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Bar Transfer Test Fees

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I feel quite a strong degree of discomfort in asking for help like this but unfortunately my financial position is very constrained and I have to set aside my own personal pride. For the past 7 years I have been unable to work due to disability and illness. I have been living with my Mum and subsisting on disability based Social Security benefits. This has been an intensely frustrating and depressing period in my life.

By profession I trained originally as a barrister so I am now trying to take steps back to some kind of productive career and life. In pursuit of this objective I have applied for call to the Bar of England and Wales as a foreign qualified lawyer (I am actually a qualified barrister in Northern Ireland ). However I have for the last 9 years been living in England, having left Belfast in 2003. My application to qualify as a barrister in England and Wales was successful but is conditional on my passing 4 parts of the Bar Transfer Test (BTT). The tests I am required to take and the fees are:

1.       the Civil Procedure exam (£300),
2.       the Criminal Procedure exam (£300),
3.       the Ethics exam (£200)
4.       the Advocacy training and assessment (£525          training and £895 exam).
5.       the total cost of the fees for these tests amounts to £2,220.

As someone whose only income is social security disability benefits this is an impossible sum for me to put together on my own. This is the reason I am here asking for the generosity of strangers and hopefully some of my friends. I sincerely hope that in due course I might be able to use these legal qualifications for a good and positive purpose and to offer help to others. Either helping the vulnerable who require effective legal representation or alternatively to assist fellow members of the Labour Party in internal disciplinary matters and helping to promote the proper and equitable application of the Party rules for all members; which is an issue that is important to me personally.

I appreciate that to ask for financial help like this from largely strangers is a peculiar and disconcerting feeling. However it is my experience that at the root of the human soul is most often a kernel of kindness and very many people will reach out to assist those in need or to help others turn their lives around. I try when I can to live my own life in this manner and to offer help and support in whatever way I can to those others who come to me. If you are able to offer some little bit of help and assistance, whatever the amount big or small, to help me in raising the money for these legal training fees I would be extremely and eternally grateful. Thank you for giving me your time and considering my appeal.

Best, Duncan.

Donations 

  • Anonymous
    • £100 
    • 7 yrs

Organizer

Duncan Shipley Dalton
Organizer

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