Human at Law

I have been running a particularly difficult family law matter over the past few months. One of those unrelenting, intractable files that is tragically dysfunctional for the family and equally trying for the lawyers running it. Last week the matter proceeded to a judicial settlement conference. I was held up in court on another matter, and my instructing solicitor appeared for our client. When they finished, she texted: “can you call me?”

I called her when I wrapped up in court not long after. The settlement conference had been a disaster - as to be expected. But that was not why she was calling.

She was calling because she was shaken. Shaken by the conduct of the judicial officer presiding and, separately, opposing counsel. She had felt attacked. Not outmanoeuvred, not outargued, not simply on the receiving end of a hard day's advocacy. Attacked. And she rang me, I think, not because she needed to explain why no settlement was reached, but because she needed someone to confirm what she had experienced was real, and that her response to it was proportionate.

Before I continue, I should declare an interest: I have favourite solicitors (you all know who you are), and she is one of them. All barristers have favourites, and if we claim otherwise we are lying, and not even convincingly. She is one of mine because she is exceptionally good - precise, prepared, instinctively strategic in the way that cannot be taught and is therefore rare. She is also young; a fact I find somewhat terrifying as a measure of my own age, but that is beside the point. What is not beside the point is that she had walked out of that conference shaken in a way that I found genuinely upsetting. Not because she is fragile - she is not - but because there is no occasion in this profession that should ever shake a person like that - least of all one engineered by people experienced enough to know precisely that it would have that effect.

We had a good debrief, and I hope I was able to bring her some comfort. At the end of the call, she asked me if I had any advice on how she could improve her advocacy skills.

My heart broke a little. Because that question could only have meant one of two things: either she was doubting herself, wondering whether some deficiency in her own performance had warranted the treatment she had received - or she was asking how to better protect herself for next time, as though ‘next time’ was simply an inevitability she had to accept. Both possibilities were sad. That a junior lawyer, after an experience like that, should be asking whether her skills were the problem - whether she had in some way deserved it - is a genuinely troubling indictment on the profession that we belong to. It should not happen. That question should not even be one that ever forms.

But I am experienced enough to know that while it should not happen, it does, and it will.

This profession is adversarial by design. That is not a caveat or a disclosure - it is the foundational architecture. The system is built on opposing positions, contested facts, competing interests, and practitioners who are professionally obligated to advance their client's case with commitment and, where necessary, ferocity. The adversarial process is not a regrettable feature of legal practice. It is the mechanism. And the mechanism depends, structurally, on practitioners who understand how to use it, and respecting where its limits are.

There is a line between vigorous advocacy and personal conduct. Most practitioners know where that line is without needing it to be drawn for them. They argue hard and go to lunch. They press every legitimate point and remain collegial in the corridor. They understand that the person across the bar table is not their enemy - that she is doing a job, as you are doing a job, and that both of you will go home afterwards to lives that have nothing to do with the matter in dispute. The vast majority of the people I work alongside hold themselves accordingly. They are decent, rigorous, honourable. I am proud to be in the same profession as them.

But that majority is not unanimous. And the minority who treat the adversarial nature of the work as licence for something else - who mistake the permission to argue fiercely with permission to demean, intimidate, or personalise - create damage that extends well beyond the immediate exchange.

It is in part a structural problem owed to fragmentation. This profession has no clean escalation pathway for the kind of conduct I am describing - not one that a junior practitioner without established networks can access without significant personal cost. The formal mechanisms exist, but they carry formal consequences: reputational exposure, the perception of being difficult, the relational collateral damage in a profession that runs almost entirely on relationships and referrals. In that context, the incentive to absorb poor treatment rather than name it is not irrational. It is the rational response to a system that discourages it by design.

The power asymmetries compound it further. Seniority in law is not merely a credential - it is a structural advantage that shapes how conduct is perceived, how complaints are received, and how credibility is distributed. And it cuts both ways: the same hierarchy that functions legitimately as the backbone of the system can, in the wrong hands, function as cover. When the person behaving badly is also the person whose authority you are professionally obligated to respect, the calculus for the person on the receiving end is neither simple nor fair. We have known this for a long time. We’re just collectively more comfortable not saying it.

The legal profession has done genuine work in recent years on psychosocial hazards -bullying, harassment, the cultures that have historically normalised both. That work matters. But it is also incomplete. It is incomplete in two important respects. The first is that creating a mechanism to complain is not the same as creating conditions in which complaining is even viable. The formal pathways exist, but the environment in which a practitioner must decide whether to use them - the power dynamics, the professional relationships, the career calculus - has not materially changed, and a process that requires the very courage the system actively disincentivises is not a remedy. The second failure is perhaps less visible but no less significant: the profession has not done enough to equip its practitioners to distinguish between what is part of the job and what is not. To understand that the hits that come with legitimate adversarial practice are categorically different from conduct that crosses a line - and that being unable to immediately identify the difference is not a reflection of inexperience or inadequacy, but a predictable consequence of a profession that has never been sufficiently clear about where the line is.

I have sat with that failure for long enough to know I cannot resolve it from where I stand. What I can do is describe how I have tried to work within it, because I think the personal and the structural are less separate than they appear.

I keep my professional interactions intentionally warm. Deliberately, consciously, sometimes overtly warm and friendly - because I know the battleground we are walking into or walking out of, and because I am aware that the person on the other side of the matter is also a person, carrying whatever they are carrying, doing a difficult job in a profession that does not always make it easy. I need that warmth. Not as a performance of congeniality, but as a counterweight to the adversarial pressure that is inherently ever-present in the practice of law. It is the only way I have found to do this work over any length of time without it extracting something you cannot recover.

