Bonus Episode - Ask a Lawyer
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This transcription is automated, therefore it may not be 100% accurate. It is to be used as a guide only as the AI bots may have some things wrong.
0:00:00 - (Nicole): This episode of bring your kid to work is brought to you by Lioness Media.
0:00:04 - (Nicole): It's time to bring your kid to work.
0:00:07 - (Nicole): Hey everyone. It's time to bring your kid to work. It's the family podcast that explores the world of work through the eyes of parents and their kids. Each week we interview one parent and their child to chat about what they do for work, what they like, what they don't like, and how they got there in the first place. Let's find out who we're talking to today.
[TRANSCRIPT]
0:00:00 - (Nicole): This episode of bring your kid to work is brought to you by Lioness Media. It's time to bring your kid to work. Hey everyone. It's time to bring your kid to work. It's the family podcast that explores the world of work through the eyes of parents and their kids. Each week, we interview one parent and their child to chat about what they do for work, what they like, what they don't like, and how they got there in the first place.
0:00:25 - (Nicole): Let's find out who we're talking to today.
0:00:29 - (Nicole): Hello and welcome to a very special bonus episode of bring your kid to work. It's the middle of season two, so what better time to bring you the answers to the questions that our Facebook community asked for our lawyer, our criminal lawyer, Laura Reese. Then right now, now is the best time, of course, halfway through season two. So here is the amazing Laura Reese answering the questions from our Facebook bring your kid to work careers community.
0:00:56 - (Nicole): Thank you so much for your brilliant questions, you smart, smart people. Just a warning for this particular episode, though, criminal law is not for the faint of heart. There are some pretty tough stories that.
0:01:10 - (Nicole): Come out of criminal law.
0:01:12 - (Nicole): And if you think that that's something that your small person doesn't necessarily want.
0:01:17 - (Nicole): Or need to hear, then please feel.
0:01:19 - (Nicole): Free to skip this particular bonus episode. This one is going to be for the mid to late teens plus their parents. So just upfront wanted to give that warning. No swears or anything like that, just some kind of intense conversation. So I wanted to warn upfront about that.
0:01:38 - (Nicole): I hope you enjoy our bonus episode.
0:01:40 - (Nicole): Ask a lawyer.
0:01:45 - (Nicole): I've got some rapid fire questions that my friends in our bring your kid to work career conversations community have asked me to ask. So, Laura, I'm going to throw them at you now. You've already asked answered Rani's question because she wanted to know where the title of barrister came from. So that's about speaking at the bar. Nice. Another question from Paul was, how do you detach from the type of work that you do? Because you would defend some people who were guilty and see the details of their crime and have them go to jail and be away from their families. How do you switch off from that and be able to go back to your family?
0:02:28 - (Laura): It's a really good question, and it probably is one that you just revisit throughout your career. And look, sometimes revisiting it or dealing with it may require psychological assistance, actually, because we are exposed to what we probably now all refer to as vicarious trauma and I think as a profession, rather late to the party on vicarious trauma.
0:02:51 - (Laura): But we're getting there. We recognize that it plays a role. It's very interesting to reflect on cases.
0:02:59 - (Laura): Which have an impact and cases which don't. And it's very personal, it seems. Which cases resonate with you often? It might be if a child is the same age as your own child.
0:03:10 - (Laura): A child victim, that can be very confronting or just funny little details that.
0:03:16 - (Laura): Might resonate with you personally in some other way. They can be very heavy. And I guess how we deal with it, we're all different.
0:03:22 - (Laura): But collegiality is actually the key.
0:03:25 - (Laura): I think it's being able to talk through or just debrief with trusted colleagues who have been through maybe not exactly that issue, but very similar issues, and who understand and are not going to be burdened by it, perhaps in the same way as your friends and family.
0:03:46 - (Laura): Who don't operate in the world that.
