Choosing the Bar means choosing self-employment. For most barristers, there is no employer, no firm structure, and no team to absorb the day-to-day pressures of practice. Emily Windsor, a chancery barrister with judicial experience, has spoken with characteristic directness about what that structure genuinely involves — the advantages it creates and the pressures it places on those who carry it.

Windsor practises in chancery, working across the full range of activities that encompasses: client advice, case preparation, and advocacy in court. Her clients are a deliberately varied group — ranging from farmers working the land in Cumbria to companies whose names appear in most households. The range of legal questions that variety generates keeps her professionally engaged, but the underlying work is consistent: find the best solution to a complex legal problem for the person who needs it.

That work sits inside a self-employed structure. Windsor is a member of Chambers rather than an employee of a firm, and she describes that model as one that genuinely delivers on its promise. Independence in practice — the freedom to run her own caseload and work to her own schedule — sits alongside the community that Chambers provides. When advice is needed, or when a difficult case requires a sounding board, colleagues are available. The isolation of solo practice is real, but it is tempered.

Windsor is also clear about where the model makes demands. Personal responsibility for a practice means there is no one to carry a case in your place. Most barristers work through their matters individually — it is the default condition, not an exception. That individual accountability does not leave when the working day ends. Windsor reflects that she thinks about her clients in the evenings and at weekends more than she probably should. The responsibility is present even when the desk is not.

The pace of practice has also shifted. Windsor came to the Bar at a time when written letters were the primary mode of professional communication, and a reply within a few days was considered acceptable. Email changed that calculus permanently. Responses are now expected faster, and barristers operating independently feel that directly. There is no administrative layer to manage communications on their behalf.

Technology’s influence is not purely pressurising, though. Windsor notes that the shift to online resources has been genuinely liberating in other respects. Legal research that once required physical access to a library can now be conducted from a laptop at home. Working remotely for extended periods is now practically and professionally viable in a way it simply was not a generation ago.

On the question of career longevity, Windsor’s view is clear. Senior barristers are frequently at their most valued in their sixties and seventies — their experience read as authority rather than liability. Windsor found herself discussing retirement with her pensions advisor and struggling to identify a compelling reason to pursue it. She looks forward to work. That, in itself, says something about what the self-employed Bar can offer.