To south west Wales, where a notable collection of judges joined the Legal Wales conference in Pembrokeshire. Alongside the lady chief justice and president of the Supreme Court was the impressive president of tribunals Judge Barry Clarke. He explained his pride in restoring the backlog to pre-Covid levels largely through using video hearings to allow judges from the rest of England and Wales to hear cases in the cluttered south east and London.

One challenge was to find a name for this scheme, and Clarke’s bright idea was to farm out this task to the judges themselves. He admitted that his (we presume) tongue-in-cheek suggestion of Enthusiastic Employment Judges In Transit (Eejits) would perhaps not achieve the levels of gravity he was looking for. Instead, the Virtual Region was the winning entry, and Clarke revealed that the judge who suggested it received a bottle of wine as a prize.

‘It sounds silly but offering the chance for judges to name it helped,’ he said, when asked how he secured buy-in from so many.

Justice scales on a file next to a laptop

Source: iStock

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