Best Practice Guidance

COMBAR has recommended the COMBAR Best Practice Guidance for Chambers: Fair Work Allocation, Earnings Monitoring and Reporting, Parental Leave and Retention and Progression.  The guidance is available here.

COMBAR is committed to ensuring that all members of the profession have fair and equal opportunities to fulfil their potential and to progress.  It aims to support and encourage chambers in achieving a standard of excellence in equality of opportunity that reflects the high professional standing of the Commercial Bar.

To this end, COMBAR recommends the best practice guidance for chambers, which is intended to complement existing requirements and guidance from the Bar Council and the Bar Standards Board.

The guidance includes a model Fair Work Allocation policy and a model Parental Leave policy.  It recommends that chambers should adapt these policies to suit the characteristics of chambers as they see fit and recognises that, in particular as regards financial relief to be given during a period of Parental Leave, COMBAR member sets have a wide variety of ways of calculating how members should be levied to pay the running expenses of chambers, and that one size does not fit all.  That said, the objectives of the policies, in particular the encouragement of female members to return to chambers following pregnancy and leave and to continue to build successful practices at the self-employed Bar, are ones which are common to all member sets and critical not just to the success of individual chambers, but to the Commercial Bar as a whole.

It is hoped that best practice guidance prepared by experienced self-employed commercial practitioners will be of assistance to COMBAR member sets generally.

If you have any questions, please contact the E&D Committee through admin@combar.com