Marc Beaumont asks: what exactly is a "Professional ?"

An amateur sportsman might tell you that a professional is someone who performs a skilled craft full-time and for payment. But that materialistic notion does not fully capture the definition.

A Silk who prosecutes other lawyers recently remarked that a legal professional is someone who, when asked, is obliged to explain his or her conduct to a regulator. But that definition wrongly regards the regulator of a modern profession as the fount of all omniscience and the only critical arbiter of excellence. There was a time, not so long ago, when men and women were regarded as professionals without ever having to validate that description from time to time before a committee of their peers, still less to a committee of laymen. However, this definition does, perhaps, bring us closer to the idea of a person whose craft is performed against the framework of a code of ethics.

Yet a code of ethics cannot instil a sense of right and wrong, or the quality of moral courage and it cannot prevent a practitioner from favouring his interests over those of his client. Nor can a Code compel a lawyer to resist any outside pressure that might imperil his or her client. It is here, I suggest, that one gets closest to the elusive essence of professionalism.

Be he Barrister, Solicitor, Surgeon or Soldier, the truly dedicated professional will willingly put himself or herself on the line for another person. Those who sit solemnly in judgment pondering minor infractions of sets of rules might reflect on this definition of professionalism. The analogy with the military is obvious. Barristers who stand up to Judges will understand this idea acutely well. It is really only once a Barrister has faced a hostile tribunal, when he or she is the sole spokesman for an unpopular or, perhaps, even a reprehensible client, when the saving of a life, or a career, or a reputation, rests on his or her shoulders, that the Barrister will know what it means to perform his or her craft with professionalism. And despite the strain, the fatigue, the bad pay and even the obloquy of the media, it is curious but true, that we want to step back into the line of fire again and again.