When I look back to when I was called to the Bar in 1973 by the Treasurer and Benchers of the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn, the world—and certainly the legal world—seemed a safer place. Stern portraits of richly robed and magnificently bewigged judges lined the panelled walls of the sixteenth-century hall. On a raised dais, a distinguished band of legal luminaries and assorted, bespectacled greybeards watched keenly as each of the fifty nervous student barristers, white tie and tailed like extras from a Fred Astaire movie, shook the Treasurer’s hand and on being declared “utter barristers” received a slim volume entitled Duty and Art in Advocacy by Sir Malcolm Hilbery. All this spoke of centuries of slowly evolving legal tradition, of the significance and dignity of the profession, and of the certainty of the role of judges and trial lawyers in the legal process.