access to a really varied and fairly wide variety of really interesting criminal work, including Crown Court trials from the very beginning. And that's all I needed. Once I was given the platform, the opportunity, then I was able to go away and thankfully build relationships with solicitors and also word-of-mouth relationships. You know, at one time someone was saying — I remember someone telling me when I went to a conference in my mid-20s, probably, I'd only been practising a couple of years — and I went to a conference at Strangeways Prison in the morning and someone said, yeah, everyone on G-Wing says you're the one to have. And it was things like that. Like, wow, I'm famous on G-Wing. And it was — I'd obviously done a case for someone who ended up on G-Wing and they were very happy. But there was a lot of that in those days. If you were flavour of the month on G-Wing or whichever wing it was in whichever prison, the word went round and suddenly they were like, so-and-so wants you to defend them for murder, or armed robbery. I remember getting briefed for the first time in really serious cases where people were going to get life or 10 or 15 or 20 years. And it came pretty quickly. I mean, I was instructed in a murder case as a junior for the first time when I was 26 years of age, only three or so years into my career. And none of that was based on any history or performance, necessarily. A lot of it is just based, as I say, on word of mouth — someone said something to someone, and your name got mentioned to someone else, and then suddenly you're the one everyone wants.

Orlagh Kelly: How does it feel in your mid-20s to have only three years on your feet and to have that level of responsibility? That's something to think about. It's a lot.

Chris Daw KC: You're right, and it's interesting. I don't know whether it's arrogance or over-confidence or whatever, but at the time, whilst I was acutely conscious that these were very serious cases that I was doing, I was made particularly conscious of that in the very first murder trial or murder case I was instructed in. I was instructed to go to the magistrates' court to deal with what was then called an oral committal. They don't exist anymore. In those days, if you were charged with a crime, no matter what it was, you could go to the magistrates' and you could challenge whether there was enough evidence for the case to be sent to trial. And if the magistrates decided there wasn't, then the case would be dismissed. So that was the case, even for very, very serious cases. And so that was the reason I was instructed, because it was in the magistrates' court. But it was a DNA murder case — one of the very early ones. It would have been in the mid-1990s, a very early DNA murder case, where I had to cross-examine the DNA expert. To be honest, the answer to your question is that at the time, I just really enjoyed it. I mean, it was just thrilling. And so, you know, whether in the grand scheme of things possibly someone more experienced should have been doing it — well, you could argue yes, probably. But at the end of the day, you know, I did the best I could in all of those cases. And as I say, I absolutely loved it. And I loved going to court, and I loved the thrill of doing cases where there's a lot of interest in it, and particularly where the case was very, very serious. I did mass shooting cases and things like that, you know, where clients had been spraying bullets around the streets, and that was all over the news — those sorts of cases that I got into in my sort of, I guess, between seven, 10, 12 years' call, they were the ones that were the most fun. Although I really enjoyed, always enjoyed going to court to do any trial, because a jury trial, no matter what the subject matter, is intrinsically a sort of naturally dramatic event. You know, there's a beginning, a middle and an end. There's a storytelling structure around it on both sides, and then you have the role of the judge. And the whole thing, I think, is really entertaining. And of course there's very serious public interest involved and a lot on the line for the defendant and the victims and the police involved and everybody else. But for me, if you can do a job that has a public interest element and it's also really good fun, then you've cracked it.

Orlagh Kelly: Well, it makes me think that whatever that psychometric test that you did — that said barrister or actor — was really on the money. It sounds like the performance part actually appeals to you quite a lot.

Chris Daw KC: Absolutely. I mean, they do say that most barristers are failed actors, you know, and whether that's the right way around I don't know. But they do say that — you wouldn't become a criminal advocate, I mean, if you're a tax specialist maybe different, but you wouldn't become a criminal advocate if you didn't have any sort of performance interest, because there is a significant performance element to it. And frankly, the performance element can be the one that wins the case much more than the granular detail of the evidence.

Orlagh Kelly: Particularly when it's to a jury I'm guessing.

Chris Daw KC: And so, and it's really an important difference between criminal practice — I do a lot of cases which cross over between, you know, in the corporate field, which cross over between the criminal jurisdiction and the civil or commercial litigation jurisdiction. And you simply cannot run a case in the High Court in front of a judge the way that you run a case in the Crown Court in front of a jury, because judges are so much more sceptical, so much more forensic in the way they analyse. And it's almost impossible to sway a judge purely by an emotive but persuasive argument in the way that a jury can be swayed. And of course there's all sorts of other dynamics such as that in a jury trial there are 12 judges in effect — 12 jurors who are trying the case — and in a judge-only case there's only one. So it's a kind of all-or-nothing, whereas in a jury trial, if you persuade three, they can't return a guilty verdict. You only need to persuade 25% of the jurors to your side of the argument and you can't lose, because you need at least 10 to agree for a verdict.

Orlagh Kelly: And so without giving away any of your trade secrets, do you have any kind of special techniques or things that you've built up over the years that you do for your jury trials that you think helps you?

