It’s one of the last surviving professions of Dickensian London, and can still pay upwards of $650,000 per year. Clerks have no equivalent in the U.S. legal system and nothing in common with the Ivy League-trained Supreme Court aides of the same spelling. They are, by their own admission, “wheeler-dealers,” acting as middlemen between solicitors and barristers, who depend on clerks to bring them work. The power dynamic between clerk and barrister is baroque and deeply English, with a naked class divide seen in few other places on the planet. |