Half an hour with Adam Wagner: barrister and legal blogger extraordinaire (and City alumni of course)

Thanks to One Crown Office Row for this rather dashing image of Adam Wagner.

‘I know it’s a stupid Disney thing to say, but it’s true – just be a nice person, be yourself.’

Lessons in humility - Leading junior barrister and editor of the UK Human Rights blog, Adam Wagner, talks Twitter, Terry Jones and what it takes to make it as a barrister...

Relaxed, affable and even self-deprecating, Adam Wagner is a lawyer who is striving to make the justice system more transparent and more user-friendly for non-lawyers.After reading PPE at Oxford, Adam completed the CPE Diploma in Law at City University in 2006. Despite recalling that he found it a very steep-learning curve and claiming that he doesn’t remember doing well in any aspects of the course, Adam is now a barrister at One Crown Office Row, a chambers that specialises in public law, healthcare law, clinical negligence and personal injury, He is ranked as a 'leading junior' for clinical negligence and healthcare law in the 2010 edition of The Legal 500 and is a founding editor of the UK Human Rights Blog.

It is clear that Adam’s views have been formulated by the time he spent in the States doing an MA in political science at Columbia University. Before that, he had been interested in doing charity work or something academic, and was not particularly motivated to be a lawyer. This is possibly explained by the fact that his father did not always enjoy his job as a solicitor and advised him not to be one. He talks about the idea of constitutional law, (similar to what we could call public and human rights law in this country) being far stronger in America,with more openness and more idealism amongst students. ‘Whereas here',he says, ‘there’s this attitude; “we’re all going to go make loads of money, people don’t like us but so what'.

Adam’s attitude is anything but this; his approach is far more humble. It took him two years and two rounds of applications for him to get pupillage, a feature of Adam’s career that he admits he was ‘gutted’ about, having built himself up to believe that he would be successful straight away. This worked out for the best though as it forced him to take a year off after the BPTC, in which he worked as a paralegal at the solicitor’s firm Leigh Day & Co. This practical experience in public law and medical law, which is what he does now, made the pupillage process far less intimidating, and gave him connections with solicitors, something which is crucial for a barrister.