Chris Daw KC: Ignore the law completely. I think that's really important — because I don't mean that in a literal sense, but what I mean is that jurors are, of course, used to watching courtroom scenes, but they're used to watching them on the television or in movies rather than in real life. You kind of, I suppose the techniques that I bring are that I, instead of looking at the paperwork and instead of looking at the sort of textbook, which I absolutely did religiously as a 23, 24, 25-year-old for at least eight or nine years — every single case was just minute, every detail of every line of every statement, reading the law in great detail — once all of that kind of becomes just a natural process, and many of the legal issues you've been over 50 times so you don't need to go and look at them again because you have a very good understanding of each of the different areas of law that you're dealing with, all it becomes about is: you become a student of psychology. And so what I do is I think about what will the jury respond to. Will they respond to an emotional argument? Will they respond to a compassionate argument? Will they respond to an argument based on common sense? Because if you think about it, law and the technicalities of law are at one end of the kind of legal spectrum. And the other end is facts and common sense, which aren't actually written down in a book anywhere. And so I think if I have a special technique, it's to treat advocacy as an exercise in persuasion, where all that matters is persuading the decision maker. If I'm in front of a jury, the judge in a sense is almost an irrelevance — although the judge is very important — I don't need the judge to agree with me. And even if the judge says I don't agree with anything you're saying in front of the jury, that doesn't matter. What matters is whether the jury accept that there is at least a reasonable doubt created by everything that they've heard and everything in the case. So I look at it very much as being an exercise in psychological persuasion — which to some people, that's not right. Why should the legal system involve psychological persuasion? And the truth is that all legal advocacy has always been about psychological persuasion. If you're trying to persuade a judge, you're trying to persuade a judge using a different set of psychological cues and triggers, and they might well be more closely aligned to what's in law books or in authority. Whereas with the jury — one of my favourite stories that I tell juries — I do a lot of storytelling in the course of my closing speeches to juries. And one of the stories that I tell is in relation to mistaken identification cases, which are, you know, a very common defence — certainly before we had CCTV everywhere and DNA and all the other stuff, there were a lot of cases and there still are which depend on identification. Fundamentally, a witness says, I saw Chris Daw running away from the scene of the murder. And I know him, I've known him for five years and I know what he looks like. He was wearing a red jacket. I've seen him wearing it before. And that kind of thing.

And I tell the jury about a true story about something that happened when I was in my early years of practice. I was doing a trial in Manchester, and I got a call in the evening from my dad. And he said, what's going on? I said, what do you mean, what's going on? He said, because at the time they lived in Southport, which is 40 miles or so away from Manchester — a good hour's drive, probably. And he said, "Well, why didn't you come around when you came to Southport today?" And I said, "Well, I haven't been in Southport today. I've been in Manchester, doing a trial." He said "No, no, no. I saw you — grey BMW, same car, it's your car. I saw me go down and then go round the roundabout and then go." And I said, "But Dad, seriously, it wasn't me. I haven't been to Southport today. I've been in court all day in Manchester — at two o'clock this afternoon I was in Manchester Crown Court." And I had a 15-minute conversation, and I would guarantee you to this day my dad still believes it was me, and still believes for some weird reason I didn't come and visit him and my mum that day.

And I tell jurors that story to illustrate how a witness — even my own father — could be convinced he saw me, because he's using ingredients that have triggered his memory. So he knows that I drive a grey BMW. So someone driving past in roughly the same BMW, the same colour, who maybe looks roughly like me, my dad's brain has filled in all that detail: it must be me. He's clearly not looked at the number plate and he's not seen my face head-on because I know it wasn't me.

I tell stories to jurors that they can relate to. I say things like, you know, we've all had that experience of walking down the street and we see someone across the road that we recognise and we wave and we go, hello. And then they come a bit closer and it's not the right person. But if you'd gone home that night, you'd have said to your partner, I saw Steve Smith in town today — if you hadn't realised that you'd misidentified the person. If I have a technique, it's to use relatable stories, which are always true. I mean, I've been accused of making them up, but I never make them up. I tell relatable stories from my own life and situations and events that have happened, which are metaphorical for whatever the issue is in the case. And I found that to be a very persuasive and powerful advocacy technique, because it's really difficult to push back against the points that I've just kind of been summarising for you about identification, because we all know that they're right and they do happen.

So that's, if I have a trick of the trade, it's using my own life. I talk about, sometimes I talk about my children. I sometimes talk about my parents or holidays I've been on. Just if there's some event that I remember — I remember talking once in a fraud trial about working in the chip shop when I was at Sixth Form, and there was a whole story about it. It went on for 20 minutes and at the end of it, I explained what the significance was. And the trial was a huge fraud trial, and my client was a commercial bank director, and it had nothing to do with working in a chip shop. But I knew that the jury would understand what I was talking about in relation to working in a chip shop and apply it to working in another environment, to simplify and to give a sort of really simple metaphor which is real. And I think the reason why that kind of psychological persuasion is successful is because none of it relies on talking about the evidence in the case. It's all about giving the jury a reason to have doubt. And that ultimately is a criminal defence lawyer's — and certainly a criminal defence advocate's — job. Our job is not to prove anything. We don't have to do that for the defence. As a defence barrister, all we have to do is establish reasonable doubt. So my 'magic' plan that I developed on day one was in every single case, find the two or three points that are relatable and which a jury would step back from and say, do you know what, maybe there's a point there. And once you get maybe he's got a point, then you've got reasonable doubt and then you win the case. And there's no magic to any of that. A lot of that I've just explained is pretty much common sense. But that's my style, and it worked for me.

