Between the devil and the deep blue sea

If there was a prize for the most time-consuming application form on the planet, the one would-be QCs have to fill in would surely be in contention.

It took newly made-up QC James Rowley, of Byron Chambers, a full five days to complete the 72-page form that thudded on to his desk last year.

In this week's issue of Legal Week, Dominic Carman collates war stories from a number of the 443 advocates for whom the promise of being able to put 'QC' after their name was enough to persuade them to undertake the form-filling marathon required of them by QC Appointments.

Of course there will always be someone who makes it all seem so easy. In this case, it is Khawar Qureshi QC, of Serle Court, who nonchalantly filled out his application form on deadline day.

"I came into chambers at six in the morning and started on the form," he tells Carman. "I had it sent out by courier at four that afternoon."

The man to turn to, surely, in a crisis. But he was very much the exception that proved the rule, with many applicants even resorting to coaching in order to get through the interview process.

I have to admit that I was sceptical when the Bar Council teamed up with the Law Society in a bid to save the silk system, once it had been quite rightly decided that this was not something that the Government should be administering.

The new system is infinitely more transparent that the old one, which relied on a nod and a wink from a small cabal of senior judges. While the old system was easy to administer, it was certainly not a fair one.

In order to be both rigorous and fair, the new process must inevitably be a difficult one to complete successfully. If the QC rank is to mean anything, it must, by definition, be hard to get.

This year QC Appointments has attempted to simplify the application form by trimming 10 pages off it. As we report this week, it has also been forced to impose steep increases in the cost of applying in order to pay for the administration of the system, which must be self-funding. This is because fewer people than anticipated applied for silk in the new system's inaugural year. The risk, of course, is that this will put more people off applying, threatening the project's viability.

One thing the body mustn't do, however, is cut corners, for risk of destroying the system's credibility. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, it would seem.