Admiralty and shipping
so I appreciated their support. I still pick their brains when I have a question I can’t answer.” While most of his work tends to be more paper and office based in comparison to criminal or family lawyers, Ralph explains that he particularly enjoys “the fact that you get to discover a lot about the world, both past and present. In terms of learning about the past, I recently had to look at coverage of piracy, barratry and scuttling in marine insurance policies going back to the 18th Century. In terms of the present, you learn a lot about people and commercial situations across the world. You’ll suddenly find yourself reading about fraudsters in Singapore or shipments of rice from Thailand or weather conditions in the Indian Ocean. You’re always learning something new about things that make up our world and how interconnected it is and that’s really fascinating.” Navigating the role “As a junior barrister you’ll often be asked to advise on discrete points of law,” explains Ralph. “Very commonly, that will be a question on the construction of a contract such as a shipping charter, and you’ll have to analyse what the words the parties have chosen to use mean. There might also be questions on jurisdiction or the proper procedure – such as whether arbitration should be used instead of litigation. Beside advice, writing statements of case is the other most common task. If you have bigger cases, you may be involved in drafting witness statements and in reviewing expert evidence. Experts are quite common in shipping law: you’ll be involved in scrutinising their reports and questioning them about their analysis. Ultimately, if you’re the junior barrister on a case, you will be the person responsible for writing the skeleton argument, where you set out your side’s position in advance of the trial.” Although there are several benefits to working as a barrister in shipping law, the nature of the work means that a lot of cases,
Shipping law is one of the oldest and most developed branches of commercial law. It falls into two areas: ‘dry’ shipping, which involves contractual issues such as bill of lading and charterparty disputes; and ‘wet’ shipping, which involves disputes over the ship itself (eg, collision and salvage). Although the shipping industry is by its nature international, London remains the preeminent venue for dispute resolution. After studying classics at the University of Cambridge, Ralph Morley came to practise shipping law for what he describes as a “slightly unusual reason” – he simply had an interest in shipping. Ralph was part of the university’s Royal Naval Unit, training under the supervision of the Navy, navigating small patrol boats around the North Sea and the Baltic, and learning about ships and the sea. “I didn’t want to join the Navy, but it was something that I learnt a lot from and I thought it was a really valuable experience. When I was wandering around a barristers’ career fair in my last year as an undergraduate, I took lots of flyers away and one of them, which was in fact from 7 King’s Bench Walk, where I am now a tenant, mentioned shipping law. I did a mini-pupillage there to find out more and discovered that shipping offered immense variety and knotty problems of law and fact.” Launching into shipping law After graduating, Ralph completed a law conversion course at City University and went on to do pupillage at 7 King’s Bench Walk (7KBW). He found his pupillage “surprisingly” stress-free: “I always felt that my four supervisors really wanted to help me put in the best work that I could. They were engaging, kind and funny, and always willing to give me the time and resources to help me learn about the areas of law 7KBW practises in. Shipping throws up some complicated questions – about the conflict of laws between different jurisdictions, for example – which I hadn’t studied at all on the law conversion course,
For more chambers that work in this practice area, please use the ‘Pupillage index’.
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