Orlagh Kelly: Well, that's very interesting. And one of the things that I'm thinking, listening to you, is the fact that you had a non-traditional pathway to the bar and worked in a chip shop amongst other things — probably helps with your storytelling to members of the public who come from all walks of life. Possibly, unless people are particularly excellent communicators, that might give you an edge over the more privately educated.

Chris Daw KC: I don't want to dwell too much on the private education. You know, for me — I do feel like the bar, I know statistically the bar still is massively skewed in its demographic towards those from wealthier and privately educated backgrounds or grammar school backgrounds and often professional backgrounds, even if they've gone to state schools. They've gone to grammar schools and they have professional parents who support them through that process. So I do feel the bar statistically is skewed in that direction. But that doesn't mean that many of those privately educated barristers are not really, really good at their job and really effective on the whole. I guess if you were trying to be really simplistic about it, I tend to find that the more privately educated and more highly educated tend to end up on the prosecution side, and those of us from what you might call more ordinary state school kind of backgrounds tend to end up on the defence side — although by no means is that a rule that is universal in its outcome. Coming back to your point, whether it's the relationships I'm able to build with clients, which are, I think, probably second to none in the sense that I inspire trust and confidence in clients, or whether you're talking about advocacy in court with juries — I think much of it, if not most of it, comes from the fact that I can be relatable. I can talk to — I mean, I did a talk today as it happens. I was in a prison this morning speaking to a group of 15 or 20 life prisoners who are — some of them have been in prison for over 25 years. And within five minutes, I told them a bit about my background. I mean, they were expecting me to turn up in a suit and tie and probably to be posh. And yet when I came along wearing a tracksuit and a T-shirt and told them where I come from, immediately you get a sense of real people relaxing and feeling comfortable with you, because they don't feel like you're an elitist kind of individual or someone who is from such a different world that you may as well be speaking a different language — which I've seen barristers, posh barristers, if I'm being frank about it, when I've seen them speaking to clients with mental health problems, with drug problems, who come from really deprived communities.

And it is like watching a Chinese person speak to a French person, and neither of them can speak the other one's language. And they're literally on another planet. Whereas that isn't the case for me. I've been successful at what I do and I have a lifestyle that matches that success. But I still basically do come from the same background as many of those who are in prison. And it's just that we had forks in the road where at some point we went different ways — and in my case it was at the age of 16, as I explained, and in many of their cases it was around the age of 16 when they first got arrested or they first got themselves locked up in a young offenders institution. So I think being able to have a real, genuine understanding of how people live, and particularly how people live within communities with high levels of crime, is really, really helpful in dealing with clients and also dealing with juries. And being able to, if I talk to a jury and I say, you know, you can often be walking down the street at, you know, 11 o'clock on a Friday and the kebab shops are turning out — any kind of that kind of reference, I think it comes across as being natural and credible. It's not an act. It is who I am. But I am also, I hope, a fairly skilled advocate and communicator. So I know which buttons to press. It's really that simple.

Orlagh Kelly: And so what I want, of course, to come on to — and again, most of our audience will probably know this, but for anyone who doesn't — you have been somewhat of the barrister for the stars, particularly from the football world. We're going to talk Ryan Giggs, John Terry. You've recently been on TV with some involvement in relation to what's described as the Baby Reindeer case, in terms of Fiona Harvey on the Piers Morgan show, I believe.

Chris Daw KC: Yeah.

Orlagh Kelly: How did this happen? Because that Fiona Harvey piece is more recent and of course the John Terry case a bit older. But how did that come about? How did you first get involved with — I mean, given that these guys weren't in G-Wing and hadn't heard of you from that particular location.

Chris Daw KC: So, as far as I think — John was probably the first client I had who was really famous. You know, he was the captain of the England football team, he was captain of Chelsea, and he was, you know, one of the half dozen or so most famous footballers at the time. You know, Champions League winner and everything else. And in John's case — I would say that was probably the first — I mean, I'd represented sort of minor celebrities before that, probably people who had a certain audience, but not necessarily as well known as our sort of Premier League footballers are. And the simple answer to your question is that I got a phone call from a solicitor friend of mine who represented John in other areas — I think civil, some commercial matters and stuff like that. And he said, look, you know, John's got this criminal case, it's blown up in the media quite big, and you know, do you want to do it?

And I said, yeah, absolutely, I'd love to do it. So then that was, you know — and it was a very different experience because I was still a junior barrister. That was before I took silk. So it's a very different experience as a junior than it is as a silk when I did Ryan Giggs two years ago in silk, where I was leading for the defence right the way through. It's a different experience. But in short, that's how I came to defend John. And then from there I went on to defend a number of other people who were nothing to do with football necessarily, but once your name is associated with a really high-profile case, particularly one where we won the case — as we did with John.

Orlagh Kelly: Can you tell us a bit about that before we move on, because it is a slightly older case, in the event that some of the audience aren't kind of up to date with the facts.

