Anna Laney KC – Crown Office Chambers, London

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 […]

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Maria Karaiskos KC – Church Court Chambers

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 […]

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