Intellectual Property

Facilitator: And who was in chambers (Francis Taylor Buildings) when you arrived?

Mary Vitoria QC: Blanco was head of chambers. I think this is in order of seniority, and Julian – no, it was Anthony Walton, Julian Jeffs, Kynric Lewis, Robin –Michael was nominally just a little bit senior in call to Robin. So it was Michael [Fysh], Robin [Jacob], Peter Prescott, Hugh Laddie, Mark Platts-Mills, Jeremy Davis, George Hamer and then me.

Facilitator: Tompkin, Geoffrey Tompkin, or Kenneth Johnston?

Mary Vitoria: No, they had left.

Facilitator: Had they already left?

Mary Vitoria: Yes.

Facilitator: And how was pupillage life?

Mary Vitoria: Well, I enjoyed it. I suppose, probably for me, knowing that I had a full-time job, meant that not everything was staked on it as it is for younger people. I mean I didn’t come too early – I was about 33 by the time I joined chambers, so I enjoyed it. It was jolly hard work. I suppose you are always anxious that you are doing the right thing or making the right decisions and so on, but I mean Robin on the whole was very easy to get on with.

Facilitator: Did he delegate lots to you? I mean… doing lots of pleadings.

Mary Vitoria: Yes, a fair amount, yes.

Facilitator: So there was a lot of hands on stuff.

Mary Vitoria: Yes, yes.

Facilitator: Rather than just following somebody around…

Mary Vitoria: Yes, certainly when I joined and for many years afterwards it was very much still the practice that you don’t send pupils into court to do anything on their own. That was maybe due to some agreed standard or something like that. I think probably because most of the clients were commercial clients, it was felt that they won’t sort of trust something to a pupil if they were going to muck it up somehow. Generally speaking there wasn’t hands on experience in court. But yes, you will do some pleadings, you will sit on conferences, discussed it beforehand, etcetera. Generally, pupils were not expected to say much during the conference, and if they did that sometimes was recorded as a vulgar arrogance or insensitivity and held against them when it was time to decide whether they should be taken or not.

Facilitator: What did you do then? – because as you say, by that time you had got a lot of experience, so, if you were in a conference that was about chemistry and a chemical patent, I would have thought it would be pretty hard for you to keep quiet.

Mary Vitoria: Yes, I mean, on the whole, I don’t think we tended to go much into the chemistry of it. It was mostly sort of tactics, and you know, personalities of clients, whether this is going to stand up in court or not rather than going to the sort of nitty-gritty of patent law itself. If I remember correctly, American Cyanamid was in 1975 and I became a tenant in 1978, in the beginning. Robin became silk at around that time, and I think he did very little cross examination and full trials until after he took silk, from what I remember. It was mostly injunction work. [American Cyanamid v Ethicon Ltd [1975] UKHL 1].

Facilitator: One thing that we talked to lots of people about is American Cyanamid and how it transformed the practice from having mini- trials into much quicker proceedings based on the balance of convenience of the case, if that’s the way you want to put it. But there was a degree of concern because these mini trials constituted a lot of the work before American Cyanamid. Do you think that was something that they were worried about in relation to taking you on initially?

Mary Vitoria: No, I don’t think I picked that up. I think there was generally quite a lot of work around. I remember doing devilling in my first year of practice but then not afterwards. I remember Hugh Laddie always saying that this will never last or that it will come to an end but it did last and it got heavier and heavier, so we took on more people.

Facilitator: That’s really interesting. We haven’t heard about that; the sort of stories we have heard so far are about building up IP litigation work over the 1970s and throughout and not much expressions like Laddie’s that this might be just temporary.

Facilitator: One of the questions about life in Francis Taylor Building was the chambers’ tea that became particularly famous in chambers, what was that?

Mary Vitoria: Chambers’ tea, well, we always used to go about 4 ‘o clock, and have tea which was sort of set out in somebody’s room, generally Blanco or Anthony’s, because they had large rooms. People would come back from court, say Robin and Michael, and they would say “someone has given me a really hard time because he was trying to run this argument, what do you think?” And we all sort of discuss it. Sometimes the opposing counsel would also be in chambers. Having given a very favourable opinion to A, B would come in and we would say: “Oh, I can’t talk about it, oh you’ve got a rotten case there” and so [we would] start teasing them. I think [chambers’ tea] was very, very instructive; you would see how people would put arguments and think about cases or the different ways of putting things. It was just very instructive for young barristers to have that kind of environment.