Chris Daw KC: So, I mean, it's all out there to be found on Google. And the answer is that John was accused of racially aggravated harassment of another player during a Premier League match against QPR. He was alleged to have used racial abuse against a player called Anton Ferdinand, who was the brother of Rio Ferdinand — who was also an England captain and a Man United player, a very famous player in, you know, the 10 to 15 years ago bracket. And there was a criminal investigation because of the profile, because it took place on television. I mean, it was a live game on TV, and because there were cameras from every angle filming and there were lip readers brought in and everything else. And in the end, it was a very interesting case because although it was a very significant case, it was a case that was tried in the magistrates' court by the senior district judge — or the Chief Magistrate of England and Wales, actually — at Westminster. And so it wasn't tried before a jury. And it was very interesting, because rather like we were discussing earlier about advocacy and the different forums — although it's a criminal case, this is a case tried before a professional judge, a district judge. And in that case, the district judge acquitted John on the basis that there was a reasonable doubt. He said, I — and John's defence was that he wasn't abusing Ferdinand; he was responding to an accusation by Ferdinand that John had used racial language. And the judge said, I can't in conscience say that I can be sure that the prosecution proved that it was an aggressive or abusive remark as opposed to a questioning remark and one of defence on John's part. So that was a case where actually the law did come into play quite significantly because, you know, we had an uphill battle to even persuade the judge that there was a legal defence at all. But thankfully, in the end, he decided not only there was a defence, but the defence had been made out. But doing a case in circumstances where you have the world's media reporting — I think that was the first criminal trial that had ever been live-tweeted. So that was in 2012 or 11, 11 or 12, I can't remember which. But back then there was still a reluctance on the part of the courts to allow social media and people to have mobile phones in the courtroom and to be communicating with the outside world. And that case was one of the first, as I say, where everything was live-tweeted from the courtroom. So the whole case — there was basically a transcript created on Twitter, where the journalists wrote every word that everybody said and put them into tweets so that people could follow the trial live. Now that's become very normal. And when I did the Ryan Giggs case, you know, there were a hundred journalists and they were all live tweeting, reporting, right the way through, every blow by blow of every single thing that was said in court. So, yeah, the short answer to your question is a solicitor asked me to do the case, and it was one of those stepping stones that we all have in our career which kind of helps you to have credibility the next time someone of that kind of level of celebrity comes along and has a case that they need defending.

Orlagh Kelly: And I think the question that occurs to me is bound to occur to anyone that's listening to the episode — how do you manage or deal with that level of press attention, which is not something that I'm aware any of us have been trained for during our academic pathway.

Chris Daw KC: You're absolutely right. I never had any formal media training. I had to kind of make it up as I went along. I think the answer is — because I was junior counsel for John — in a sense, it's like you've got your training wheels. So you've got your training wheels for a really high-profile case, but ultimately you're not the one who has to do the main parts of the advocacy. I actually was given the task of sort of looking at managing media and dealing with issues around adverse publicity or prejudicial publicity. So I think I kind of learned on the job in that case. And I do remember at the end of the case — it was unusual for a criminal case because the judge had risen, I think, we finished the evidence on a Wednesday afternoon or something along those lines. Maybe it was a Thursday morning. And he said, I'm going to come back at two o'clock tomorrow on Friday and I'm going to give my judgment — in other words, the verdict. But he was going to do it as a written judgment, which is again out there if anyone's interested. You can read it, because it's a fascinating kind of analysis of evidence and how it all ends up with a not-guilty verdict because the judge is persuaded that there's a reasonable doubt. But in terms of the press — I do remember at the end of it, as we knew it was two o'clock, we had two different press statements drafted ready to kind of be released to the media. Obviously one was if we lost and one was if we won. And I was involved with — we had a PR professional there at court, a very senior PR professional. And so it was a team effort in which there were professionals in the room, and the professionals deferred to the lawyers in terms of what went out there. But they also said, what would be the most advantageous presentation in terms of how we would present an explanation of the case to the media. So I think that was just a big learning curve of all of that stuff. But also I learned from George Carter-Stevenson, who was the silk who led me in that case. George completely ignored the media, had absolutely no interest, completely ignored the media altogether and did the case as if he was representing Joe Bloggs who worked at the corner shop. It made no difference to George. And I think that was a really useful kind of example. He was a very senior silk even then — he's now in his seventies, I think — but he was a very, very senior, long-standing silk, and watching him just essentially walking through hordes of reporters — I mean, they were climbing onto step ladders and everything outside Westminster Magistrates, like a tunnel of reporters created with hundreds and hundreds of journalists and cameras. And George could have been out for a Sunday stroll. It didn't make any difference to him. He just got in there and focused and did his job. We all learn, hopefully, from those who are more experienced and those who have been in the big cases before. And that was a big part of my education at that stage. And that was a couple of years before I took silk.

Orlagh Kelly: Did George have experience in high-profile cases?

Chris Daw KC: George did, yeah. I mean, George had been involved in — I mean, he's one of the most senior criminal silks in the country and he's been in silk, I think, for 25 years now or more. So he'd been in all the high-profile, big frauds, you know, for sort of well-known kind of people. But also, I just don't think he was the sort of personality that really had a great deal of interest in the media. And that was, you know, there were a load of the rest of us that kind of had to manage all of that stuff.

