Competition
After finishing his LLM, Aaron worked as an academic for five years, first at his alma mater in Bristol and then at Cardiff University, where he ultimately discovered what he really wanted to do. “I loved working in academia, and especially teaching law and being in the classroom environment with students, but more and more I found that I wanted to be at the sharp end of cases,” he says. He applied for – and secured – pupillage at Brick Court Chambers before enrolling on the BPTC. Aaron is mixed race, state-school educated and he is part of the first generation from both sides of his family to go to university, so his background is very different from the barrister stereotype. He emphasises that a key attraction of becoming a barrister is that “it is a meritocratic profession – it is about your ability, not anything else.” For that reason, his advice to aspiring barristers with non- traditional backgrounds is “don’t be deterred – as with choosing any career, the important thing is to pursue something that you enjoy and are good at. If you have a genuine passion, you should go for it.” Three main types of work Now a tenant at Brick Court Chambers, Aaron has built a competition law practice across a variety of sectors. Competition law, he explains, covers four key areas: “It regulates anti-competitive agreements, decisions and concerted practices; prohibits the abuse of a dominant position; regulates mergers; and prohibits certain public restrictions of competition, in particular via the rules on State aid.” Within that “academic topography”, competition barristers do three main types of work, the first of which is regulatory: “You can be acting in or advising on an investigation by a regulator into whether a party’s conduct breaches competition law,” explains Aaron, “or acting in the courts to appeal against or defend a regulator’s decision.”
Competition and regulatory work involves a mixture of commercial, public and (at least for now) EU law. The general competition law prohibitions under EU and domestic law apply to all types of economic activity, and work in this area also involves a range of sector-specific regulation (eg, in the telecoms, energy and financial services sectors). It also includes merger control under EU law and the Enterprise Act 2002. The work involves a mix of regulatory and court proceedings, with claims for damages for breaches of competition law taking on a higher profile in recent years. Related areas are State aid and the rules on public sector and utility procurement. Asked how he became a competition law specialist, Aaron Khan explains that “there wasn’t a masterplan – much like my career more generally. For most of my A levels, I thought I would study computer science at university because I was very interested in technology, but I realised that I didn’t quite have the skills for that, I chose to do a law degree because I thought it would be interesting, not because I thought I would necessarily pursue it as a career.” It was the right choice – the more he studied, the more he realised that “this is where my interests lie.” Keen to develop his expertise, he completed a bilingual LLM degree in EU law at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium. “It was an amazing but slightly terrifying experience – my French is okay, but I had to improve very quickly,” he recalls. Competition law was one of the main modules on the course, which was Aaron’s introduction to what would become his career: “I found myself completely enthralled, not only by the body of law but also with its close interaction with economics. The analysis of whether certain actions should be permitted or prohibited by competition law is absolutely fascinating.”
For more chambers that work in this practice area, please use the ‘Pupillage index’.
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