You can’t beat life at the Bar, says Simon Myerson QC, as long as you’re in it for the right reasons

The ‘Why do you want to be a barrister?’ question is a staple element of pupillage application forms. For students it often means long evenings of rephrasing sentences about their life-long quests for justice in a bid to make them less vomit-inducing. But what happens when a silk of 20 years’ call has a crack at answering it?