And one of the things I learned, I suppose, is that the silk has to dictate the agenda for how they do their bit. But a silk is only as good as the rest of the people around him or her, you know, in terms of the team, in terms of particularly junior counsel — such an important role in a case of that level of interest, because there's just no room for mistakes. There's no room for missing anything. So the junior's job is absolutely to be completely on top of the details, to make sure that what's delivered to the silk — in terms of instructions or suggested lines of questioning, or even entire cross-examinations that are compiled and written out and structured — the junior's job is to kind of give the silk those ingredients, and then the silk's job is sometimes to throw it all in the bin and say, I'm going to do it differently. But hopefully if the team is a strong one, the silk's job is to take sort of 70% of what they're given and then add in the 30% of the silky magic, which is the bit that hopefully wins the case. And George absolutely did that. George took what we did as a team — we did a lot of background grafting, a lot of work on disclosure, et cetera — and George took all of that and he delivered in a very calm way that was very appropriate for the senior district judge. It would have been a very different case with a jury. You would have done the case completely differently. But George handled the case really, really well. And I have to say that was an example to me that I still kind of carry with me — the level of professionalism and also just the calm assurance and the calm presence that a really, really experienced leading barrister can bring to a case, which I don't think anyone less experienced has quite that level of credibility, and just — unflappability as well.

So all of that came into the mix, and George didn't allow himself to be distracted by the media. But that was partly because there were other people in the team who kind of had an eye on the media activity and were looking to manage it. But it absolutely — it's a big part of a high-profile case, the public perception of the case. And when it came to Ryan Giggs, of course, that was a jury trial — a jury trial in Manchester of the most accomplished of Manchester United's players ever. And the most successful Premier League player in history was being tried in the city where he had been with Man United for 18 or 20 years or whatever it was. And that was, as you can imagine, a very, very different prospect to doing a trial at Westminster Magistrates, where there's a district judge and where the courtroom is quite small and where there's only so much room for the press and where there's no jury.

So very, very different. And at that stage of my career — I'd been in silk for nearly 10 years when I did that trial — you know, there was an expectation when I'm doing a case of that level that I would have an understanding of how media works now, and not only for the legal reasons, but just because clients who have a high profile are often very, very concerned about the media, almost as much — and in some cases even more — than they are about the case, because their whole life and their career has been played out in the public eye. And they don't want their final — or the final memory or recollection of them — to be that they were sent to prison for some terrible crime. And you know, the nature of the case and also corporate clients — when I represent high-profile corporates, they're very, very concerned with publicity, with reputation, with commercial risk.

And all of those things, once you are dealing with cases of that nature — you can't just sit there and say, I'm a lawyer, I'm doing law. You have to say, I'm leading a team and I'm leading on behalf of a client who has lots of objectives, of which winning the case is the most important, but there are others and we need to respect those and work on those as well. And that's something that I think over time I've just become accustomed to doing, because almost every case I do is reported in the media in some way, shape or form — some very extensively like Ryan Giggs, others less so like corporate clients where, you know, the company might be very well known but the case is quite technical and so they get almost no publicity. But that publicity which they do get is potentially very damaging to the corporation and its reputation, and even regulatory and other issues may come into play, or fines.

So I think my view is that leading a team in this era of social media in particular requires you to have an acute insight into the impact of the media on the process, on the client, and ultimately on the jury, if it's a jury trial.

Orlagh Kelly: So what's interesting there to me is the opportunity to develop skills other than those of the core skills we think barristers need, and build around that to bring more value to clients and to improve and professionally develop. And so what that brings me on to — which is very interesting — is that you have developed professionally somewhat outside, tangentially I guess, to your career at the bar, in terms of you've written a book, you've written and presented a TV series, you have your own media company. Would that be fair to say? I think at this stage, can you tell me a bit about how that developed and where that fits into your kind of career aspirations?

Chris Daw KC: Yeah, I think it fits into my career aspirations in this way — I'm now 54 years of age, I've been a barrister for 31 years, and I spent, as I said earlier, 15 years or so really intensively doing nothing but courtroom advocacy — almost literally nothing, I mean that literally in the sense that I was working seven days a week and going to court every day and going to prison in the morning before court to see clients. So that sort of relentless, just doing my day job, which was very much essential because you have to do that in order to build your kind of experience and your client base and your reputation. But at this stage of life — over 10 years into silk — with a pretty well developed client base and network of clients and solicitors that I work with, I'm not chasing work all the time.

I'm not in court all the time. I do quite a lot of advisory work, and also because of the nature of my cases they're very well funded, so I have a lot of time out of court to prepare. Over the past year, I've been in court for about eight or nine months — no, slightly more than that, maybe nine or nine and a half months. But that's a lot. So generally speaking, since I took silk, I've been in court no more than 50% of the time. And what that has meant is that I do have time to think and I do have time to reflect.

