I’m starting out with a modest and hopefully achievable goal :

1 Do SOME legal blogging. Not necessarily a lot. Just SOME

(By which I mean attending court and observing hearings as a ‘legal blogger’ ie a lawyer attending in a quasi journalistic role, rather than simply any old person who blathers on about legal related stuff online)

It’s so super hard to find the time to do this. Neither experience nor a strong sense of the potential benefit of doing legal blogging make it easy to squeeze a day out of my overloaded diary to do unpaid work miles away where everyone pulls faces at you when they think you aren’t looking. Plus, well, there has been a lot going on around here lately, and I don’t think life is about to get any less pressurised. So…achieving ANY legal blogging in 2023 will be a victory.

2 Try and identify and write about cases that enable me to write about particular areas of interest

This is tricky because the court lists are frankly, useless. Not only do they give me zero information about what a case or hearing is about, they aren’t published until the afternoon before the hearing. It occurred to me yesterday whilst pondering the new pilot that where I’d really like to be a fly on the wall is cases involving a QLR (qualified legal representative). These are cases where the new statutory prohibition on cross examination in person created by the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 will apply, and where an unrepresented party will have questions asked on their behalf by a QLR (but don’t be misled by the ‘R’ part of that acronym because they aren’t the representative of the party). Any day now these cases will suddenly start coming through the pipeline at high volume. I have some predictions (which I will keep to myself for now, because they might be wrong) about how smoothly this will all work, and about the potential challenges for all involved in case managing such cases, in drawing the boundaries of what a QLR is and is not / can and cannot do, and in achieving fairness. The point is, I’d like to see it in practice. Because how this works is really important. And we all need to learn from our collective mistakes or at any rate from experience. And because people (litigants) need to know what to expect.

I don’t just want to see the questioning. I want to see the ground rules hearing, the PTR. I want to look at the process.

The question is how do I identify a case involving a QLR on a day when I am actually available to spend in court legal blogging? Tricky. If I had nothing better to do I’d just turn up daily and watch as many cases as I could until one turned up. But I don’t and that won’t work.

I could attend on a particular day and ask court staff to point me to anything in the list involving a QLR. Even if they know which cases involve a QLR as opposed to a ‘normal’ lawyer, I’m not entirely sure they would tell me. I could indicate to the local judiciary that I hope to attend on a particular day and seek assistance in identifying suitable cases. Maybe…

I could ask QLRs to let me know if they have been appointed and to tell me their hearing dates. A coincidentally helpful quirk of the QLR scheme is that a QLR is NOT a legal representative with lawyer-client duties in the ordinary sense, so actually I think there would be fewer barriers to a QLR letting me know the bare fact of their instruction and the date and time of their GRH and FF hearing / trial than usual. I would not alert the media to a hearing unless my client consents, though I think views do vary on this.

At the moment I think these hearings are probably few and far between – but they are starting to filter through. I met an advocate this week whose clerks had just had a call from the court to establish her availability for a hearing, and I have certainly had a couple of post July cases cross my desk, albeit that they have mostly not yet reached the stage of listing fact findings / trials of evidence.

Of course, there is nothing to stop a party notifying me if their case involves a QLR, should they be happy for a legal blogger to attend their hearing, and there is some information on The Transparency Project’s legal bloggers page about what can and can’t be shared with legal bloggers about children cases (in cases under the new pilot it will be possible to share more information, but in other cases the information that shared should be limited to the basic nature of the dispute (i.e. a summary in a sentence or two), the date, time, duration, type and location of the hearing. Contact details can be found at www.transparencyproject.org.uk/legalbloggers.

Goal number 2 is, of course, entirely pointless if I can’t make goal number 1 a reality…but I’ll do my best. If anyone reading this blog in whatever capacity can assist in pointing me in the right direction I’d be very grateful. I make no promises as to whether I will attend or what I will write, but I will do my best to come, and do my best to write a fair and accurate account incorporating legally informed observations.

3 Get other people legal blogging

I know. Number 1 isn’t selling it really, is it? But it really is worth doing, even if you aren’t terribly enthused about the public benefit of the exercise. As my mother would say (albeit not of legal blogging) it’ll do you good. Much like a crisp winter’s walk you were dragged out on but which you returned back from invigorated and red cheeked, you really will feel better from it and you will have seen all sorts of interesting things in the hedgerows along the way.

This one seems to be starting promisingly. The Transparency Project are running online training for potential legal bloggers on 2 Feb, to coincide with the launch of the new Reporting Pilot (running in Cardiff, Leeds and Carlisle from 30 January in children cases, where the presumption against reporting will be reversed and journalists and bloggers will be able to report anonymously in most cases – details here). Lawyers who think they *might* want to give it a go can come along and find out more by emailing me at trustees@transparencyproject.org.uk. Quite a few have signed up already. It’s an hour of your life you won’t get back if you think it sounds awful, but why not stick it on your CPD plan and come along?

You can either undertake legal blogging at one of the pilot courts (in which case you will not need to make any application for permission to report), or you can do the same at a court near you (in a non-pilot court you will still have to apply for permission to report at the end of the hearing, but this is not terribly difficult, and in my experience is usually successful).

There we have it then. A short legal blog (in the general sense) about legal blogging (in the more particular sense). I suppose that, were it not for the fact I didn’t think of them till it is now officially too late to even say HNY I would call them New Year’s Resolutions. Probably just as well I haven’t called them that because I always break my New Year’s Resolutions.