We are keen to extend mini-pupillage opportunities to a wide range of applicants who may be considering a career at the bar.
We are committed, as a chambers, to reducing barriers to the profession.
Mini-pupillage offers experience of working life as a barrister but is also an important opportunity to get to know different sets of Chambers.
Our mini-pupillages are not assessed and are not a requirement of applications for pupillage at The 36 Group.
Please see our separate pupillage page for information about pupillage at The 36 Group.
The 36 Group’s mini-pupillages can be obtained in a number of ways:
1. Entering our annual oral advocacy competition
2. Bar-wide schemes, for example via Bridging the Bar or 10,000 Black Interns
3. Team-level applications
Team-level mini pupillages
Each year, our practice groups offer a fixed number of mini-pupillages. The availability of mini-pupillages will be communicated on this webpage and on our social media sites.
Applications are welcome from all candidates regardless of nationality, ethnicity, religion, age, gender, sexuality, health, disability, neurodiversity or family/other circumstances.
Chambers prides itself on being a friendly and supportive team of barristers and staff members. We want all of our mini-pupils to feel welcome and will work with any successful applicants who require additional support to ensure they can take full advantage of the opportunities that mini-pupillage offers.
When attending mini-pupillage, subject to availability, mini–pupils will be offered the opportunity to attend court hearings, arbitration appointments and client conferences, or to work on legal research in Chambers.
We aim to provide mini-pupils with a week-long opportunity to spend time with a number of different counsel (again, subject to availability). The hours will likely be from 9am to 5pm each day, but this will be dependent on both the needs of the mini-pupil and barrister availability.
Mini-pupils will be expected to enter into a confidentiality agreement.
Our aim at 36 Crime is to do all we can to try to demystify the bar and to make the criminal bar open and accessible to all. We want the very best candidates to come to the criminal bar, and to come to 36 Crime, irrespective of connections or background.
To that end, in early summer of 2026 we launched a new mini-pupillage scheme in which we greatly expanded the number of places we offered. We kept the requirements for applicants to a minimum to encourage all and we specifically reserved a number of places for applicants from backgrounds that might otherwise find it difficult to gain experience of the bar.
We are delighted to report that the scheme proved to be very popular. We have had mini pupils attending court every week since its launch and we now have mini-pupils booked up every week to the summer of 2027. The corollary of this success is that sadly we have reached capacity and have reluctantly decided to temporarily close applications to allow us to catch up with those we already have.
Please be assured that the scheme will re-open in 2027, and instructions will be posted here when that happens.
Our sincerest hope is to continue to offer places to the widest possible group without having to add filters and barriers to suppress numbers – but our capacity is finite. To keep that aim alive while simultaneously managing the real limits on places, we have concluded that this temporary halt is the fairest way to proceed.
In the meantime we wish you the very best with your studies and applications
The 36 Crime Mini-Pupillage team.
The 36 Group’s 2026 Oral Advocacy Competition has now closed. Competition entrants should expect to know the outcome of their entries by the end of July 2026.
The preposition for 2026 was: Juries; for or against?
We look forward to administering this competition again in 2027.
