Constantine Partasides QC was one of the youngest solicitor-advocates to be appointed to silk in 2014. (Four other solicitors were also successful.) He came to this country as an infant with his parents when they left Cyprus in 1974. But the ties with the UK predated that time, as his grandfather had fought in the Second World War as part of the British Colonial Armed Forces and had later settled here, becoming a fruit and vegetable trader in Covent Garden (in its original central London location). Constantine secured a fully state-funded assisted place at a top public school in 1979, […]
Hugh Sims was called to the Bar in 1999 and appointed to silk in 2014. The legal directories already recognised him as a leading Western Circuit barrister – across no fewer than seven areas, from commercial through professional negligence to insolvency. Prior to taking silk, Hugh had been on the Attorney General’s Panels since 2002. We met at Hugh’s Guildhall Chambers in Bristol. Hugh told me that he had studied physics at Manchester University but although he enjoyed the subject (and was good at it, he gained a ‘first’), he said that the prospect of “a lifetime spent underground at […]