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How well would you do in a trivia quiz on court etiquette? Do you know (and I give lots of thanks to the various solicitors who have contributed their favourites to what follows):

  • not to put your coffee cup on the bar table,
  • to bow to the bench on entering and leaving the court,
  • not to leave the bar table empty of practitioners,
  • to give precedence to a more senior practitioner,
  • not to wear your PJs (hopefully only a consideration in online courtrooms) or your gym gear,
  • not to dial a friend/client/managing partner from the bar table?

I suspect some of your thoughts are shifting from trivia to trivial. But is court etiquette, real and online, trivial? No, it isn’t. Rather, it is another vital component of our role as officers of the court.

As officers of the court, our role is to facilitate clients to engage with the rule of law, to encourage them to see that it is worth engaging with at a personal and societal level. This is particularly important in court proceedings where they are effectively putting their dispute, their whole life perhaps, into another’s hands. How do we convince them that, win or lose, the judgment is valid and worthy of compliance, that they got justice?

We convince them with more esoteric arguments about the importance of the rule of law to the functioning of society. And a well functioning society benefits every member of it personally. These arguments should come from our professional heart as it is what makes our profession so important to our society.

We convince them, too, by complying with the court rules, allowing each party to properly put forward their position to an impartial decision maker. Those rules help level out power imbalances of which we are daily made more aware.

But we also convince them by practical appearances of order, of respect, of this being a process greater than the day-to-day. And court etiquette essentially encapsulates those practical appearances.

Trivia – yes. Trivial – no.