0:03:48 - (Laura): We operate in, because we do see and hear about terrible things all the time. There's a lot of human suffering involved in criminal law, obviously, and there is this need that we all feel to not fully take it home with us. And in order to do that, I think the most effective tool is to rely on people who are your close and trusted colleagues. And then really, if you find that it's taking a toll on you, that you can't shake, if it's creating a burden that you can't shake or you.
0:04:22 - (Laura): Feel you can't free yourself from, you need to seek professional support.
0:04:27 - (Laura): And increasingly, people are recognizing that. But we are actually still a group of lawyers who are quite vulnerable to depression. And so we really still have a lot of work to do as a group, as a profession, to strengthen those connections that we have with each other and to encourage each other to seek support when we need it and to recognize it. Emotional dysfunction, fractured relationships, it's not pretty picture looking at criminal law as a whole.
0:05:01 - (Laura): But I think we are becoming much.
0:05:03 - (Laura): Better at talking about those things, and.
0:05:07 - (Laura): That can only be good for all of us.
0:05:09 - (Nicole): Definitely, yeah. And that, I think, would be very similar for people who experience the other side of the criminal justice system, like those who are first responders or doctors or police officers and that kind of thing. I imagine it would be similar for them and that they would do the same thing. Talking to colleagues would be the way.
0:05:29 - (Laura): Through, I think so. One really interesting, because I've always, I mean, I have great admiration for any of those people who are really, truly first responders to these often pretty shattering incidents involving terrible suffering. One thing that we're dealing with now as criminal lawyers is that's come a little closer to us, where we used to read statements by police officers saying, my name's blogs, and I turned up at this scene and this is what I saw.
0:05:54 - (Laura): We now see what they see because we see their body worn camera footage. So it's brought that immediacy of experience much, much closer to us. And I don't think any of us really fully appreciated it before it happened. Now, instead of imagining a scene, you see the scene, you see the officer running towards a car accident, for example, and you see everything that's happening. And I think I can think of six or seven of my colleagues who've mentioned this experience now as being much more visceral and much harder to forget than the way that we used to do work. And it's been a really interesting development in policing and in criminal justice generally. But I think probably we had underestimated the fact that it just brings us that much closer to the trauma of an incident.
0:06:40 - (Laura): Yeah, wow.
0:06:41 - (Nicole): Didn't even think about that as a concept. I'm going to take us in a little bit of a different direction now. Nathan wants to know if we have in Australia, the equivalent of pleading the fifth, which is in America, that rule where you can know, I plead the fifth, which means I don't have to say anything because it might incriminate me.
0:06:59 - (Laura): Yeah, well, yeah, we do.
0:07:01 - (Laura): The answer is we do to a certain extent, generally speaking. Say you're a witness in a case and a lawyer asks you a question, and it might. A simple example is you might be a witness to a crime, but the lawyer might want to ask you questions about whether you had taken drugs yourself that night or whether you had sold drugs to the person involved. And you might say you would be told in court, you don't have to answer that question because it may tend to incriminate you. So it's called privilege against self incrimination.
0:07:34 - (Laura): So generally speaking, absolutely, we have that right. But in some very specific circumstances, we don't have that right because we have.
0:07:44 - (Laura): What'S called a star chamber with the.
0:07:46 - (Laura): Triple C. We have in Queensland, an organization called the Triple C, the Crime and Corruption Commission, which has extraordinary powers and can compel a witness. They can actually say to a witness.
0:07:58 - (Laura): In a hearing, you have to answer.
0:08:00 - (Laura): This question, and if you don't answer this question, you will be sent to jail. And so even though it's true to say that, generally speaking, we have the right not to incriminate ourselves by being.
0:08:12 - (Laura): Forced to answer questions because there is the power to force us to answer.
0:08:18 - (Laura): Questions in certain circumstances. I would say that that right is not a particularly strong one. It's not a particularly protected right.
0:08:26 - (Nicole): So we have something, but it's not quite the same.
0:08:29 - (Laura): That is good to know.
