Thought for this Issue: The Task of Advocacy is About Making it Simple

In “Good Barristers; Bad Days”, PA Keane AC KC, in an address to Queensland Bar Practice Course, 28 May 2015, at 7, said:

One of the most misleading clichés which you will hear about advocacy is the phrase “Keep it simple, stupid.” The reason for having barristers at all is that it is not simple. The task is not to keep it simple; but to make it simple. And that is hard.

Michael McHugh QC, himself one of the legends of the Australian Bar, has observed that the secret of Sir Garfield Barwick’s success as Australia’s pre-eminent advocate lay in his ability to simplify what was complex and to illustrate an abstract proposition with a concrete example. This is the quintessential skill of oral argument.

The skills of refinement, simplification and synthesis that we value most highly in our advocates have been developed over the course of a millennium in oral argument in court or in mooting in the Inns of Court, rather than in the marshalling of citations from academic treatises. That is no less true today than it was in the time of Edward I.

But the exercise of these skills is harder for barristers today than ever before because our confident and rights-conscious fellow citizens who will be your clients, and the commercially savvy solicitors who will be briefing you, will often bring moral and economic pressure to bear on you to pursue every possible point regardless of your view of its merits or lack thereof. It is part of your job, perhaps the hardest part, to counsel your clients and your solicitors against what will appear to the court to be a wasteful self-indulgence. You will need to be brave. You might lose the support of some solicitors as a result, but you will, in the long run, be, and be seen to be, a better barrister for it. The courts will be better for it too. And you will impress the judges and others.

(emphasis added)

12 McHugh, “The Rise (and Fall?) of the Barrister Class” in Gleeson and Higgins (eds), Rediscovering Rhetoric: Law, Language and the Practice of Persuasion, (2008) 165 at 189.