The unauthorised guide to taking silk

How to become a KC, courtesy of soon-to-be KC Ruth Hughes

So, you’ve seen that someone from 2015 call is becoming a KC. You’ve decided to take the plunge—either now or some years down the road. 2025 applications are open and the closing date is 25 April 2025 at 5pm.

What might be helpful is this: the unauthorised guide to taking silk.

Please note this guide is written from a chancery perspective, if you want a guide from a criminal perspective, get someone to write one while they are awaiting the jury’s verdict.

What should I do first?

See if Ede & Ravenscroft stock Harry Potter time-turners. It would have been ideal if you had thought about silk earlier in your career. Much earlier. At least five years ago. More on this later…

And the second thing?

Scrutinise the form (and the lengthy guidance). Like “read the question!”, this advice doesn’t date. Things have moved on since Lord Neuberger (allegedly) took silk without knowing he’d applied, thanks to his senior clerk. The form is long and detailed and you will want to spend at least two working weeks and maybe more on it.

There are five competency areas:

A) Understanding and using the law
B) Advocacy (written and oral)
C) Working with others (aka leadership)
D) Diversity Action and Understanding (aka E & D, still considered a plus on this side of the pond)
E) Integrity (or realistically lack thereof)

Excellence is what is being sought. Silk is a kitemark of excellent advocacy.

Cases…

This is where thinking about silk early would be helpful — you’ll need to have accumulated 12 substantial cases over the last three years which will be foundation of evidence to apply. You basically want to demonstrate you already have a silk’s practice (even before getting the letters after your name).

KCA (King’s Counsel Appointments) say that cases should not be “run of the mill”, but rather to have important consequences, precedential value, or present novel or unforeseen complexity. There should have been professional challenge.

The requirement for a bedrock of cases which meet the mark is what makes the application years in planning.

Some people do take silk with fewer cases, e.g. if one case was part of the Lehman Brothers litigation, so don’t let the number put you off entirely, but there is no getting away from it. You really do have to be ready with a bunch of recent ‘big’ cases of which you feel some pride, and where the assessors, principally judges, will be willing in good conscience to report that your advocacy was stellar.

If you’re looking at an application in the next three years, I suggest building a spreadsheet that exactly mirrors the competency matrix. When you think you might use a case for silk, fill out the spreadsheet noting exactly what you did against each item in the matrix. This will help in the future because it is difficult to remember three years on why exactly your cross was so great.

Save your written advocacy and your notes for cross examination and closing in a file, too. You can label this file “silk” or if you think someone might read that over your shoulder in chambers then you can mark it “CPD” or something else equivalently anodyne.

You can do this also do this with new cases that haven’t made it on to the form yet if you are applying this year because if you are invited to interview it will be helpful to have some recent examples to supplement the form you have put it. This is good because it gives the flavour that you are already practising at a silk level.

Think about an application consultant

A consultant is here to help you through the process, for a fee. You’re busy — you already have a silk’s practice. So, for example, if you are a consultant reading this, it would be useful if you could provide a spreadsheet similar to the one I’ve described above.

Do you need a consultant, though? Views differ on this one. KCA say no. Everyone — yes, everyone — else I spoke to (including more than 15 silks, mainly practicing in chancery or tax, and many recently appointed) said yes, you do need a consultant.

A good time to approach the consultant is three months before the application deadline.

Note that consultants can be expensive. I encountered people who had used more than one, but there you risk getting conflicting advice. I wouldn’t have enjoyed that.
So, I was originally sceptical about the need for a consultant, but came round to the idea. The reasons why you might want to pay up are:

1. They have experience. Consulting aspirant KCs comprises their job. They can be more honest/brutal than fellow members of chambers;
2. The complete process takes a huge amount of time. You don’t want to do it more than once if you can avoid it;
3. Regrets. You wouldn’t want to not get silk and look back and think, “if only I had used a consultant”;
4. Consultants understand the STAR system well. You probably don’t, unless you were a recruitment consultant in a previous life;
5. They will give you a mock interview, which you do need.

Looking on the bright side, this cost is wholly and exclusively for the purpose of your profession — and as such, is tax deductible.

STAR? What is this STAR nonsense? I dropped science after GSCEs to focus on useful subjects like History and French. Now we have to do astrophysics! isn’t what I signed up for…

KCA employ an evidence-based appointment model. You have to provide evidence of excellence in the competencies.

If the only jobs you had before coming to the bar were like me (a) sales assistant in the local museum and (b) night paralegal (bar school didn’t pay for itself, although the pupillage award drawdown was helpful) then this model may present itself as a mystery.

Ruth Hughes will be appointed KC on 24 March 2025. She practises at 5 Stone Buildings, specialising in trusts and estates, mental capacity, tax and fraud. Ruth once represented 22 highly endangered Chinese tigers in a divorce. Sort of. One of them was called Tiger Woods. She has cross-examined on the closing of the contracts on Avatar and litigated about the capital gains tax on a Turner painting. She helped obtain Proceeds of Crime Act final restraining orders against Baroness Mone and her husband, Douglas Barrowman. She has acted for many well-known figures lacking mental capacity. She can’t tell you who though. She can be contacted at clerks@5sblaw.com