0:08:30 - (Nicole): It even sounds ominous. A star chamber.
0:08:33 - (Laura): Star Chamber.
0:08:34 - (Laura): Well, yeah, that's right. But, I mean, I'm fairly confident that they would have similar. We didn't dream up Star chambers in Australia, so, yes, it's certainly an ancient concept, but in Australia, we have embraced it, really, across the country, for purposes of sort of breaking up organized crime.
0:08:56 - (Laura): Gangs, for example, or trying to solve crimes which have confounded usual investigation methods.
0:09:05 - (Laura): So what we're really talking about is people who are refusing to tell the truth because they're either afraid it will incriminate themselves or it will incriminate someone else who'll be very angry with them for saying it. So, typically bikies or other people involved.
0:09:21 - (Laura): In gangs, but it's got a much.
0:09:24 - (Laura): Broader application than that these days.
0:09:27 - (Laura): Wow.
0:09:27 - (Nicole): There you go. And Nicola was asking about the wigs, and so you've answered a little bit about where they came from and that yours is horse hair and that it came from London. But is that still the case for baby lawyers these days? Do they get their wigs from London.
0:09:43 - (Laura): Made of horse hair?
0:09:45 - (Laura): You can buy them here. Probably have been able to buy them here for quite a long time. I think we've had legal outfitters in Australia, really, since the early days of the colony. I think the reason mine came from London was because my grandmother was English.
0:10:01 - (Laura): My family's English, and she had worked.
0:10:03 - (Laura): In London during the war. And when my uncle was going to be a barrister, she wanted to get him one from this traditional area in.
0:10:10 - (Laura): London, so she arranged for that to happen.
0:10:14 - (Laura): But, yes, I think the horse hair wigs that you can buy in Australia, I think they're made here.
0:10:19 - (Laura): Not confident about that.
0:10:20 - (Nicole): And the actual curls, do they add curls for different things? What do they mean?
0:10:26 - (Laura): I don't know.
0:10:27 - (Laura): And actually, now that I was thinking about that question as well, I think a lot of the new wigs are not horse hair.
0:10:32 - (Laura): I think they're nylon hot, but I.
0:10:36 - (Laura): Don'T know what the significance is. All I know is that there are distinct wig types for barristers. So the barristers wigs have the curls at the side and then the curls on two little sort of tail sort of things at the back. It's a very particular wig. And then judges wigs are different again, and then you've probably seen the long.
0:11:04 - (Laura): Bottom wigs, which kind of look like.
0:11:07 - (Laura): They have rolls and rolls and rolls. And they are for what we used to call Queen's council, but now King's counsel and also supreme court judges. Gotcha. But they tend now only to be worn on ceremonial occasions. No one wears a long bottomed wig to court. They really are.
0:11:26 - (Laura): They're enormous. I don't know.
0:11:28 - (Laura): It's like wearing a woolly jumper over your head. As much as Queensland loves its wigs, I think we draw the line at that. But together with the whole setup is pretty intense.
0:11:40 - (Laura): I mean, when you go fly into.
0:11:42 - (Laura): Places in the cape and you have to go to court there and you're in your woolen bar jacket and your white collar called a jabo, and your.
0:11:50 - (Laura): Woolen robe and then your horse hair.
0:11:53 - (Laura): Wig, you can feel both absolutely boiling and pretty anachronistic to be getting around in that kind of outfit, particularly the further away that you get from George street in Brisbane.
0:12:04 - (Laura): But that's how we roll. Yeah.
0:12:07 - (Nicole): See, I was thinking it was like the military and you added one rings if you had more experience. But that just explained. You've explained that a lot better for me. Thank you. It was like getting different things on your. What do you call those things?
0:12:22 - (Laura): Yeah.
0:12:22 - (Laura): Epileps. Yeah. Yeah, that's the word.
0:12:25 - (Nicole): Thank you.