And along the way, around about the time or just after I took silk, for whatever reason, I got it into my head that it's a good opportunity. I've reached that — it was my career objective. I've always wanted to take silk and it was a big deal for me, particularly with the background that I come from. It's quite unusual — you go into silks, into the judiciary, and the proportion of state educated sort of people is lower and lower the higher up you go up the judicial ladder to the Supreme Court, and you'll find very few state-educated judges at those levels, and likewise in silk, sadly, to this day. But I think the point I'm making is that I saw it as an opportunity to reflect on why I'm doing all this, and why any of us are doing this, and what's the point of the system I work in. Because I think it's such a strange thing that we go to work every day. If you work in a biscuit factory, it's not difficult to work out what you're doing. You know why you're doing it. You're doing it because people like biscuits and they want to eat them and they'll pay for them in supermarkets. It's really not complicated to understand what's the point of it. And so you want to make sure you don't ruin the biscuits, don't break the machines. There's a sort of common sense to everything in most jobs. But in my line of work — like what's the point of a jury trial? What's the point of prosecuting somebody, for example, for possession of cannabis? What's the point of prosecuting someone who's a habitual heroin user for possession of heroin? What's the point of prosecuting a 12-year-old for almost anything? And the more I thought about it, the more I realised that most of what I do every day is achieving nothing. It's not giving anyone any biscuits. What it's doing is — yes, it might be achieving a result for a client, which is positive for that client. But if you take the criminal justice system as a system rather than individuals doing individual things, take it as a system — what I began to do eventually was ask myself, what's the point of this system that I work in? What is the point of it? What's the equivalent of the biscuit delivery? And my conclusion was that the point of the criminal justice system should be to reduce crime and to have fewer victims of crime and to make society a better and safer place. When you say it out loud like that, most people will go, well, of course it is — what else would you want to do with it? And the answer is we don't do any of those things. What we do is we have a system of criminal justice that revolves around process. So if someone does a certain thing, they can expect to be arrested, and if that certain thing is another kind of thing, they can expect to be charged, and if it's a certain kind of thing, they can expect to be sent to prison, and depending on what it is, it could be for a month, a year or 20 or 30 years. But that whole process — nobody ever asks what's the consequence and the outcome of the process, and how does that impact on those overall objectives of making the world a better and safer place? And so that's what I did. I said, what's the impact? And in the end I decided that there are a number of — and I did a lot of research as well, I should say, not just based on intuition and experience, but I did a lot of research and, as I made clear in the book, also employed two young barristers who did a lot of research for me and went out there and found out lots of information about criminal justice around the world. I went on a journey — I went on various foreign trips to Switzerland and to the United States and various other places where I looked at prisons and I met with law enforcement and even drug dealers and went all over the place. And having done all of that, I decided that there were a number of drivers for why the criminal justice system doesn't do its job — why the biscuits are burned, if you want to go back to the biscuits. And they were as really as straightforward as this: we lock up too many people for too long, that's number one. We criminalise or prohibit the use of drugs of certain varieties but not others, and the ones that we criminalise and prohibit leads to a vast range of unintended consequences such as violence, crime, gangs and very, very full prisons. All of these are things which are direct consequences of drug prohibition. And perhaps most importantly, I looked at the way that we treat children and young people. So in this country, we have an age of criminal responsibility which is 10 years of age, and a 10-year-old can be prosecuted in this country. It has been — famously, in the Jamie Bulger case and in a number of other cases, 10-year-old children have been prosecuted in an adult Crown Court and sent to a young offenders institution, then to prison for something they did when they were 10. And that's an extreme example, but the more common example are 14 and 15-year-olds arrested for drugs or maybe carrying a knife but not using one, finding themselves in court, finding themselves in a young offenders institution, and before you know it they are in a revolving door of crime and prison, and crime and prison. So I decided, having sort of looked around the world at other ways of doing it, that we should just stop criminalising children altogether. We should make the age of criminal responsibility 18 — the same age at which you are allowed to vote. Because if you're not old enough to choose the government, why are you old enough to make decisions that could be characterised as criminal? I don't understand. You're either mature enough to be treated as an adult, in which case you should be allowed to vote when you're 10, or you're not mature enough — in which case you shouldn't be allowed to vote, but you also shouldn't be sent to a criminal court like an adult. And so those were the three policy areas that I realised — if you changed all three of those, if you stop criminalising children, if you licence and regulate drug supply, and if you dramatically reduce the use of prison to only dangerous people, people who are physically dangerous to the public, then lo and behold, almost overnight, the prison population would shrink in half, the overall spend on criminal justice would shrink, and the harms of criminal justice, particularly around drugs, would reduce, or even more dramatically, reduce almost overnight. Although "overnight" is an exaggeration — over a five to 10-year period of introducing these sorts of policies.

So I then wrote an article for the Spectator which advocated the legalisation of drugs — all drugs, not just cannabis, as many people just stick to cannabis because there's a sort of instinctive view that people will accept cannabis legalisation but not other drugs. In fact, cannabis is the one that is least relevant from a legalisation point of view. Heroin is much more relevant and crack cocaine much more relevant, because they're the drugs that cause most crime. And although cannabis still has an issue in the sense that it's supplied by organised crime and that's not a good thing — so I wrote this article advocating legalisation, and within a week or so got an email from an editor at Bloomsbury, the publisher of Harry Potter amongst other things, and they wrote to me and said, we like your article in the Spectator, have you got any other ideas that might fill a book?

