Anna Laney KC is a construction specialist whose practice focuses on international arbitrations. She is a tenant at Crown Office Chambers in the Temple. She comes from “a proper working-class background” and, with her brothers, was the first generation in her family to go to university. There were no connections with the legal profession, and it remained a mystery to Anna – and her family – that, at 8, she declared she wanted to be a barrister when she grew up, and she never wavered from that ambition. It wasn’t the only job outside the law that Anna had: her […]
Maria Karaiskos, who was appointed King’s Counsel in 2023, both prosecutes and defends in the most serious, sensitive, and complex criminal offences including murders, historic rapes, child abuse, high-profile sexual offences, road traffic fatalities, multi-handed drug conspiracies and international importations. As Church Court Chambers’ first female silk and first ‘home-grown silk’, Maria recalls her first day in pupillage in her earliest set of chambers 3 Temple Gardens: That evening at after-work drinks, Maria was told by a venerable senior colleague that they had “never had a Greek in chambers before.” Even in this day and age, people did not always […]