In October 2023, the Bar Standards Board launched a public consultation to clarify our regulatory expectations of chambers. This followed a series of consultative roundtables across all circuits in England and Wales, which reaffirmed the important role which chambers can play in fulfilling many shared professional and regulatory objectives. The Bar Standards Board has now brought together our regulatory requirements of barristers’ practice management in chambers in a dedicated webpage on our website.

Most self-employed barristers in England and Wales work from chambers. Chambers play a key role in the recruitment and development of barristers. In doing so, chambers both support the professional development of individual barristers and help to ensure that the profession supports the rule of law and serves the public.

This new webpage brings these practice management obligations together in one place and provides guidance and illustrative good practice examples, with links to good practice on professional websites. We are providing these resources to assist both barristers who are members of chambers and chambers staff to achieve high standards of practice. The new chambers webpage can be found here.

 Mark Neale, Director-General of the Bar Standards Board said: 

“We are excited to launch the new dedicated webpage for chambers, which brings together all our rules in one place. The aim of this initiative is to support all chambers in emulating best practice and to do so, not by adding to regulation, but by making it easier to comply with existing regulations.

We believe that barristers acting collectively as members of chambers can make an important difference on standards, equality, access and a range of other important objectives.”