0:12:28 - (Laura): As a of. There are two categories of barrister. One is a normal barrister, just every day, like me. And then there are senior council. So in Queensland, we refer to them as King's council. In other states, it's senior council. And they are people who've been appointed to a higher rank. Basically, it acknowledges their experience, their leadership of the bar, their ethical standing in the legal profession.
0:12:57 - (Laura): And they actually do wear different robes, so they wear silk robes. So a KC is referred to as a silk, and the process of becoming a KC is referred to as taking silk. So when you see a barrister in.
0:13:13 - (Laura): The street and they're wearing what looks.
0:13:16 - (Laura): Like a different kind of robe, it's because they have a different sort of rank or position within our profession.
0:13:21 - (Laura): Wow.
0:13:22 - (Nicole): That's answering a lot of questions. Thank you. I've got two more for you. Jane wants to know, have you ever hated a client or what they did so much that you couldn't defend?
0:13:33 - (Laura): I haven't.
0:13:35 - (Laura): It's actually.
0:13:35 - (Laura): It's a very interesting aspect of our.
0:13:38 - (Laura): Job that once you sit down with.
0:13:40 - (Laura): Somebody, no matter how terrible a thing they've done, you have to talk to them and you have to establish some kind of rapport or relationship with them.
0:13:50 - (Laura): In order to assist them.
0:13:52 - (Laura): And if you start from the proposition that your job is to represent them.
0:13:57 - (Laura): As is their right, as is the.
0:13:59 - (Laura): Right of all of our citizens, of our community to be defended before the.
0:14:03 - (Laura): Law, then your own personal feelings, they.
0:14:07 - (Laura): Can come into it, of course, but they're not what's important.
0:14:09 - (Laura): You're not there to figure out whether.
0:14:11 - (Laura): You like that person or not. You're not even there really to judge them. You're there to assist them to the best of your ability and based on the ethical rules that are in place for us, and to advocate on their.
0:14:25 - (Laura): Behalf, really, regardless of what you personally.
0:14:28 - (Laura): Might think of them, certainly some clients are more challenging than others. Some of our clients can be very abusive because they're lashing out at us as a manifestation of a system they think is really unfair. And that can be hard going, but it's a very good practice to try to not take it personally, both in terms of not identifying too closely with them so you don't break your heart, but also so you're not really offended or personally attacked when they behave badly.
0:14:55 - (Nicole): Yeah. And last one from Hannah. What's a case that will always stay.
0:15:00 - (Laura): With, oh, that's a tricky one because.
0:15:04 - (Laura): There probably is one that I always.
0:15:05 - (Laura): Come back to, but it's really sad.
0:15:08 - (Nicole): We don't have to talk about it.
0:15:12 - (Laura): It's. You know, there's a lot of talk in Queensland at the moment about youth justice and about kids being out of control and how we should respond to that, either as a society or through our criminal justice system, or both. And I often think about a kid I represented when I worked in a regional town in Queensland years and years ago, when I had been a baby lawyer for maybe six months and this kid was ten.
0:15:37 - (Laura): This is a terrible story.
0:15:38 - (Laura): I think I should just not tell this story.
0:15:41 - (Laura): I mean, I can think of lots of others because this one really sticks with me.
0:15:45 - (Laura): Yeah, I think a lot of cases stay with me. And it's funny how then some cases just don't.
0:15:51 - (Laura): It's a bit like you ever had.
0:15:53 - (Laura): That experience of finding an old assignment and just thinking, is that my words? Did I write that? And then others you're much more familiar with. And I have a number of cases that stick with me. One of my really strong memories is a woman I acted for in Arakun, and I used to go up to the cape a lot for legal aid and fly into small communities up there and act for people who were charged with any number of different offenses. And I acted for a woman who had a really disabled child, and she'd done something quite terrible. But I was really trying to convince.
0:16:29 - (Laura): The judge that she had such a.