So they came to see me in my chambers and we sat down and we had a number of conversations. And within maybe six or seven weeks of that — this is back in 2019, the year before COVID — by the end of the year I delivered the manuscript for my book, Justice on Trial, which advocates all of the things I've just been going through.

But the thing that was interesting for me was that I was able to — half the book is essentially me telling stories, as I said I do in court, but it's telling the stories of cases I've done where you can see there's a grain of kind of — where they're almost microcosmic of the system. So, you know, I tell the story of a client of mine who had been in prison for 30 years — he was 52. He'd been in prison in and out, not in one go, but in and out for 32 years, and he'd been inside for 30 since he was 18.

And I use that as sort of — you know, that's everything that's wrong. You've got someone who's never hurt anyone. He's never actually physically attacked someone. He's done stupid things, he's been off his head, and he's certainly been involved in drug supply at a low level over the years. And he ended up going back in again, not for harming anyone. It's a long story — it's in the book if anyone's interested — but I remember sitting down with him and saying to him, he'd only been out for a week from a seven-year sentence, and he got arrested and locked up again after a week for armed robbery. And it wasn't really an armed robbery because he had a banana in his pocket. But you know, that kind of stupid — not really an armed robbery anyway. And he got an automatic life sentence because that was what you got in those days for a second conviction of that kind. And I said to him, what the hell — you know, why? You've been out for a week, I don't get it. You know what? And he said, Chris, I'll be honest with you, I can't live out there. I can't live outside these walls. I can live in here and I'm fine. I know who everyone is. I know exactly what's going to happen all day. I know who to talk to if I need this and that. And people come to me because he's been there for 30 years, he knows it inside out. But that to me was a true story. But when you think about it, we spent how much on him? I mean, if you take today's figures, we probably spent a million and a half pounds on keeping Michael — as I call him in the book — in prison all of those years. One and a half million pounds. That's more than it costs to send a child to Eton for the whole of their childhood. And what's the outcome? Nothing. We've just wasted all that money to have this guy warehoused all this time. That to me — so what I've tried to do is take stories, if you want to call them that, but they're just examples of cases I've done and people I've come across. And through the book, you know, use those stories. I've talked about young people that I represented, including a 12-year-old I represented in the book. And again, why it was so inappropriate that he was in the criminal justice system. And thankfully, in the end, by means of judicial review, he came out of the criminal justice system. But essentially what I'm looking to do is to communicate. I'm trying to give people information because I'm acutely conscious that most people instinctively have no time for criminals, no time for prisoners. It's ironic, actually, that apparently a third of the male population have a criminal conviction of one kind or another in this country. And I think in the US it's even higher. And so it's quite ironic that people have this kind of broad view that anyone who's committed a crime is a very bad person, when there are 10 million, or 8 million, or whatever the figure is.

To me that doesn't add up. Hence the final chapter of my book is why people are neither good nor evil. And I made this point to the lifers I spoke to this morning. What I'm saying there is it's not the person, it's the act. And so good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things, but that doesn't define them either way. What defines a person — or what defines criminality — is actions. So you look at the actions and how you change those, rather than demonising the individual as a bad person or as evil. I mean, evil is one of the most common adjectives used in headlines about criminal cases — about particularly murders, anything to do with children. Evil is trotted out by lazy kind of journalists as the explanation. There you go, they're evil. That's all you need to know. Very, very rarely — and I would say almost down to one or two individuals I've come across in my career — would I say that the individual has a character which means, either because of psychological dysfunction or mental health issues, severe psychosis, whatever it might be, where they're essentially going to remain dangerous to everyone forever, and they're not going to stop raping or murdering or stabbing or punching or kicking. And they're always going to blow up. One or two people, I think, were almost beyond repair. And that's a very tragic and sad thing to see, but almost everybody else — even the murderers, even the armed robbers, even those who have committed the most appalling acts of violence — my view has been that most of what happened, that they did, was as a result of circumstances which were not within their control at some point in their life.

And I went to see young people in young offenders institutions as I was filming for the BBC show that you mentioned. And they were all the victims of multiple traumas. They were 15 and 16 years of age, and one of them had personally witnessed five unnatural deaths by the age of 16. We're talking about drug overdose, we're talking about stabbing, domestic violence. Five different people had died in this person's presence before the age of 16. And shock horror, they had committed a few crimes and landed themselves in a young offenders institution. And I guess that's a really good example of why, A, why I do the media work and why I do the television and why I do the other stuff, but also of why we shouldn't have children in the criminal justice system, because they are not there because they are bad, evil young people. They are there — almost all of them. And the governor of the young offenders institution said the same: these young people are here because of trauma in their lives.

And having kind of processed all of this, having taken the time to go out and speak to people who know about these things, who deal with prisoners, prosecutors all over the world — in the US, in Europe — I feel it's almost — I enjoy communicating these things, but also I think it's really important that someone is saying that we've got it wrong, that the emperor's got no clothes over criminal justice.

