4-5 Gray’s Inn Square Chambers

About Chambers

Heads of chambers: Timothy Straker KC and Rupert Beloff.

Who we are: 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square is a leading housing, planning, property, commercial and public law chambers.

We have a reputation for excellence and are home to a group of intellectually energetic and highly regarded barristers, mediators and international tenants. We are committed to providing creative and practical legal advice to meet the commercial needs of our clients. We have a reputation for excellence in all of our core practice areas. Our barristers are supported by a first-class practice management team.

What we do: Our core areas of law include: administrative and public law, social housing, commercial, employment, planning and property, dispute resolution, election, local government, regulatory and disciplinary, and international law.

What we’re looking for in a pupil: We seek to identify candidates with the skills and potential to be outstanding barristers within our fields of expertise.

What you’ll do: Pupils’ work will include research, drafting opinions and arguments. Pupils will shadow their pupil supervisor as they do research, paperwork and go to court, sharing an office and analysing how they perform their day-to-day tasks.

Perks: Chambers shall accommodate pupils’ reasonable requests for flexible working hours in order to allow for parents of children and other dependents to meet their caring commitments.

Pupillage at 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square Isabella Taylor, tenant at 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square

Graduated from Queens’ College, University of Cambridge with a 2:1 in Law Tripos, BA (Hons), and the City Law School with a Distinction in Master of Laws, Bar Vocational Studies (with specialism in Advanced Civil Practice). Supervised by Rowena Wisniewska Sethi, Jonathan Manning, and Vivienne Sedgley during pupillage.

Introduction: Pupillage at 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square emulates life at the Bar. No two days are the same, and each pupil benefits from high standards of supervision while having their own unique experience. Pupillage is a highly engaging and practical undertaking; it is not training in the form of traditional academia or the bar course, it’s truly vocational.

Day in the life during non-practising period, ‘first six’: A typical day in the life as a first six pupil at 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square strikes the balance between training the pupil as a practitioner, while nonetheless giving them the opportunity to be genuinely helpful and contribute to the cases that make up their supervisor’s day-to-day workload.

One day in my first six, I spent the morning reviewing my supervisor’s final grounds of appeal and skeleton argument for the Court of Appeal. In advance of reviewing my supervisors’ final product, I had the benefit of drafting my own advice, my own skeleton argument, and my own grounds of appeal. I received detailed feedback on my work. Two members of chambers were working on this case for the appellant, and I was able to get an insightful view into the case from each of them because of the open-door policy within chambers.

In the afternoon on the same day, another member of chambers had received an update on a different matter in the Court of Appeal, of which I had no prior knowledge. I was tasked with producing an urgent research note on a discrete point of law. I attended one of the Inns of Court libraries to conduct my research. The opportunity to assist members of chambers in developing areas of law in the appellate courts was instrumental for me in honing my legal research skills and written advocacy. Conveying research succinctly and clearly is as important as the contents of the research itself.

Days like those were great preparation for my second six, when I was often appearing in the County Court at least three days a week and managing multiple cases at a time. Pupils are trained in drafting pleadings too, with training sessions throughout the year on the set’s specialist practice areas. 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square ensures that pupils have the opportunity to shadow junior members and experience the types of cases on which pupils will be instructed in their second six. This enables pupils to take the leap to representing clients on their own with confidence.

Transition to the practising period, ‘second six’: During the practising period of my pupillage, I was instructed on a variety of cases, from landlord and tenant matters, to injunction applications, among an abundance of general civil litigation work and civil applications in the criminal courts. The support and open-door policy at 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square continues throughout the practising period and beyond, and weekly chambers tea meant I was able to share my experiences with my colleagues and benefit from their insight.

Finally, 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square is committed to ensuring a healthy work-life balance for their pupils. In the first six, I was not expected to work beyond my hours of 9am to 6pm. In the second six, there was an ongoing dialogue with the clerks about case load and what each pupil needed. Chambers fosters open communication and collaborates with its members to tailor each individual’s practice, ensuring members excel at the Bar.

Diversity and inclusion