0:16:31 - (Laura): Connection with her child and such an important role in her care that he should really in quite exceptional. It was an exceptional case that permitted him to not send her to actual jail, and that involved in my robes running down the road in Arica into the royal flying doctor service to get.
0:16:51 - (Laura): A letter from the doctors who just.
0:16:53 - (Laura): Happened to be in community that day to say that this child, if her mother wasn't in the community, she would have to be removed to Cairns Base Hospital and live there until her mum came home. And then I ran back. And then the judge was so troubled by the matter that he wanted to come back the next day and sentence her, and in the meantime, she ran away. And then we tracked her down the next day, and then he sentenced her and he didn't send her to jail. And it was like this massive 24 hours roller coaster ride which ended really well.
0:17:21 - (Laura): But that one has stuck in my mind because it was such a mission, but he was such a compassionate judge and he really listened to what I had to say, and it felt like it worked. Everything worked in the way that it should that day.
0:17:36 - (Laura): And that felt good.
0:17:37 - (Nicole): Yeah. That was all the questions from our community on Facebook. But thank you very much, Laura, because I think a lot of people, when they're little, say, I want to be a lawyer, and they don't understand what that means. And so hopefully they'll be able to listen to this and have a much better understanding of what that means, not just day to day, but for their lives.
0:17:57 - (Laura): Well, I would say to anyone, and it's really the same with any job.
0:18:01 - (Laura): But any kid or indeed adult who's thinking, oh, I might like to be a lawyer, try and do some work.
0:18:09 - (Laura): Experience, or just go to court one day and sit in the back of the court.
0:18:13 - (Laura): They're open to the public.
0:18:14 - (Laura): And before you've sat in a court, and not all lawyers go to court, of course, there are lots of different areas, but before you've actually seen how these jobs work, they don't really come alive in your mind, but there are.
0:18:27 - (Laura): Ways that you can get a little.
0:18:29 - (Laura): Insight into them, and court is one of them.
0:18:31 - (Laura): And I think it's a really good starting place.
0:18:35 - (Nicole): I had no idea that you could just go and watch.
0:18:38 - (Laura): Yeah, it's a principle of justice, is that justice is open. The courts are open unless they're closed for certain reasons, like if a child.
0:18:46 - (Laura): Is giving evidence or if there's evidence.
0:18:49 - (Laura): Being given in a sexual assault matter, for example. There are some rules then, but generally speaking, the rule is that our courts are open.
0:18:56 - (Laura): Wow.
0:18:56 - (Laura): And it's in order for people actually to know what happens for the law not to be this thing that happens behind closed doors. It's meant to promote transparency and accountability on the part of judges and lawyers who are appearing and making decisions.
0:19:13 - (Laura): And also, of course, to inform people.
0:19:15 - (Laura): As to why those decisions are made.
0:19:17 - (Nicole): Laura, thank you so much for joining us on bringing kid to work. It's been a real pleasure listening to you talk so passionately about the law.
0:19:26 - (Laura): Thank you.
0:19:27 - (Nicole): Bye.
0:19:32 - (Nicole): Wow. Thank you so much, Laura, for partaking in the Q A session from our.
0:19:39 - (Nicole): Bring your kid to work community.
0:19:41 - (Nicole): I am fascinated by a couple of things I heard in the. Well, actually I'm fascinated by all of it, but particularly there is something called a star chamber and that's not made up for TV. That's actually a thing in Queensland law. Fascinating. Had no idea about that. Also had no idea about the madness of trying to represent people out in remote areas and the dashing to and fro and how that has to happen in a wool coat and a wig is extraordinary to me in this tropical climate of north Queensland that we have. And of course, the subtropical climate of southeast Queensland, it is not built for woolen coats and horse hair wigs, and yet we still make our criminal lawyers wear that stuff. It's amazing to me.
