The Bar Council’s Independent Complaints Commissioner Michael Scott has criticised barristers for using his office to make ‘tit-for-tat’ complaints against one another to settle personal scores.

In his 2001 annual report, published last week, Scott said that while the level of complaints made by barristers about each other had dropped slightly between 2000 and 2001, there was still a tendency among barristers to use his office as a means of resolving internal grievances.