That warmth is not only self-protective. It is, I think, the foundation of the kind of professional relationships that are vital to the functioning of this profession - and nowhere is that more apparent than in the relationship between a barrister and her instructing solicitor. The barrister-solicitor relationship is, in my view, one of the most substantively important professional relationships in this jurisdiction and one of the least discussed. When it functions as it should, it is a genuine professional partnership - each carrying different knowledge, different access, different skills, oriented toward the same outcome. I tell my instructing solicitors to call me. Not only when there is a procedural question or a filing deadline approaching - any time. Half-formed concerns, things that are troubling them about the file, questions they are not certain are worth raising. Call. The solicitor who trusts her barrister enough to ring on a Wednesday afternoon with something unresolved is the solicitor who does not miss the thing that matters at trial. That trust is not incidental to good practice. It is the substrate of it.

So when my instructing solicitor asked about her advocacy skills, I told her the truth: this is not about lacking any particular skill. It is about developing a thicker skin. But I qualified this, very quickly, that I did not mean that in the way it usually sounds.

Thicker skin is not an instruction to eat concrete and harden up. It is not an acceptance of poor treatment dressed up as professional resilience. What I mean by it is something more precise: the development of a settled confidence in your own position. A trust in your own convictions. A capacity to remain steadfast in the knowledge that you have done your job, and done it well - so that when the arguments come at you, as they will, and the pressure comes, as it will, it can move through you without taking anything with it. Because that is the job. The very nature of practice is that your submissions, your arguments, your case will be disputed and contested. That part is not personal. It has nothing to do with you. It is merely the mechanism, and the mechanism requires you to let it function without mistaking the professional for the personal.

The thicker skin is actually a diagnostic instrument. When you are standing confident in your position - settled in the knowledge that you have prepared properly, argued soundly, discharged your obligations - and something still gets through, that is useful information. That is the signal. It is how you can say, with some confidence, that the thing that just happened was not a function of your inadequacy but of someone else's poor conduct. It is the difference between taking a hit that is part of the job and recognising the hit that has crossed a line. Without that settled baseline, it is genuinely difficult to distinguish between the two - and that ambiguity is, I suspect, precisely what some less-scrupulous practitioners rely upon. Conduct that is couched in professional language, that arrives in the context of legitimate adversarial exchange, can be almost impossible to identify as wrong unless you have enough ground under your feet to feel the difference.

Some of us come to that ground more easily than others. I am aware that I am reasonably well-equipped for this particular environment - my high school teachers would not be remotely surprised that I ended up at the bar, and I mean that as neither a boast nor an apology. It is simply that the capacity to hold your own under pressure is not equally distributed, and the profession does not account for that sufficiently, and it should.

Which brings me back to the call. What my instructing solicitor was experiencing - that doubt, that rumination and interrogation of her own competence - was precisely the ambiguity I have just described. She did not know which side of the line she was on. But I did. I had no hesitation. She had done her job, and she had done it well, and what had happened to her in that room was not a reflection of any deficiency on her part. It was a reflection of the conduct of the people who caused it. That was why she called. Not for advice on advocacy. For someone to tell her, with enough conviction to make it land, that the thing she suspected was true: it was not her. It was them. And it was wrong.

Not everyone has someone to call. There are practitioners throughout this profession who carry experiences like this with no professional outlet. For junior lawyers, it is often the absence of network - no established relationships, no trusted senior to call, no structural backing from which to name what happened without cost. But the isolation is not theirs alone. A seasoned practitioner carries a different and perhaps more insidious version of it: the silent expectation that by this point in a career, one ought to be able to handle it. That the seniority itself forecloses the admission of difficulty. That to say ‘this shook me’ is somehow incompatible with the years behind you. It is a different kind of stigma, but it is stigma nonetheless, and it produces the same result - the experience goes unspoken, and the conduct that caused it prevails.

I see this too often. I’ve really only ever worked in law, but I can’t help but think this profession is somewhat uniquely plagued by these harmful experiences - I can’t go a month without witnessing someone be ruthlessly dressed down in open court, or a lawyer brought to tears and hiding under the stairwell in the corridor. It saddens me to say that, as I have a profound respect and affection for this profession of ours, but it is accurate.

I do not have a complete answer for it. I am not sure anyone does. If there is a remedy, it is probably the simplest and least comfortable one: call it out, as and when it happens, in terms that are clear. To say ‘your conduct is making me apprehensive’ simply because it is. But not everyone has the backing to do that, or the structural position from which it can be done without cost, and I am not willing to simply tell junior practitioners to speak up as though that advice arrives without consequences attached.

What I can do though, is something smaller but meaningful.

If you are a practitioner and you have had an experience that left you shaken, or doubting yourself, or asking whether your own skills were somehow the cause of someone else's conduct toward you: you can call me. You do not need a formal complaint in mind or a clear idea of what you are looking for. My contact details are on my website. The offer is genuine and it is open.

And to every senior practitioner reading this: I would ask you to make the same offer. Not as a policy position or a wellbeing initiative. As a plain statement, to anyone who might need to hear it. Offer your ‘thicker skin’ to those who are still in the process of developing their own.

The profession does not change through formal mechanisms alone. It changes when enough people decide that a standard is worth holding, and say so, in terms that leave no room for misunderstanding. In the meantime, I am here, and my door is open.

About the Author

Ashleigh Morris is a Melbourne barrister practising in family law, with a particular focus on contested hearings, trials, and complex parenting and property litigation. She is regularly briefed in matters involving difficult factual disputes, urgent applications, relocation cases, enforcement proceedings, and cases requiring strong cross-examination and strategic advocacy.

Ashleigh is also the founder and chief executive of The Profession, the first centralised platform for events, connection and career development for the Australian legal profession.

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