0:20:33 - (Nicole): I am so grateful to Laura for being so open, for helping us understand what it is to be a criminal lawyer in this country and to be as vulnerable as she's been, to let us know that this work is hard. If this is something that you are interested in, you need to understand that it's hard. And so getting in and being in a courtroom and seeing what happens is obviously a sliver of what happens as a lawyer. But it's really important, I think, for those who are interested in it to at least give that a go.
0:21:05 - (Nicole): I didn't realize that you could just walk into court and be someone who just sat in the back and watched. I mean, we all watch these TV dramas and you don't realize that you can just be a part of it. And that that's a principle of the law, that transparency, that openness. How fantastic that that's know for all of us. What if we get charged with a crime? We want that openness. We want that transparency.
0:21:31 - (Nicole): We want our lawyers. Golly, we want our lawyers to be as brilliant as Laura, that's for sure. So thanks so much to Laura. Thank you again to our Facebook community. So it's bring your kid to work careers conversations. Join that community. We have great chats about all things career. We've got some great guests coming up and I popped in the community yesterday. Just some fabulous guests that we've got coming and an opportunity for our listeners to put in some questions so that I can ask them on the podcast.
0:22:04 - (Nicole): Can't wait to talk to you next week.
0:22:07 - (Laura): Talk to you then.
0:29:50 - (Nicole): Bring your kid to work was recorded.
0:29:52 - (Nicole): In meant on the lands of the Jaggera and Turable, people who've been sharing their stories for more than 60,000 years.
0:29:59 - (Nicole): Thanks for listening to another episode of bring your kid to work. If you haven't already, make sure you give us a review on your podcast player of choice. It helps other people find the show and follow bring your kid to work and subscribe wherever you're listening now and send your favorite episode to a friend. These stories are too good to keep to ourselves. And don't forget to follow us on Instagram and TikTok at bring your kid to work and on Facebook at bring your kid to work the podcast and did you know you can join the conversation join bring your kid to work career conversations community on Facebook for great career tips and conversations about the journey of work, workplace culture, and parenting while working.
0:30:41 - (Nicole): We're always looking for inspiring guests to be a part of our show. If you have a fab idea for a guest, drop us a line at admin@bringyourkidowork.com au or dm us through the socials. We would love to hear from you. Thanks again for listening. Bring your Kid to Work is a Lioness media production this episode was produced and edited by me, Nicole Lesio. Our music is composed by Rikuo with graphics and design by Anastasia McCuka.
0:31:10 - (Nicole): Follow bring your kid to work on your podcast player and all the socials and visit.com to see our blog transcripts from our episodes and to sign up to our newsletter for the latest updates. Talk to you soon. Close.
0:35:59 - (Nicole): Bring your kid to work was recorded in mean on the lands of the Jaggera and Turrbal, people who've been sharing their stories for more than 60,000 years. Thanks for listening to another episode of bring your kid to work. If you haven't already, make sure you give us a review on your podcast player of choice. It helps other people find the show and follow bring your kid to work and subscribe wherever you're listening now and send your favourite episode to a friend.
0:36:28 - (Nicole): These stories are too good to keep to ourselves. And don't forget to follow us on Instagram and TikTok at bring your kid to work and on Facebook at bring your kid to work the podcast and did you know? You can join the conversation join bring your kid to work career conversations community on Facebook for great career tips and conversations about the journey of work, workplace culture, and parenting while working.
0:36:51 - (Nicole): We're always looking for inspiring guests to be a part of our show. If you have a fab idea for a guest, drop us a line at admin@bringyourkidowork.com.Au or dm us through the socials. We would love to hear from you. Thanks again for listening. Bring your kid to work is a lioness media production. This episode was produced and edited by me, Nicole Lessio. Our music is composed by Rukkuo with graphics and design by Anastasia Makkuhka.
0:37:20 - (Nicole): Follow bring your kid to work on your podcast player and all the socials, and visit bringyourkidowork.com to see our blog transcripts from our episodes, and to sign up to our newsletter off for the latest updates. Talk to you soon.