Orlagh Kelly: I mean, certainly a lot of what you say resonates with me — both in the time that I did some criminal defence work at the start of my practice, but when I moved into doing children's law and defending parents in public law cases, so there were ultimately criminal matters wrapped into that. It's very easy to go into those and assume, because someone has essentially beaten up a very small baby, that they must be pure evil, until you start to see their background. And that was a real eye-opener for me. You really started to understand that these people actually didn't ever really have a chance. They'd known no role model, and the trauma that they've gone through — it's not as cut and dried as those who are not actually dealing with it day to day believe, you know, when they see it from the headlines. So my question to you — I'm conscious that we're going to have to wrap up, and I'm going to have to get you back on for another episode because it's so interesting. But I'm just wondering — what's the next step in actually making change? You're raising awareness, but would you ever consider going into politics?

Chris Daw KC: No, I wouldn't, not directly. At one stage I thought I did want to do that. But I think the reason I — and it's interesting, because I met the new prisons minister, James Timpson, recently, and I went through — it was a private conversation, I won't reveal the detail. But he's someone who's come from outside politics. He was running his family business and he's been made a lord and now he's the minister for prisons. And, you know, that's the sort of thing that you could say, well, maybe that will be of some interest. The problem for me would be that I don't think I could cope with all of the obstacles to actually making change. And I think I feel much more comfortable working in a way that I can advocate. I do have connections and contacts to many MPs that I have regular private communication with, and I kind of give them support if they're looking to advocate for a policy in committee or in parliament — I'll give them sort of talking points. And I think my kind of place in that environment is writing about things, communicating about them through television and through — and by the way, I'm launching a YouTube channel soon called The Law Club with Chris Daw KC, which I hope everyone can go and sign up for. But using any vehicle I can to communicate some of the things that you and I have been talking about in this interview — about why the system doesn't really work, why it's so dysfunctional.

And I think in the end it's for others to decide at political level whether there is any political mileage in any of these reforms. The concern I have — and I think probably the reality of it is — that even those politicians like now James Timpson and sort of reform-minded politicians are always going to bump up against electoral reality. And I'm sad to say the sort of soundbite nature of most criminal justice coverage makes it very difficult to start to have the kind of discussions that we've been able to have and explore on this podcast. But where if you look at the headlines in the media and the social media output, there's really very little kind of thought and depth and very little appetite for nuance and the nuanced realities of life and why people are in the system. People just don't care enough about the prison system or the justice system for it to be anywhere near the top of their list of voting priorities. And when it is, it's generally to vote for getting tougher and locking people up for longer. So politics, I'm afraid — as it comes to this issue — it's one of those areas which is particularly badly served by our politicians and where we are wasting billions on doing things that don't work. And I'm just going to keep banging the drum in whichever forum someone will listen to me about that.

Orlagh Kelly: And is that what your YouTube channel is going to be about — the Law Club? What type of...

Chris Daw KC: The main focus of the Law Club is actually mentoring and social mobility. So the main focus is going to be looking at providing content which gives young people support with their journey into the law — not just young people, people of any age. I mean, strangely enough, one of the most successful videos I've ever done on social media was about becoming a barrister in later life, you know, in your 40s or 50s or even beyond. And that got a huge response and very, very many views. So no, it's not just aimed at young people, it's aimed at people of all walks of life. But the main purpose of it is to give people somewhere to go where they can get content which will guide them through different processes. There'll also be entertainment content as well around the journey to becoming a barrister, and content that involves candidates, applicants, students as they go through the process. And so it's more — I think it's more the thing that — so you asked me about going into politics, and one of the reasons I'm not interested in going into politics is because I think I can make much more of a difference with helping people get into the law as a career. And you know, talking about the most — probably one of the most rewarding things, if not the most rewarding thing that's ever happened in my career, was I did a talk at my old school in Milton Keynes to a group of sixth formers many years ago. And about seven years later, I got an email from a young man who said, you came to speak to me at school, I was in sixth form. And you talked about legal careers and everything. And I just wanted to tell you, I've just been admitted as a solicitor. I didn't really think it would happen. But the fact that you'd gone to my school and you'd made it to where you made it made me think, well, if he can do it, then I can do it. And so that's one person. And to be honest, having one person who's listened to something I've said, and then it's made a difference to their ambitions, their kind of self-belief, and they've ended up following a career that they're enjoying and they feel really proud of — that's more important to me than almost anything else, because it's a real, demonstrable difference that you've made to someone's life who otherwise perhaps would have ended up leaving school early and not pursuing an education. So the more I can do around that — and the Law Club is going to be just a big sort of expansion, if you like, of what I do already, which is often to speak to young people in schools and other organisations up and down the country to just bang the drum for — you know, wherever you come from, whatever your background, the law is for you if you want it to be. And that's where I think my time, in a sort of practical sense, is better spent.

Orlagh Kelly: Very good. Well, it's been wonderful having you on. It's been absolutely fascinating. I think it's going to be a bumper episode because we've covered so many topics, and I'd love to have you back on at some stage in the future, particularly once you've gotten further into your YouTube channel, The Law Club, and see how that goes. So thanks so much, Chris. That has been great.

Chris Daw KC: No problem. It's really great to have the opportunity to explore some of these things, and if I may say so, I think you've brought them out very well.

Orlagh Kelly: Thank you very much.